Lord Rosebery's speech at the People's Palace on Monday lets
us see the " hard core " of the Imperial Federation movement. The Colonies, in amalgamating with the United Kingdom, are to remember that " there is one thing which they can never have, however great, however powerful they may become, and that is the authority which that word home' gives throughout the British Empire. In these islands are the title-deeds of the Anglo-Saxon race. In these islands we mean to keep them. And no one can take from that Imperial race, to which you and I and all of us in this hall belong, one par- ticle of the historical authority, the Imperial reputation, which comes from our descent and the locality we inhabit,"—England, in fact, is to possess the " imperium," or, to use another Roman illustration, to occupy the position of the " prerogative class" of the Empire. It is not the race but the locality which is to be first thought of. Wellington, Marlborough, and Nelson, Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, " belong in the first place and especially to these islands, and what I would venture to impress upon you is this,—that if there is to be an Empire of the kind mapped out by Mr. Parkin, the centre and the home of that race must always be in these islands." This is what we have always believed Imperial Federation to mean, and we are much interested to obtain so frank an avowal from its official exponent. The perpetual and equal alliance of the English-speaking communities—which, oddly enough, Lord Rosebery adopts in one breath and destroys in the next—is surely a far worthier goal than the aggrandising of these islands under federal forms.
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