Lord Rosebery spoke on Wednesday at the annual meeting of
the Edinburgh Unity of the Empire Association, and began by paying a tribute to the memory of Mr. W. E. Forster, who started and founded the Imperial Federation League. Taking the greatness of our Empire as his theme, Lord Rosebery cordially endorsed Mr. Chamberlain's recent disavowal, on behalf of the Government, of any desire to impose any scheme of organisation upon the Empire, and very properly recalled the action of the late Mr. Dailey—it is significant of the shortness of people's memories that even the Times alludes to him as Mr. Daly—in arranging for the sending of a contingent from New South Wales to the Soudan in 1884-85. Lord Rosebery was less happy in his anecdote of the Australian statesman who, when asked whether his people went into the rights and wrongs of the quarrel, replied : "No, I cannot say they did. What they went for was the Empire." That is only an Imperialistic variant on the maxim " My country, right or wrong," and, what is more, we cannot think that it fairly represents the attitude or the intelligence of our Colonial allies. Neither Canada nor Australia would have sent a single man to our aid had we been engaged on a war aimed at the suppression of liberty or enlightenment.
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