FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TUB "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—We are destined to hear so much of Federal systems in the days at band that it is desirable we should start fair. You write this week in your leading article, "Every Federal Government in the world represents an amalgamation of governments previously separate." Mr. Balfour adventured the same statement at Preston, but it seems to me wide as the poles apart from the teaching of history. It would be far more accurate to say that when unitary government has become unwieldy or unsympathetic or over-bureaucratized, there has emerged a "State right" demand which, wherever separation was clearly impossible, has found a federal solution. Fracture, re-set, federate. Such is the lesson of history. The Federation we first think of is the United States. In this case thirteen great fragments of our Empire tore themselves out of that Empire to form a Federation. A fissiparous Federation too. The Louisiana purchase from France was presently broken up into half a dozen States. Virginia and Dakota were partitioned only the other day. In place of thirteen double-chambered Parliaments there are now some forty-eight. In the case of our great Dominion, Upper and Lower Canada, united in the Durham Settlement, were for nearly a hundred years in a condition of acute racial antagonism. That Union was broken up by the British North America Act, and as a Federation of seven states, which will a. little later no doubt be fifty states with fifty parliaments, their destinies now drift along upon an even keel.
The case of the great parent State of New South Wales is equally educational. From her huge bulk she first threw off Tasmania (1823), then Victoria (1850), and again Queensland (1858). Half a century later these far-flung fragments have come together in a Federation. It may be that history is to repeat itself; that Ulster, deprived last year of the safeguard of the Second Chamber pledged her in the Act of Union, will detach herself with blood and iron, to reunite in fulness of time as a partner State in a federal system. Certainly, in all the circumstances, should she so decide no one will attempt to coerce her. There are within Ulster all the elements of the State right; more -wealth and more population than in the three New England States, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island combined. Only reasons of space prevent me from drawing attention to the historic genesis of the German and Swiss Federations. Enough to say they are not widely dissimilar to the above.—I Inver Lodge.
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