THE NEW DEPARTURE IN AUSTRALIA.
T"project of consolidating the Australian Continent into one powerful State has taken a great step forward. Most of the Colonies have been willing to co- operate in the work, though only Victoria has been zealous ; but New South Wales has hung back, and has even declined to enter the Federal Council with limited powers which since 1886 has harmonised many intercolonial disputes upon the jurisdiction of Courts of Law. Moved, however, by some cause as yet unknown, but, it is to be presumed, by a recognition of the danger to which the Colony would be exposed in the event of a great war, the Premier of New South Wales, Sir Henry Parkes, stated publicly on Thursday week that the time had arrived when a Parliament and an Executive must be created for all Australia to deal with international questions ; and that a Convention from all the Colonies should be assembled to devise a plan for federation. As that is the opinion of the other Colonies also, New Zealand excepted, all resistance has apparently died away, and we may expect within two or three years to see a definite project for founding the new nation for- warded to the Colonial Office for the assent of the Crown. There are, of course, many visible difficulties and sources of delay; but the most important of them will, we believe, disappear, not so much from argument as under the pressure of unrelenting facts. The first object is to place the Colonies in a position to defend themselves without assistance from the Mother-country; and the attempt to do that will involve the formation of a Government, with considerable powers of legisla- tion, a separate revenue, and a strong, or at least an undivided, Executive. If there is to be a common army, however popularly organised, and a common fleet, however small, and fortresses for the defence of the great harbours, there must be a chief in military command, yet responsible to the civil power ; there must be a central representative body to co-operate with that civil power, and there must be a National as distinguished from a Colonial revenue, levied at the discretion of the central power, and without the intervention of provincial authori- ties. Those data granted, we may trust to the national instinct which will speedily be awakened to make the general government sufficiently effective. The Colonies will, of course, be jealous of their independence ; they will, of course, bicker as to methods of levying the taxes of the Dominion and those of each Colony ; and they may be fretful for a time about the expense which any scheme of federation must involve ; but if the project is accepted at all, the result is certain. The Convention will soon discover that the Australian Legislature cannot work with less powers than those of Congress ; it will be unable to discover a common source of sufficient revenue except the customs duties ; and it is sure to leave the Executive suffi- ciently enfranchised, even if it does not, leave much power to the Viceroy. Our only doubt is whether it will follow the example of the American Union, and reserve to the separate Provinces all powers not explicitly transferred to the Dominion ; or whether it will adopt the wiser precedent of Canada, and make the central authority the Inheritor- General of all the authority not assigned in terms to its constituent divisions. The whole question of nationality ultimately hinges upon that, and upon that we should hope the American Civil War had taught the world a sufficient lesson. There should, too, be a provision for revising the Constitution under some process less cumbrous and less liable to be defeated by sectional jealousy than the one adopted in America, and a widely different scheme for the government of territories not yet admitted within the Dominion. Canada did not need that ; but Australia occupies a different geographical position. Like the American Union, she will be practically isolated so far as the fear of invasion is concerned ; but she is an island seated in an ocean studded with rich islands which offer themselves to the first European captor. Her people, too, have been bred under influences widely different from those which made the Americans, and have shown already a desire to be supreme in the Pacific, which cannot be gratified unless her Government possesses means of ruling dependencies not admitted to political equality. New Guinea alone is a kingdom in area, and New Guinea belongs to Australia by a right almost as strong as that which binds the Isle of Man to Great Britain.
We confess we envy the task of the representatives to be assembled in the Convention ; it is so infinitely superior to that of Members of Parliament. They will all be " plain men," little known outside their own Colonies, as, indeed, were the men who revised the American Constitution ; but they will, if they succeed, and above all if they agree, have laid the foundations of a great nation, with a history which, as the centuries advance, may be more interesting than that of the United States, whose annals are almost exclusively internal. The great Southern State will be an island, and, like every other island, cannot avoid incessant relations with every other Power in the world. Water divides, but it also unites, for it furnishes a per- petually open road. Australia as a Republic cannot help being a maritime Power, and from the days of Phoenicia downwards, there never was a maritime Power yet without a foreign policy. She is too liable to attack, too eager for commerce, too clearly compelled to protect settlements and subjects at a distance from her own shoreF. It is a Fleet Australia will need rather than a Militia, more especially if she commits the imprudence of including New Zealand—a separate world, twelve hundred miles off— within her own dominion, and the possessors of fleets are never contented with the less interesting annals of mere landsmen. Fleets imply adventure, though their owner is but a city on the wrong side of the Mediterranean. The Australian Colonies have already questions which, were they independent, would be serious questions, with France and China and Holland, and they bear a relation towards Further Asia not borne by any European Power. They will not be organised into a State for ten years before they will be trading, settling, and governing in the only splendid possession which Europe has left for the next conquering Power, the great necklace of rich tropical islands, a neck- lace with two rows, which stretches down from Japan to a point almost within sight of the Australian coast. Australia is the natural heir of the Eastern Archipelago, an Empire in itself, and will not be long a State before, whatever Europe may think or feel, she will have claimed her heritage. Europe will be perfectly powerless, and in all probability, occupied as she will be with other questions, profoundly indifferent.
The federation of Australia, great as may be the power thus founded, will be witnessed here without the smallest jealousy. Nobody desires to hamper Australia, even if she expands very rapidly. There is not a trace of that con- tempt for Australians which our ancestors are said to have felt for the American Colonists, and none of the lingering jealousy with which even. the English regard all other successful Powers. Some quality in the Australians not easily to be defined, though we should call it cheeriness, attracts the English at home, and, but for the length of the voyage, they would fill up the plains of the Southern Continent at a rate which would hardly delight the work- men of Melbourne or Sydney. All men here are willing that Australia should remain a Dependency ; but if she declared her wish to rise into the position of an inde- pendent ally, there would be, amidst some sorrow at the disappearance of a dream, but little irritation. There are men among us, indeed, who think that, so far from dreading Australian Federation, we should welcome it as the first great step towards Imperial Federation. We are, we regret to say, wholly unable to enter into that dream. We cannot even imagine Australia, with her un- impeded career before her in the South, taking up part of our burden in the North, helping to guarantee us against European attacks, maintaining our Empire in Asia, or submitting to the influence of our democratic Parliament. No new people accepts that position except for the gravest reasons, and why should Australia accept it ? What have we to give in return for such a sacrifice except a maritime protection which, in the very act of declaring her inde- pendence, she would assert that she did not need ? The Dominion may, indeed, be content to remain for many years as a Federal Republic within the Empire, as the Canadian Dominion has done, but it will be on condition that the Empire defends her without interfering in her internal government, or levying within her coasts any taxation. The dream of the union of countries separated by twelve thousand miles of sea is a dream merely, and would be one even if England were willing that her policy should be partly directed from Ottawa or Melbourne. It is as a powerful Colony, soon to become a powerful State, that England will welcome the Australian Dominion, all the more willingly perhaps that Australia cannot, like Canada, merge herself in a State already almost as strong as Europe in combination. Australia must always remain alone, sufficient or insufficient to herself,—a fact which will, we hope, affect her organisation, as it most assuredly will affect the political temper of her people.
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