and crippling any power we possess for bestowing benefits through
legislation on the country to which we belong?"

The proposal would be incredibly stupid, if it were not recklessly
mischievous.

But to most advocates of the federal system the word means less than
this; and the conception, usually vaguely expressed, is that the
relations of England, Scotland, and Ireland, should be something like
those of the communities which make up (to quote instances commonly
given) the German Empire, the Swiss Federation, the United States of
America, or the British self-governing dominions of Canada, Australia,
and South Africa. So expressed, the aspiration for a federal union
deserves respectful consideration.

In the first place, it must not be forgotten that no proposal of this
nature has yet been put forward, even in general terms, by any English
or Irish Party. Mr. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists,
has indeed said that he and his friends "were only asking what had
already been given in twenty-eight different portions of the
Empire:"[46] and a speaker usually more careful in his language[47]
lately suggested to his audience that they should

"ask the twenty-eight Home Rule Parliaments if the Empire would be
split in pieces if there were a twenty-ninth."

But in order to make up the number of Parliaments and Legislatures
within the Empire to twenty-eight it is necessary to include in one
category the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the colonial Parliaments
of Newfoundland and New Zealand, the federal Parliaments of Canada and
Australia, the provincial or state Legislatures (widely differing from
one another in their constitution and powers) comprised in those
Federations, the Union of South Africa and its constituent provinces,
and the tiny assemblies surviving in the Channel Islands and the Isle of
Man. From a reference so vague and confused no inference as to the real
meaning or desire of either speaker can safely be drawn.[48]

But let us put aside, with the foreign confederacies (which have in most
cases been achieved or maintained by armed conflict), the practically
independent Parliaments within the British Empire, and confine ourselves
to the Federations of Canada and Australia, and to the Union (sometimes
incorrectly called a Federation) of South Africa.

In the first place, it is not immaterial to observe that each of the
Legislatures here referred to resulted, not from the di