world, or any of the other
blessings of united power, depend on the four or five devices, all of
them trivial, and some of them contemptible, which figure in his
project. Of all ways of gratifying a democratic community that we
have ever heard of, the institution of hereditary rank seems the most
singular,--supported, as we presume that rank would be, by
primogeniture and landed settlements. As for the consultative council,
which is an old suggestion of Lord Grey's, what is the answer to the
following dilemma? If the Crown is to act on the advice of the agents
then the imperial politics of any one colony must either be regulated
by a vote of the majority of the members of the council--however
unpalatable the decision arrived at may be to the colony affected--or
else the Crown will be enabled to exercise its own discretion, and so
to arrogate to itself the right to direct colonial policy (Rowe's
_Bonds of Disunion_, 356). The simpleton in the jestbooks is made to
talk of a bridge dividing the two banks of a stream. Sir Henry
Parkes's plan of union would soon prove a dividing bridge in good
earnest.

Sir Henry Parkes does not try to conceal from us, he rather presses
upon us by way of warning, that separation from England is an event
which, 'whatever surface-loyalists may say to the contrary, is
unquestionably not out of the range of possibilities within the next
generation.' 'There are persons in Australia, and in most of the
Australian legislatures, who avowedly or tacitly favour the idea of
separation.' 'In regard to the large mass of the English people in
Australia,' he adds on another page, 'there can be no doubt of their
genuine loyalty to the present state, and their affectionate
admiration for the present illustrious occupant of the Throne. But
this loyalty is nourished at a great distance, and by tens of
thousands daily increasing, who have never known any land but the one
dear land where they dwell. It is the growth of a semi-tropical soil,
alike tender and luxuriant, and a slight thing may bruise, even snap
asunder, its young tendrils.'

'The successful in adventure and enterprise,' he says with just
prescience, 'will want other rewards than the mere accumulation of
wealth,' and other rewards, may we add, than knighthoods and sham
peerages. 'The awakening ambitions of the gifted and heroic will need
fitting spheres for their honourable gratification,' and such spheres,
we may be very sure, will not be found