ot only for military, but for naval defence, and would be
wanting in patriotic feeling if they did otherwise. New Zealand, on the
other hand, is too small to be capable of creating a Navy, and rightly
contributes to ours. We have arrived at an interesting psychological
point when Australia and Canada both seem to be inclined to reserve, in
theory, a right to abstain from engaging their Navies in a war
undertaken by Great Britain, but nobody will be alarmed by this
theoretical reservation. It is an insignificant matter beside the Naval
Agreement reached at the last Conference (1911)--an agreement worth more
than volumes of unwritten statutes--to the effect that the personnel of
the colonial fleets is to be interchangeable with that of the Imperial
fleet and that in a joint war colonial ships are to form an integral
part of the British fleet under the control of the Admiralty. With such
an agreement in existence, it becomes superfluous to lay stress upon the
fact that without formal and complete separation from the Mother Country
in time of peace, the neutrality of a Colony would not be recognized by
a belligerent enemy of Great Britain in time of war. In any case these
developments have no concern for Ireland, which does not want, and need
not be given, power to raise a local Navy. Nor, with regard to the
regular land forces, will anything be changed. Troops quartered in
Ireland will be, as before, and as in the Colonies now, under complete
Imperial control. So will Imperial camps, magazines, arsenals,
dock-yards. On the other hand, arrangements should certainly be made to
permit the raising of Volunteer forces in Ireland. There are large
numbers of Irishmen in the British Territorial Army, and Ireland sent
five companies to the South African War. Though the poverty of the
country will for a long time check the growth of Volunteer forces, it is
the Union which presents the only serious obstacle to their
establishment. No surer proof of the need for Home Rule could be adduced
than the fact that it was held to be impossible to extend the
Territorial system to Ireland. One of the objects of Home Rule is to
remove this suspicious atmosphere. Whether local power to organize and
arm Volunteers in Ireland should be given to the Irish authority, or, as
in the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, reserved to the Imperial
Government, is, if we trust Ireland, as we must, a secondary and not a
vital matter, which would not affect the que