other connecting links are those of law and finance.  The Privy Council acts as a Court of Appeal in certain causes, and Colonial Governments borrow money in the London market.  These communities widely seperated in geography and in temperament, have no common fiscal policy, no common foreign policy, no common scheme of defence, no common Council to discuss and decide Imperial affairs.  Now this may be a very wise arrangement, but you must not call it an Empire.  From the point of view of unity, if from no other, it presents an unfavourable contrast to French Imperialism, under which all the oversea colonies are represented in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris.  In the English plan the oversea colonies are unrelated atoms.  You may say that they afford all the materials for a grandiose federation; but if you have flour in one bag, and raisins in another, and candied peel in another, and suet in another you must not call them a Christmas pudding until they have been mixed together and cooked.  Those areas of the globe, coloured red on the maps, may have all the resources requisite for a great, self-sufficing, economic unit of a new order.  Their peoples may desire that new order.  But until it is achieved you must remember that the British Empire belongs to the region of dream and not to that of fact.

For many years now, apostles of reconstruction have been hammering out the details of a scheme that shall unify the Empire on some sort of Federal basis.  For the new organism which they desire to create they need a brain.  Is this to be found in the Westminster Assembly, sometimes loosely styled the “Imperial Parliament”?  As things stand at present such a suggestion is a mere counter-sense.  That body has come to such a pass as would seem to indicate the final bankruptcy of the governing genius of England.  All the penalties of political gluttony have accumulated on it.  Parliament, to put the truth a little brutally, has broken down under a long debauch of over-feeding.  Every day of every session it bites off far more in the way of bills and estimates than it even pretends to have time to chew.  Results follow which it would be indiscreet to express in terms of physiology.  Tens of millions are shovelled out of the Treasury by an offhand, undiscussed, perfunctory resolution.  The attempt to compress infinite issues in a space too little has altered and, as some critics think, degraded the whole tenor of public life.  Parliament is no longer the Grand Inquest of the Nation, at least not in the ancient and proper meaning of the words.  The declaration of Edmund Burke to the effect that a member has no right to sacrifice his “unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience” to any set of men living may be echoed by the judges in our day, but to anyone who knows the House of Commons it is a piece of pure irony.  Party discipline cracks every session a more compelling whip; and our shepherded, regimented, and automatised representatives