took as a definite surrender of all claims to suzerainty, and as a definite recognition of their position as an “independent sovereign state,” bound temporarily by the provisions of a treaty, which could have no permanent force in “fixing the boundary to the march of a nation.”  So far from being reconciled they were only emboldened to embark on a policy of aggression, which in 1885 involved the British Government in military measures costing nearly as much as would have been required to suppress the whole rising in 1881.  For the time being the stagnation and chronic bankruptcy which followed the removal of British rule and the exodus of the loyalists limited Transvaal ambitions.  The gold discoveries both increased that ambition by furnishing it with revenue, and at the same time brought about a close economic intercourse with the neighbouring colonies which, under the political conditions of disunion, was bound to create friction.  In the end the policy of make-believe and “cutting the loss” had to be redeemed at the cost of 20,000 lives and of L200,000,000.  Reconciliation, in large measure, has come since.  But it has only come because British statesmen showed, firstly, in the war, their inflexible resolution to stamp out the policy of separation, and secondly, after the war, their devotion to the real welfare of South Africa in a policy of economic reconstruction, and in the establishment of those free and equal British institutions under which—­by the final dying out of a spurious nationalism based on racial prejudice and garbled history—­South Africa may become a real, living nation.

The reservations and guarantees which this Home Rule Bill may contain cannot possibly constitute the framework of a federal constitution.  All they can guarantee is a period of friction and agitation which will continue till Ireland has secured a position of complete separation from the United Kingdom.  At the best the Home Rule experiment would then reduce Ireland to the position of another Newfoundland; at the worst it might repeat all the most disastrous features of the history of “Home Rule” in the Transvaal.  At the same time it may be worth inquiring how far there would really be any valid Colonial analogy for the introduction of a federal system of “Home Rule all round” if such a scheme had been honestly contemplated.  The first thing to keep in mind is that the internal constitution of the Dominions presents a whole gradation of constitutional types.  There is the loose federal system of Australia, in which the Commonwealth powers are strictly limited and defined, and all residuary powers left to the States.  There is the close confederation of Canada in which all residuary powers are vested in the Dominion.  There is the non-federal unitary government of South Africa with a system of provincial local governments with somewhat wide county council powers.  There is, lastly, the purely unitary government of the two islands of New Zealand.  Each of these types is