the outcome of peculiar geographical, economic, and historical conditions.  To understand the federal system of Australia it is essential to remember that till comparatively recent times Australia consisted, to all intents, of four or five seaport towns, each with its own tributary agricultural and mining area, strung out, at distances varying from 500 to 1300 miles, along the southern and eastern third of a coast line of nearly 9000 miles looped round an unexplored and reputedly uninhabitable interior.  Each of these seaports traded directly with the United Kingdom and Europe in competition with the others.  With economic motives for union practically non-existent, with external factors awakening a general apprehension rather than confronting Australia with any immediate danger, it was impossible to find the driving power to overcome local jealousies sufficiently to secure more than a minimum of union.  The Commonwealth Constitution is a makeshift which, as the internal trade of Australia grows and as railway communications are developed, will inevitably be amended in the direction of increasing the power of the Commonwealth and diminishing that of the States.  In Canada the economic link between Canada proper and the Maritime Provinces was, before Confederation, almost as weak as that of Australia.  British Columbia, which it was hoped to include in the Confederation, was then separated by a journey of months from Eastern Canada, and was, indeed, much nearer to Australia or New Zealand.  Quebec, with its racial and religious peculiarities, added another problem.  That the Confederation was nevertheless such a close and strong one was due both to the menace of American power in the south, and to the terrible example of the weakness of the American constitution as made manifest by the Civil War.  Yet even so, Sir John Macdonald, the father of Confederation, frankly declared the federal constitution a necessary evil—­

“As regards the comparative advantages of a Legislative and a Federal Union I have never hesitated to state my own opinions....  I have always contended that if we could agree to have one government and one Parliament ... it would be the best, the cheapest, the most vigorous, the strongest system of government we could adopt.”

This also was the view of the framers of the South African Union.  The circumstances of South Africa enabled them to carry it into effect.  For all its extent, South Africa is geographically a single, homogeneous country with no marked internal boundaries.  It is peopled by two white races everywhere intermixed in varying proportions and nowhere separated into large compact blocks.  The immense preponderance and central position of the Rand mining industry makes South Africa practically a single economic system.  The very bitterness of the long political and racial struggle which had preceded intensified the argument for really effective union.