reserved for them in the matters dealt with-and the amendment by local action in the Dominion of an imperial constitution. The texts of statutes are completely adequate for the purpose of the student in all of these cases except the most critical, namely, the granting of local ministerial responsibility. For the study of this phase of the process recourse must be had to colonial instructions and reports, and correspondence, often more or less personal and intimate, between the colonial governor and local politicians. It may be that the real nature of the transition-such as took place in Newfoundland and in New Zealand in 1855— eludes the form of written documents altogether.

The following table may serve to summarize the process by which the Dominions have come to enjoy self-government within the Mother Empire:

The federations of colonies occurred as follows:

1. The five Provinces existing in continental Canada in

1867 were joined in a federal union by the British North America Act of that year. To this federation were added from time to time, out of territory already part of the Dominion, the four remaining North American Provinces in the foregoing list.

2. The six Australian Colonies of 1900 were united in a single federal Commonwealth.

3. The four autonomous South African Colonies of 1909 were placed in a Federal Union by the South Africa Act of that year.

Some suggestions regarding the literature of the field may be in place here. The history of the granting of constitutional and responsible governments in the provinces and colonies and of the process of federation may best be traced in the works of Mr. Arthur Berriedale Keith, at present the paramount authority in this field. The review provided in the first pages of Mr. Keith's Responsible Government in the Dominions (1909) is expanded in the first part of the first volume of the work by the same title issued three years later (not a second edition, however), and in the second volume under the sections dealing with

the various federal unions. The legal aspects of the question of imperial control are canvassed in the third volume of the latter work and in the first part of Imperial Unity and the Dominions, issued in 1916. The last work also contains a suggestive analysis of the problem in terms of imperial and international politics.

References are to be found in these works by Keith to much other useful literature, of which Brand's Union of South Africa, Lucas' edition of the Durham report, and Jenks' little historical work may be mentioned here. The work of Todd on Parliamentary Government in the British Colonies hardly needs to be named; it is, of course, of greatest interest upon one side of the question.

There is a great deal of material bearing indirectly upon the question in statutes enacted by colonial legislatures in execution of imperial statutes granting powers to these legislatures to do certain things, and in British imperial statutes dealing with intra-colonial affairs and non-political matters such as land legislation and boundaries; to this material an introduction may be found in Lefroy's Canada's Federal System.

The grants of responsible government and the erection of federations were preceded by other steps such as, on the one hand, the grant of representative institutions and of powers over land sales, customs and mining royalties, and, on the other, the passage (perhaps "negotiation" would describe the process better) of the Imperial Defence Act of 1888 and the gathering of the earlier Colonial Conferences or the Imperial Conferences of the present day. Upon the former the special works on Newfoundland and New Zealand may be consulted such as the somewhat unsatisfactory histories by Prowse, Hatton and Harvey, and Rusden; Jenks treats with full appreciation of their sig

nificance the Land Sales Act of 1842 and similar measures. Upon the imperial colonial conferences down to 1911 and during the recent war in their relation to the movement for federation in the Empire and to the future of that mighty commonwealth of nations Jebb's The Imperial Conference (1911) and Keith's Imperial Unity and the Dominions, already mentioned, should be examined. For the history of the Conference since 1916 the newspaper reports will yield some results until better material is forthcoming. In view of the recognition accorded to the Dominions at the Conference of Paris regarding international affairs it may well be suggested that the process whereby the unity of empire and the individuality of colony are developed and reconciled is reaching its perfect conclusion at this present time; dependence, independence and interdependence, as between mother country and colony and between both and other nations, are being worked out in all their manifold phases in a most startling manner.

The following documents are not to be taken as giving a full or precise representation of the present political organisation of the Dominions, except as to the general outlines. For such a picture the student will need to take into account a multitude of regulations and instructions issued from time to time in the last eighty years as well as the great body of statute law and political custom and convention which has developed in the Dominions during the period of responsible self-government; it hardly needs to be said that in the British Dominions the latter factor may be counted as nearly equal to the statutes themselves in determining the ultimate form taken by the political organisation of the country. The following documents portray the way in which the more fundamental changes were made, historically, in the constitutional framework of the various Dominions and

the relations between these changes and what had gone before.

While the collection of documents was made under the supervision of the undersigned, the assembling and annotating of the material were done by Mr. Pitman B. Potter, of the Division of International Law.

JAMES BROWN SCOTT,

Director of the Division of International Law.

WASHINGTON, D. C.,

March 25, 1919.