uniform lines than even the richest colony could do. Some of these grounds for union measure the distance which the world has travelled since 1788. Railways are far older than was self-government in the oldest Australian colony, far younger than the youngest of the original thirteen American States. Even so late as 1867, when Canada was confederated, no one thought of suggesting that the State should provide old-age pensions.

The opponents of Australian Federation, although they came more and more to feel their cause hopeless, were an active party, including many influential men. Besides denying that the benefits just enumerated would be attained, they dwelt upon the additional cost which a new Government, superadded to the existing ones, must entail. They fanned the jealousies which naturally exist between small and large communities, telling the former that they would be overborne in voting, and the latter that they would suffer in purse; and they wound up with the usual and often legitimate appeals to local sentiment.

The arguments drawn from considerations of expense and from local jealousies were met by a series of ingenious compromises and financial devices to which both the larger and smaller colonies were persuaded to agree, while the love of each community for its own political independence was overborne by the rising tide of national sentiment. An ambition which aspired to make Australia take its place in the world as a great nation, mistress of the Southern hemisphere, had been growing for some time with the growth of a new generation born in the new home, and was powerfully roused

by the vision of a Federal Government which should resemble that of the United States and warn off intruders in the Western Pacific, as the American Republic had announced by the pen of President Monroe that she would do on the North-American Continent. The same nationally self-assertive spirit and desire for expansion which has recently spurred four great European Powers into a rivalry for new colonial possessions, and which in 1899 made the United States forswear its old-established principles of policy, has been astir in the mind of the Australians. It had been stimulated by the example of a similar spirit in the mother country, and by the compliments which the English had now begun to lavish upon their colonies. It had gained strength with the growth to manhood of a generation born in Australia, and nurtured in Australian patriotism. Such a patriotism, finding no fit scope in devotion to the particular colonies, longed for a larger ideal. It supplied the motive force needed to create a national union. Without it, all the sober reasonings which counselled confederation might have failed to prevail. No equally strenuous or forward-reaching spirit moved the Canadians in 1867, nor are the traces of such a spirit conspicuous in the American debates of 1787-9. Some men were then solicitous for liberty, others for order and good govern. ment, but of imperial greatness in the present sense of the term little was said. Liberty and peace at home, not military strength and domination abroad, were the national ideals of those days.

The history of the Federation movement illustrates the truth that a great change is seldom effected in

politics save by the coincidence of two moving forcesthe prospect of material advantage and the power of sentiment. In every community there are many who can be moved only by one or other of these two forces, and nearly every man responds better to the first if he can be warmed by the second. In the American debates of 1788-9 feeling was mostly arrayed against the proposed federation, though reason was almost entirely for it. Reason prevailed, but prevailed with far more difficulty than the cause of Federalism, with less cogent economic grounds behind it, prevailed in Australia.

Like America in 1787, Australia was fortunate in having a group of able statesmen, most of whom were also lawyers, and so doubly qualified for the task of preparing a constitution. Their learning, their acuteness, and their mastery of constitutional principles can best be appreciated by any one who will peruse the interesting debates in the two Conventions. They used the experience of the mother country and of their predecessors in the work of federation-making, but they did so in no slavish spirit, choosing from the doctrines of England and from the rules of America, Switzerland, and Canada those which seemed best fitted to the special conditions of their own country. And like the founders of the American and Canadian Unions, they were not only guided by a clear practical sense, but were animated by a spirit of reasonable compromise, a spirit which promises well for the conduct of government under the instrument which they have framed.

IV. THE CONDITIONS FOR A FEDERAL
COMMONWEALTH.

Before examining the provisions of the Constitution which is bringing the hitherto independent colonies into one political body, it is well to consider for a moment the territory and the inhabitants that are to be thus united.

The total area of Australia is nearly 3,000,000 square miles, not much less than that of Europe. Of this a comparatively small part is peopled by white men, for the interior, as well as vast tracts stretching inland from the south-western and north-western coasts, is almost rainless, and supplies, even in its better districts, nothing more than a scanty growth of shrubs. Much of it is lower than the regions towards the coast, and parts are but little above sea-level. It has been hitherto deemed incapable of supporting human settlement, and unfit even for such ranching as is practised on arid tracts in western North America and in South Africa. Modern science has brought so many unexpected things to pass, that this conclusion may prove to have been too hasty. Still no growth of population in the interior can be looked for corresponding to that which marked the development of the United States west of the Alleghanies in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Of the six Australian colonies, one, Tasmania, occupies an island of its own, fertile and beautiful, but rather smaller (26,000 square miles) than Scotland or South Carolina. It lies 150 miles from the coast of Victoria. Western Australia covers an enormous area (nearly

1,000,000 square miles, between three and four times the size of Texas), and South Australia, which stretches right across the Continent to the Gulf of Carpentaria, is almost as large (a little over 900,000 square miles). Queensland is smaller, with 668,000 square miles; New South Wales, on the other hand, has only 310,000 square miles (i.e. is rather larger than Sweden and Norway, and about the size of California, Oregon, and Washington put together); Victoria only 87,000 (i.e. is as large as Great Britain and a little larger than Idaho). The country (including Tasmania) stretches from north to south over 32° of latitude (11° S. to 43° S.), a wider range than that of the United States (lat. 49° N. to 26° N.). There are thus even greater contrasts of climate than in the last-named country, for though the Tasmanian winters are less cold than those of Montana, the tropical heats of North Queensland and the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria exceed any temperature reached in Louisiana and Texas. Fortunately, Northern Australia is, for its latitude, comparatively free from malarial fevers. But it is too hot for the out-door labour of white men. In these marked physical differences between the extremities of the Continent there lie sources whence may spring divergences not only of material interests but ultimately even of character, divergences comparable to those which made the Gulf States of the American Union find themselves drawn apart from the States of the North Atlantic and Great Lakes.

It must also be noted that the great central wilderness cuts off not only the tropical north and north-west, but also the more temperate parts of the west from