Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/219

 questions, having imperial bearing, the home decisions were then always cordially acceded to. But as the colonies grew to greatness, they were ever less and less disposed to be thwarted by the imperial check in independently pursuing what seemed to them their suitable course. They had secured, from the first, the free disposal respectively of their own tariffs. But afterwards they began to seek inter-tariff and other independent arrangements, foreign as well as colonial, outside of them; and in various other ways their tendency was ever to trench more and more upon imperial treaty arrangements, and imperial rights, and legal and political consistencies.

What had been wanting all through this undermining process, and what had not been timely considered and remedied while still possible, was a firm and equal political union, by the due representation of all parts of the empire. This being wanting, any exercise of the imperial check upon a colony had always, of necessity, rather the untoward aspect of the command of a superior to the subject, than that of the decision of a whole united nationality; and thus the larger colonies, as though by an inevitable instinct, began to indicate resistance. When at length one of the greatest of these "dependencies," as we were still ominously calling them, in a vital question of imperial policy and consistency, declined flatly to be "coerced" by the home decision, it was seen that the cord had at length snapped asunder.

We had already, at this time, passed into the twentieth century. Up to the end of the nineteenth unity seemed still possible, and a Bismarck hand might still have secured it. But the English Bis-