Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/252

 taxation? As far as I can see, such purely practical considerations as these never occur to the members of the Imperial Federation League, but they are the only ones that are present to the minds of colonial working-men.

Can nothing then be done, it will be urged, in lieu of the hopeless policy of drift? Is it, in a word, unavoidable that the British in Canada, in South Africa, in Australia, and in New Zealand, must inevitably disown the British Crown and connection, and become a set of independent and disunited Republics? He would have been a bold man who would have predicted anything to the contrary ten or twenty years ago, but, strange as it may seem, the unseen forces that are at work in the shaping of peoples and nationalities may now be tending in an opposite direction. Lord Salisbury has told us the effect of modern scientific agencies in exposing outlying colonies to the attacks of powerful but no longer sufficiently remote enemies. This fact has the immediate effect of compelling us, as it were, to huddle closer together for mutual shelter. In other ways, thanks to the cable, it is something more than a mere post-prandial phrase that Australia is as much a part of the Empire as