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STEPS TO IMPERIAL FEDERATION. the most important, if not the most important, of the functions of the representatives of the people in Parliament. I have already alluded to the recent growth in annual expenditure. The growth in expenditure has not been confined to the Department of the Navy. It has affected every Department to a greater or lesser extent. During the past seven years the annual ordinary expenditure of the country has increased by no less a sum than 35,000,000l. sterling. Some of this increased expenditure could, I believe, have been avoided had Parliament exercised its powers of control. But control cannot be effectively exercised when 67,000,000l. of public money are voted in three hours, or at the rate of some 22,000,000l. an hour, practically without discussion. This was actually done on August 9th of last year. No stronger instance could be given than this of the impossibility of carrying on the business of the Empire under present conditions.

As regards domestic business, it is impossible to deny that the absorption of the time of Parliament on Imperial matters has tended to throw into the background such questions as education, housing, temperance, the relations between capital and labour, the problem of the aged poor, the decline of our agricultural population, the decline of the number of British seamen in British ships questions which affect the people of this country in their homes. This constitutes the solid basis of such anti-Imperialist feeling as exists in the country. The Little Englander attributes to what is vaguely called Imperialism what is really due to the congestion of business in Parliament. It is a feeling which is too widely held to be ignored by us who are Imperialists and every member of the Colonial Institute is an 89