They have been
allowed to make their own free representative constitutions by
altering in any manner they thought fit the already very popular
constitutions which we had given them. Each is governed by its own
legislature and executive, constituted on highly democratic
principles. The veto of the Crown and of Parliament, though
nominally reserved, is only exercised (and that very rarely) on
questions which concern the empire, and not solely the particular
colony. How liberal a construction has been given to the distinction
between imperial and colonial questions is shown by the fact that
the whole of the unappropriated lands in the regions behind our
American and Australian colonies have been given up to the
uncontrolled disposal of the colonial communities; though they
might, without injustice, have been kept in the hands of the
Imperial Government, to be administered for the greatest advantage
of future emigrants from all parts of the empire. Every colony has
thus as full power over its own affairs as it could have if it were
a member of even the loosest federation; and much fuller than would
belong to it under the Constitution of the United States, being free
even to tax at its pleasure the commodities imported from the mother
country. Their union with Great Britain is the slightest kind of
federal union; but not a strictly equal federation, the mother country
retaining to itself the powers of a Federal Government, though reduced
in practice to their very narrowest limits.
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