The feelings of equity, and conceptions of public morality, from
which these suggestions emanate, are worthy of all praise; but the
suggestions themselves are so inconsistent with rational principles of
government that it is doubtful if they have been seriously accepted as
a possibility by any reasonable thinker. Countries separated by half
the globe do not present the natural conditions for being under one
government, or even members of one federation. If they had
sufficiently the same interests, they have not, and never can have,
a sufficient habit of taking counsel together. They are not part of
the same public; they do not discuss and deliberate in the same arena,
but apart, and have only a most imperfect knowledge of what passes
in the minds of one another. They neither know each other's objects,
nor have confidence in each other's principles of conduct. Let any
Englishman ask himself how he should like his destinies to depend on
an assembly of which one-third was British American, and another third
South African and Australian. Yet to this it must come if there were
anything like fair or equal representation; and would not every one
feel that the representatives of Canada and Australia, even in matters
of an imperial character, could not know, or feel any sufficient
concern for, the interests, opinions, or wishes of English, Irish, and
Scotch? Even for strictly federative purposes the conditions do not
exist which we have seen to be essential to a federation.
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