Page:Advanced Australia.djvu/188

has nothing to lose, but everything to gain by it. No cut-and-dried scheme of Imperial Federation will be brought forward by the discreet statesman who remembers how near we seemed to it in the years before the revolt of our American colonies, and how perilous a matter, among Anglo-Saxons, is taxation without representation. But Australia is our depot and main strength on that side of the world, whither the battle of world-interests is now shifting. Too much stress must not be laid by the enthusiast on the offers, which are for the moment fashionable, of colonial contingents for our ever-recurring wars. They are sometimes merely symptoms of a desire to combine a sort of authorised filibustering with the benefits of a camp of instruction; the outcome as well of the natural desire of officers and men for adventure and experience, as of a willingness of the colonial authorities to wash the spears of the young men of their embryonic armies at the expense, in the main, of the British tax-payer. Australia cannot afford to go seriously to war until she is obliged; though it is far from impossible that the stress of war, when it does come, may be productive of good, in the shape of renewed moral earnestness and the heightening of the national ideals. Yet in the meanwhile, on the other hand, it would be base, as well as unwise, to under-estimate the friendliness, the confidence, the racial loyalty, of which such spontaneous offers must necessarily be the outcome. And it is as well to remember that, even as things are, the forces locally raised by our colonial possessions generally almost equal our own Militia, which may yet again some day become our more specially British Army, when, if ever, the Imperial Army, as such, is re-organised to serve the requirements of an organised Empire: while, to look only to the immediate future, the Australian Commonwealth, in particular, which will take over the fortifications of