of the Empire, of daughter nations at the circumference; and it is this fact above all others that gives a unique interest and character to the strange political organism we are considering. For everything else in the relations between the parts of the Empire we may find perhaps a parallel elsewhere; the existence of a number of national centres and national governments within one political system is an entirely new phenomenon. The younger nations, it is true, if we ignore such minor qualifications as are rendered necessary by the presence of the French-Canadians in Quebec and the Dutch in South Africa, are linked to their parent by ties of blood and speech and moral and social affinity which, though they did not avail in the case of the United States to avert separation, have nevertheless an immense cohesive value and importance. Yet these younger nations have developed or are developing each a true nationality of its own. They are virtually independent in their Governments. The supremacy of the Imperial Parliament has lost all practical importance in the present, and does not even appear to contain the germ of any useful development in the future. Their allegiance is not to the parent Parliament, nor even to the parent nation, but to the common throne and Empire in which, indeed, they have a common citizenship of profound significance and value—a significance and value that, with our eyes fixed on the mere machinery of government, we are sometimes too apt to forget.
This Empire, then, is obviously a middle term between the two other great Empire States that are its contemporaries, holding the balance between them, free alike from the exaggerated nationalism of the one and the exaggerated Imperialism of the other. It contains nations in the making, but it is not a nation in the making as a whole, for the welding of the manifold races within its bounds into a homogeneous nationality is as little probable in any time that we need consider as the assimilation of all the races of the world to one uniform type. Thus, by its whole genius, composition.
