representation, seem to be three essentials in any experiment Till the principle has been generally accepted, detailed schemes are simply a waste of time, but it is worth while to get our minds quite clear on the necessary elements of any plan. From the discussions on the subject in recent years three separate proposals have emerged. The first is for the creation of a permanent Imperial Committee, a Committee of the Privy Council, to which the Crown, in the exercise of its prerogative right, could add such new Privy Councillors from the Colonies as it thought fit. This body would be purely advisory, and would at the same time have under it a permanent Bureau of Imperial Intelligence, which could amass and codify the kind of information in which we are all too deficient. The second is for an enlarged Cabinet, a kind of second Cabinet, for Imperial questions. The Crown can summon whom it will to its Cabinet, and in the old days it used its prerogative in the choice of its advisers. The same power could now be put into force, on the advice of Ministers, to enlarge the Cabinet by the addition of colonial statesmen. Such a body would have both advisory and direct executive powers, and would have the merit of possessing an infinite capacity for development should an altered relationship between the Mother Country and the Colonies make it desirable to separate the two Cabinets. But it would have no representative character, and no chance of acquiring one. This defect is remedied in a third scheme, the periodical Conference of Colonial Premiers. Its drawback is found in the fat that it has no permanent organization, no executive powers, and that it is quite unconnected with our constitutional machinery, a sporadic institution whose effectiveness depends mainly upon accident.
All three schemes are imperfect, but in combination they seem to supplement each other. The most promising, nucleus is the Conference of Premiers. For this is, in a true sense, 'representative'—it is the Colonies in person, and of their own initiative, coming to our
