27 OCTOBER 1900, Page 2

On Tuesday Mr. Haldane gave an excellent address to the

Glasgow Parliamentary Debating Society on "The Influence of Imperialism in Politics." After declaring that we must not shrink from the responsibilities of Empire, he gave it as his opinion that we could not entrust the settlement in South Africa to more competent hands than those of Sir Alfred Milner. "If they left it to be worked out by their repre- sentative on the spot, whose duty it would be to try and make Britons and Boers forget the past and bring the people of South Africa together under a Constitution which they themselves were ready to receive, and which was not imposed upon them from a Government 6,000 miles distant, then her Majesty's Government would have adopted the wisest policy under the sun." As to Imperial Federation, if it meant that the work of the Colonies was to be cribbed, cabined, and confined by some rigid system imposed upon them, he was wholly opposed to it. But if Imperial Federa- tion meant that these distant parts of the Empire where the Queen's Constitution had been reproduced were more and more to act in harmony with our Government at home, it was a fertile notion. "In the House of Lords we had an institution which lent itself to the possi- bility of giving them a Chamber which should represent no longer one party of 10 to 1 against another party, but the Empire at large. If we had the Colonial Prime Ministers meeting together for counsel in a Chamber of which they were en-officio members, and deliberating over matters which concerned the Empire as a whole, we might have a development which would go far towards solving the problem of Imperial Federation." There are of course objections to this as to every other amendment of the Con- stitution which it is possible to suggest, but we see no reason why Colonial statesmen should not sit in the House of Lords as life-Peers when our great lawyers do so with such excellent results. The physical difficulty is the great one, but that gets less yearly. It has already almost ceased as regards Canada.