LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
FEDERATION FOR THE BRITISH ISLES. [To ras EDITOE 01 rat " Srscreron.."1 SIR, In referring to Mr. Birrell's speech at the Eighty Club last week on the subject of a federal arrangement for the British Isles, you use a phrase in condemnation which it can do no possible good if I repeat. Certainly no one, the beneficiary of the Spectator for almost half-a-century as this writer gratefully admits, would like to comment on any utterance of yours in a way to diminish your authority. And, again, I am one of a vast body of our citizens who would look in the mouth, and reject too, any gift-horse from any member of his Majesty's present Government. So that my very strong desire is to agree with you were it at all possible; but it is not.
You quote Freeman on a federation for our islands as saying that "federation meant uniting that which before had been disunited, but that it now apparently was going to mean breaking up what before had been joined together." But if a fractured limb has been set badly, do you not then break and reset P The great State of Dakota, being found unwieldy, was split in half some few years since. I dare say some North Dakotan, less intelligent even than Freeman of "perish India" fame, may also have prayed with Freeman that "he should not end his days as an inhabitant of the Canton of Wessex."
We have to guide us two great contemporary experiments,--• Pitt's and Hamilton's. All the science and authority of a hundred years since held that Pitt was the better bone- setter. But to us it may appear now that Pitt did not unite England and Ireland, but rather he chained them together. Hamilton's federal nexus, it is true, is a very loose relation, but possibly, were it any tighter, there too the chains might
fret. As I believe that we shall listen to little else than the federal gospel during the next few years, I pray of you not
to prejudice your splendid clientele. We shall be told that we desire to " Americanise our Constitution," and moral
exordiums will be much relied on to dilute the federal solution. And this being so, will you permit me to recall the earliest stirrings of my hope in federation, at that time not at all a belief, but indeed a cause of alarm P I was at Ottawa in 1879, and without any thought in his mind as to Ireland, Sir John Macdonald expounded to me his recent experiment, the "British North America Act" of 1867. What a pro- digious experiment! How was it possible to take a. Celtic Catholic majority, speaking a strange tongue, a " nation " of farmers who hated the commercialism and pushfulness of their Saxon conquerors, and who had been for over a hundred years on rebellion's threshold, and federate such elements in harmonious citizenhood ? True, it had been done, and after eleven years this "mad" experiment with four millions of people split into seven distinct Governments was working smoothly; but the then Leader of the Opposition, happily still living, said to me :—" There will yet be great trouble.
We have handed over the property of our co-religionists in the province of Quebec to be fleeced by Papists. The day of reckoning draws near."
The men who to-day give us hope within the Constitution are Mr. William O'Brien and Mr. Healy. The former pleads for the federal solution in every platform speech. And unless you can offer us hope, not negations, we shall abandon British citizenship by millions. Does any duty demand that with ball the Western Hemisphere smiling over to us, a splendid desert, we shall submit our children's children to recurring crises such as that of January last? Let me also add that you can never bring these isles into a Federation of the Empire as a single unit, forty millions strong. As to this, I have encountered a blunt negative all over the Empire's surface. The Dominions will not be " Prussianised." We must subscribe to the wider Federation at least four States. After all, Ulster if admitted as a fifth federal unit has cer- tainly more population, and probably more wealth, than the three New England States—Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island—combined. How, you ask, shall we harness a goat with an elephant P How, I reply, have you harnessed the two States, New Mexico and New York, in that Western Federation? "My shirt," said the Swiss federal, " is nearer than my coat." Emile de Laveleye wrote :--
"Look at the Swiss Canton of Tiscina; it is wholly Italian. Italy is united, free, glorious, even prosperous, and yet the Italians of Tiscina do not desire to be united with Italy ; they prefer to remain a Canton of the Swiss Federation. The Croats, the Servians too, and the Wallachs may all become equally devoted to the Crown of St. Stephen, but it is only by Federation this result can be attained."
[We have dealt with Mr. Frewen's letter in our leading columns.—En. Spectator.]
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