John Morley

We have a vast fleet, no doubt, but not vast enough both to picquet our own coast-line with war-ships against raids on unprotected coast-towns, and besides that to cover the great outlying flanks of the Empire.

These hostile cruisers would haunt Australasian waters (coaling in the neutral ports about the Eastern Archipelago), and there would be scares, risks, uncertainties, that would derange trade, chill enterprise, and frighten banks.

If the English flag were in danger from foreign cruisers, Australia would cease to employ our ships, and might possibly find immunity in separation and in establishing a neutral flag of her own.

In other words, one of the most certain results of pursuing the spirited foreign policy in Europe, which is so dear to the Imperialist or Bombastic school, would be to bring about that disintegration of the Empire which the same school…

The Australian, having as much as he can do to carry on from hand to mouth, would speedily repent himself of that close and filial union with the mother country, which he is now supposed so ardently to desire, when he found his personal…

He scolds Liberals for attaching too little importance to colonies, and not perceiving that our national existence is bound up with our existence as an empire.

The mother country and the colonies might be drawn closer together by the abandonment of free trade and the formation of an imperial Zollverein or Greater British Customs Union.

In short, since the concession of independent legislatures to all the most important colonies, the idea of summoning representatives to the Imperial Parliament is, indeed, as one high colonial authority has declared it to be, a romantic…

If the legislature of Victoria is left to settle the local affairs of Victoria, the legislature of the United Kingdom must be left to settle our local affairs.

Is the time and brainpower of our legislators, and of those of our colonies too, to be diverted perpetually from their own special concerns and the improvement of their own people, to the more showy but less fruitful task of keeping…

It is not in the mere machinery of federation that insurmountable difficulties arise, but in satisfying ourselves that the national sentiment would supply steam enough to work the machinery.

If anybody supposes that England, for instance, would send a fleet to Canada to collect ship-money in the name of the Federal Council, it would be just as easy to imagine her sending a fleet in her own name.

Nothing can be more absurd than any supposition of that kind, except the counter-supposition that no confederated state would ever fail to fall cheerfully in with the requirements of the rest of them.

It is certain that it will have to be a bond of political and national interest, and not of sentiment merely, though the sentiment may serve by way of decoration.

That Act contained, as Lord Kimberley confessed, some startling clauses, and its object was in fact to place blacks under the necessity of working for whites at low wages.

Gladstone in the last session of parliament, has spent more than twelve millions sterling on frontier wars in South Africa during the eighty years that we have been unfortunate enough to have that territory on our hands.

The conduct of the colonists to the natives has been the main cause of these wars, and yet it is stated that they themselves have never contributed more than £10,000 a year towards military expenditure on their account.

Yet if the stoppage of supplies of this kind would be one of the first results of the transformation of the mother country into the stepmother Union, what motive would South Africa have for entering it?

It is perfectly plain that the chief source of the embarrassments of the mother country in dealing with colonies endowed with responsible government would simply be reproduced if a Federal Council were sitting in Downing Street in the…

No, we may depend upon it that it would be a mandat impératif on every federal delegate not to vote a penny for any war, or preparation for war, that might arise from the direct or indirect interests of any colony but his own.

If they had sufficiently the same interests, they have not, and never can have, a sufficient habit of taking counsel together.

They are not part of the same public; they do not discuss and deliberate in the same arena, but apart, and have only a most imperfect knowledge of what passes in the minds of one another.

They neither know each other's objects nor have confidence in each other's principles of conduct.

Let any Englishman ask himself how he should like his destinies to depend on an assembly of which one-third was British-American and another third South African and Australian.

I would use my best endeavours to make these States independent in matters of administration.