culties which attend legislative federation. Moreover, it is the courts which have the power of smoothing over the little roughnesses, and healing the breaches in the fabric of empire. The Scottish feudal tenure and method of construction of wills were harmonized and brought up to date without need of legislation by a long series of decisions in the House of Lords from Mansfield downwards, and certain disruptive elements in the Canadian constitution were counteracted by judgments of the Judicial Committee. To have the power of construing colonial laws and customs is to have the power to guide and restrain—to have, in effect, control of development. New constitutional experiments become safe and normal when interpreted in the last resort by a strong central court Mistakes can be corrected or ignored, antiquated débris cleared away, laws extended to correspond with changed conditions. And it is all done without noise or advertisement, and therefore without the popular clamour which attends self-conscious change. Such a task is surely worthy to be entrusted to the most splendid and representative court we can create, the more because such splendour and comprehensiveness are factors on which depends its success.
These few notes have been set down not as a new contribution to the question, but as an indication of the kind of solution of the problem to which the country seems to be feeling its way. Happily there are many able workers in the field, and in a little we may look to find English political thought impregnated with similar conceptions, for in our politics an idea must first become a truism before it can hope to be given effect to. It is necessary to steer a delicate course between the two dangers of undue haste and undue apathy. I have said enough, I trust, to show the reality of the first peril But the second is equally worth remembering. We are changing rapidly both as a nation and as an Empire, and while our present forms do well enough for the
