Thursday Island and King George's Sound, must fortify also Hobart and Port Darwin; will organise its forces to protect its provincial capitals from the raids, with which they have repeatedly been threatened, of marauding European powers; and will probably maintain a field army capable of dealing with an invasion, for instance, of Mongolian sepoys. [See Appendix A.] The existing Federal Squadron, of five third class cruisers and two gunboats, will probably be increased; the formation of a Federal Naval Reserve is being considered; in a word, the newest nation in the Greater English Commonwealth is not to be, even at the outset, without its complement of national armed strength: which is always so much the better for us. The whole process is one of inevitable, because organic, growth: the formation of true political organisms. The Canadian Dominion and the Australian Commonwealth will be followed, as Lord Grey hoped to have seen, by a South African Union, and after that—But that is as far, perhaps, as we shall look (if we are wise) for the present. In the meantime, the Commonwealth Bill will be submitted to the British Parliament before long, and it will be for us to see that our colonial fellow-subjects are not legislated out of their Imperial citizenship. The constitutional link between the nation and the colonies is through the person of the Queen in Council. The Privy Council, which administered our first plantations, and which, so recently as Earl Grey's time, was held to be the proper authority to settle the then proposed constitutions of Australia and the Cape, is, for many reasons, more likely than Parliament itself to become the centre round which the ultimate organisation of the Imperial Commonwealth may crystallise. The judicial prerogative of Her Majesty is, as Mills puts it (apart from our control over the foreign relations of the colonies), the one yet unquestioned element of our Imperial
