dominions of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, each with its legislature, and each with its Council advisory of the King-Emperor, while the original or British Privy Council (supplemented, as it has already begun to be, from the colonies) "animates the whole," we see the real future constitution of self-governing Anglo-Saxondom, the real British Empire to which India and the other dependencies should be attached.
The second bond of union, the legislative veto, is useful as securing, amongst other things, some degree of legislative uniformity within the Empire. This power is not threatened by the new Commonwealth Bill, which proposes, on the contrary, substantially to strengthen it. But it is purely negative, both in its nature and influence, and can of course form no foundation of empire.
The third, the judicial prerogative of the Crown, is the very central of those crimson threads of which a recent school of Imperial Federation Leaguers was so fond of talking. Tod calls it one of the most stable safeguards, as well as one of the most beneficial acts, of the sovereign power. The appellate jurisdiction of the Queen in Council is retained primarily for the good of the colonies, and not for that of the mother country. Nothing is more necessary, particularly in the Australian colonies, than to secure the rights and property of the individual citizen, in a young, hasty, and democratic community, against the bureaucratic enthusiasms of departmental tyranny. It is not infrequently useful, for reasons more generally understood at home, to change the venue. The standard of legal training, again, is not always at its highest in the most remote parts of the Empire, and the field from which judges are picked is necessarily less extensive than at home. But more serious is the tendency of colonial executives, in communities where the authority of the common law, and the dignity
