geography, and to divert the course of trade in order to make the Union a reality.  The Intercolonial Railway, the Canadian Pacific, the Grand Trunk Pacific, the proposed Hudson Bay Railway, and the Georgian Bay Canal schemes, all these have been deliberate instruments of policy, aiming, first of all, at bridging the wilderness between practically isolated settlements scattered across a continent, and creating a continuous Canada, east and west; and, secondly, at giving that continuous strip depth as well as extension.  Hand in hand with the policy of constructing the internal framework of transportation, which is the skeleton of the economic and social life of a nation, went the policy of maintaining a national tariff to clothe that skeleton with the flesh and blood of production and exchange, and, as far as possible, to clothe it evenly.  Australia, too, is waking, though somewhat hesitatingly, to the need of transcontinental railways, for the protection of new industries and for the even development and filling up of all her territories.  In South Africa the economic process preceded the political.  It was the dread of the breakdown of a temporary customs union already in existence that precipitated the discussion of union.  And it was the development of the Rand as the great internal market of South Africa, and the competitive construction of railway lines from the coast, that really decided the question of legislative union against federation.  All three instances lead to the same conclusion that union to be really effective and stable needs three things:  firstly, a developed system of internal communications reducing all natural barriers to social, political, and commercial intercourse to the very minimum; secondly, a national tariff, protective or otherwise, sufficient at least to encourage the fullest flow of trade along those communications rather than outside of them; thirdly, a deliberate use of the tariff and of the national expenditure to secure, as far as possible, the even development of every portion of the national territory.

In the United Kingdom all these instruments for making the Union real are still unutilised.  The system of laisser faire in the matter of internal communications has allowed St. George’s Channel still to remain a real barrier.  A dozen train-ferries, carrying not only the railway traffic between Great Britain and Ireland, but enabling the true west coast of the United Kingdom to be used for transatlantic traffic, would obliterate that strip of sea which a British minister recently urged as an insuperable objection to a democratic union.[61] To construct them would not be doing as much, relatively, as little Denmark has long since done, by the same means, to unite her sea-divided territory.  The creation of a tariff which shall assist not only manufactures, but agriculture and rural industries, is another essential step.  In view of Ireland’s undeveloped industrial condition the giving of bounties to the establishment