representation, and their representatives should form part of the Federal legislative body. The constitution of the Federal Legislature would not involve much difficulty. The House of Lords, as one chamber of it, would equally be available for the Federal Legislature as for the ordinary Legislature of Great Britain. There is nothing to prevent persons who may reside in the colonies from being called to the peerage, and already many peers possess considerable colonial estates. The House of Commons, as the House of Commons for Great Britain, should not be disturbed. It is a question very important, but which need not be decided at the moment of confederation, whether the Federal Lower Chamber should be the House of Commons plus the colonial representatives, or whether the Federal representatives of Great Britain should be distinctly and separately selected. The Imperial Parliament, until the Federal Parliament grew into being, should, as it now is, be superior, and the Government of the United Kingdom would be the executive of the Confederate Empire. There are two familiar instances of exceptional representation that show how easily particular requirements can be dealt with. In the French Legislature the colonies of France are represented; in the House of Representatives of the United States, territories are allowed to be represented by delegates.

The measure of confederacy, then, which we advocate, is a declaration that the colonies are inseparably portions and provinces of Great Britain; that all parts of the Empire should contribute to the cost and maintenance of the fleet; and that, in course of time, as the importance of the outlying dominions warrants it, all parts of the Empire shall be represented in the Federal Legislature; and that, in the meanwhile, the colonies be represented at a Board (or Council) of Advice to the Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Many references have already been made to the advantages the colonies would enjoy from federation, while it has not been concealed that possibly they may to some extent think that their independence has been so guaranteed that they have the right to complain of its being denied to them. But it is to be supposed they would be consulted during the passage of the measure; and, whatever the hopes held out to them, they are not entitled to set up the result of the machinations of a few statesmen against the wishes of the vast masses of the people. And the colonies have much to gain. There will be preserved to them a national feeling-a desire to be great amongst the great, not amongst the little, to be parts of a powerful Empire instead of being powerless independent countries. They will save themselves from the risks of small States-the risk of external wars with countries like themselves, or internecine wars as various parties in the State energetically try to assert the supreme control. Nor will the colonies be pecuniarily losers. Against the actual contributions they would make might be set the increased value of colonial securi

ties and colonial property already mentioned. They might indeed regard their payments as premiums of insurance on their possessions, which in consequence of such payments would be more than proportionately increased in value.

And what does confederation mean to Great Britain? It means that, instead of sinking into a small money-loving State-a second Holland-she is to retain in her own dominions her subjects and their wealth, and not to drive them abroad. The enterprise of her people is to be devoted to enlarging the power of their country, instead of their diminishing it by becoming the subjects of other nations. The trade which she is losing, as other nations are able to supply themselves with their own manufactures, she will more than regain through the wants of millions of her people dwelling within her various dominions which she will have to satisfy. She will look forward not to declining trade, but to its unlimited increase. For the great mass of her population, the toiling millions, she will retain the possessions which will open to them and their children and children's children the means of rising to distinction and wealth if their ambition so prompts them. The most powerful of nations, with irresistible naval armaments, she will be able to stay war. The pauperism of the country will be reduced by the increased demand for labour; and portions of the British possessions, which are now wildernesses, will be covered with useful works and teem with prosperous communities.

The endeavour has been made to show in this paper

1. The unsatisfactory nature of the relations between the mother country and the colonies.

2. The urgent necessity for doing something to arrest the disintegration towards which progress is being made.

3. That a union, depending upon the pleasure, for the time being, of the different parts of the Empire, means separation sooner or later.

4. That, under the union-during-pleasure condition, much is being done to hasten separation.

5. That the mother country is entitled to retain and consolidate her possessions.

6. That confederation is desirable, and would be fraught with advantage both to the parent country and the colonies in the shape of increased trade, increased value of property, the augmented happiness of the people, and the saving of much misery and disaster.

7. That its accomplishment does not present great difficulties.

JULIUS VOGEL.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE.

II.

THE rational view of the Soul (we insisted in a previous paper) would remove us as far from a cynical materialism as from a fantastic spiritualism. It restores to their true supremacy in human life those religious emotions which materialism forgets; whilst it frees us from the idle figment which spiritualism would foist upon human nature.

We entirely agree with the theologians that our age is beset with a grievous danger of materialism. There is a school of teachers abroad, and they have found an echo here, who dream that victorious vivisection will ultimately win them anatomical solutions of man's moral and spiritual mysteries. Such unholy nightmares, it is true, are not likely to beguile many minds in a country like this, where social and moral problems are still in their natural ascendant. But there is a subtler kind of materialism of which the dangers are real. It does not indeed put forth the bestial sophism, that the apex of philosophy is to be won by improved microscopes and new batteries. But then it has nothing to say about the spiritual life of man; it has no particular religion; it ignores the Soul. It fills the air with paans to science; it is never weary of vaunting the scientific methods, the scientific triumphs. But it always means physical, not moral science; intellectual, not religious conquests. It shirks the question of questions-to what human end is this knowledge-how shall man thereby order his life as a whole-where is he to find the object of his yearnings of spirit? Of the spiritual history of mankind it knows as little, and thinks as little, as of any other sort of Asiatic devilworship. At the spiritual aspirations of the men and women around us, ill at ease for want of some answer, it stares blankly, as it does at some spirit-rapping epidemic. What is that to us?-see thou to that is all that it can answer when men ask it for a religion. It is of the religion of all sensible men, the religion which all sensible men never tell. With a smile or a shrug of the shoulders it passes by into the whirring workshops of science (that is, the physical prelude of science); and it leaves the spiritual life of the Soul to the spiritualists, theological or nonsensical as the case may be, wishing them both in heaven. This is the materialism to fear.

The theologians and the vast sober mass of serious men and women who want simply to live rightly are quite right when they shun and fear a school that is so eager about cosmology and biology, whilst it leaves morality and religion to take care of themselves. And yet they know all the while that before the advancing line of positive thought they are fighting a forlorn hope; and they see their own line daily more and more demoralised by the consciousness that they have no rational plan of campaign. They know that their own account of the Soul, of the spiritual life, of Providence, of Heaven, is daily shifting, is growing more vague, more inconsistent, more various. They hurry wildly from one untenable position to another, like a routed and disorganised army. In a religious discussion years ago we once asked one of the Broad Church, a disciple of one of its eminent founders, what he understood by the third Person of the Trinity; and he said doubtfully that he fancied there was a sort of a something.' Since those days the process of disintegration and vaporisation of belief has gone on rapidly; and now very religious minds, and men who think themselves to be religious, are ready to apply this sort of a something' to all the verities in turn. They half hope that there is a sort of a something' fluttering about, or inside, their human frames, that there may turn out to be a 'something' somewhere after Death, and that there must be a sort of a somebody or (as the theology of Culture will have it) a sort of a something controlling and comprehending human life. But the more thoughtful spirits, not being professionally engaged in a doctrine, mostly limit themselves to a pious hope that there may be something in it, and that we shall know some day what it is.

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Now theologians and religious people unattached must know that this will never serve- -that this is paltering with the greatest of all things. What then is the only solution which can ultimately satisfy both the devotees of science and the believers in religion? Surely but this, to make religion scientific by placing religion under the methods of science. Let Science come to see that religion, morality, life, are within its field, or rather are the main part of its field. Let Religion come to see that it can be nothing but a prolongation of science, a rational and homogeneous result of cosmology and biology, not a matter of fantastic guessing. Then there will be no true science which does not aim at, and is not guided by, systematic religion. And there will be no religion which pretends to any other basis but positive knowledge and scientific logic. But for this science must consent to add spiritual phenomena to its curriculum, and religion. must consent to give up its vapid figments.

Positivism in dealing with the Soul discards the exploded errors of the materialists and the spiritualists alike. On the one hand, it not only admits into its studies the spiritual life of men, but it raises this life to be the essential business of all human knowledge. All

the spiritual sentiments of man, the aspirations of the conscious soul in all their purity and pathos, the vast religious experience and potentialities of the human heart seen in the history of our spiritual life as a race—this is, we say, the principal subject of science and of philosophy. No philosophy, no morality, no polity can rest on stable foundations if this be not its grand aim; if it have not a systematic creed, a rational object of worship, and a definite discipline of life. But then we treat these spiritual functions of the Soul, not as mystical enigmas, but as positive phenomena, and we satisfy them by philosophic and historic answers and not by naked figments. And we think that the teaching of history and a true synthesis of science bring us far closer to the heart of this spiritual life than do any spiritualist guesses, and do better equip us to read aright the higher secrets of the Soul: meaning always by Soul the consensus of the faculties which observation discovers in the human organism.

On the other hand, without entering into an idle dispute with the spiritualist orthodoxy, we insist on regarding this organism as a perfectly homogeneous unit, to be studied from one end of it to the other by rational scientific methods. We pretend to give no sort of cause as lying behind the manifold powers of the organism. We say the immaterial entity is something which we cannot grasp, which explains nothing, for which we cannot have a shadow of evidence. We are determined to treat man as a human organism, just as we treat a dog as a canine organism; and we know no ground for saying, and no good to be got by pretending, that man is a human organism plus an indescribable entity. We say, the human organism is a marvellous thing, sublime if you will, of subtlest faculty and sensibility; but we, at any rate, can find nothing in man which is not an organic part of this organism; we find the faculties of mind, feeling, and will, directly dependent on physical organs; and to talk to us of mind, feeling, and will continuing their functions in the absence of physical organs and visible organisms, is to use language which, to us at least, is pure nonsense.

And now to turn to the great phenomenon of material organisms which we call Death. The human organism, like every other organism, ultimately loses that unstable equilibrium of its correlated forces which we name Life, and ceases to be an organism or system of organs, adjusting its internal relations to its external conditions. Thereupon the existence of the complex independent entity to which we attribute consciousness, undoubtedly-i.e. for aught we know to the contrary-comes to an end. But the activities of this organism do not come to an end, except so far as these activities need fresh sensations and material organs. And a great part of these activities, and far the noblest part, only need fresh sensations and material organs in other similar organisms. Whilst there is an abundance of these in due relation, the activities go on ad infinitum with