State on terms arranged; railway construction and extension in any State, with the consent of that State; conciliation and arbitration in industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one State; invalid and old-age pensions; marriage; divorce and matrimonial causes, and, in relation thereto, parental rights, and the custody and guardianship of infants.

Among the remaining powers may be mentioned quarantine, currency and coinage, banking, insurance, weights and measures, bills of exchange and promissory notes, bankruptcy, copyrights, patents and trade marks, and company laws.

The Parliament may declare by law the powers, privileges and immunities of each house, and of the members and committees; and, until so declared, they are to be as in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.

I shall be thought to have enumerated legislative powers of pretty wide range. Will there be any restriction on their exercise, so long as the authority given is not exceeded? In my view little, if any. Under the instructions issued to the Governors of the various Australian Colonies in the past, there are few subjects on which a Colonial Governor is required to reserve bills for the Royal assent, instead of giving the assent himself; and, in case of such reservation, instances of withholding the Queen's assent have been rare. It is unlikely that the Governor-General of the Australian Commonwealth will be instructed to reserve any class of bills, unless, perhaps, such as may appear to be inconsistent with the treaty obligations of the British Crown, or bills of unusual importance affecting the royal prerogative, or the rights of property of British subjects not living within the Commonwealth, or prejudicing the commercial interests of other parts of the Empire; and experience renders it probable that, even in such cases, the self-governing powers of the Federal Parliament will be restricted as little as possible.

The Governor-General will be an imperial officer. He will reign without ruling; for he will be guided by the advice of his responsible ministers, except in the very limited instances in which his instructions may direct an independent course; and we may be sure that these instances will be as few as they are to-day in Canada.

The Australian Parliament, however, must act within the limits assigned by the Constitution. I mean that it will not be

able to decide for itself whether any law which it passes is constitutional or not. It is laid down that "every power of the Parliament of a Colony which has become or becomes a State shall, unless it is by this Constitution exclusively vested in the Parliament of the Commonwealth or withdrawn from the Parliament of the State, continue as at the establishment of the Commonwealth, or as at the admission or establishment of the State, as the case may be."

State laws on subjects of concurrent jurisdiction will, of course, continue in force, except to the extent of the exercise by the Federal Commonwealth of its legislative powers, subject to the powers of alteration and repeal resident in the individual State; but when a State law is inconsistent with a Federal law the latter is to prevail, and the former is to be invalid to the extent of the inconsistency.

The Constitution is to be guarded by a Federal High Court, which is to consist of a Chief Justice, and not less than two other judges, and other courts may be invested with federal jurisdiction. Judges are to be appointed and removed by the Governor-General in Council, but must not be removed, except on an address from both houses of the Federal Parliament in the same session, and on the ground of proved misbehavior or incapacity.

The original jurisdiction of the High Court embraces matters arising under any treaty, or affecting representatives of other countries; or in which the Commonwealth, or a person suing or being sued on its behalf, is a party; or between States or residents of different States; or between a State and a resident of another State; or in which a writ of mandamus or prohibition or an injunction is sought against an officer of the Commonwealth: and original jurisdiction may be conferred on the High Court in any matter arising under the Constitution, or involving its interpretation, or arising under any laws made by the Federal Parliament, or in cases of admiralty or maritime jurisdiction, or cases relating to the same subject-matter claimed under the laws of different. States. The High Court is also to have a wide appellate jurisdiction, whether as to the subjects of its own original jurisdiction, or as to appeals from any other federal court, or from any State court from which an appeal at present lies to the Privy Council. The High Court will also decide appeals, from the Interstate Commission, but on questions of law only. There is a saving of the

Queen's prerogative to grant special leave of appeal from the High Court to the Privy Council, subject to any future Federal laws limiting the matters in which such leave may be asked; and the general appeal to the Privy Council is expressly restricted, so as to exclude matters involving the interpretation of the Federal Constitution or of the constitution of a State, unless the matter involves public interests of some part of the Empire, other than the Commonwealth or any of the States.

It is clearly intended that the Federal High Court shall be a tribunal charged with most important duties, in the maintenance of the balance of the Constitution. It is well that its independence is sufficiently secured; for, in time, occasions will of necessity arise in which it must decide conflicts between laws of the Commonwealth and laws of the several States; for all Americans know that, in a constitution delegating to the National Parliament, not only certain exclusive powers, but many others which are for distinction called concurrent, the latter class of powers, touching as they do a number of questions upon which individual States have already legislated, and that with much variety, cannot possibly be exercised without occasional controversies as to the extent to which local laws are displaced by Federal laws. There are strong hopes that the Commonwealth will find within it judicial capacity equal to the occasion. It can be said with confidence that the judicial career and conduct in these colonies up to now have been such as to give good grounds for this expectation, and for the bold assertion, conveyed by the provision I have quoted, that the people who have made this Constitution are fit to be, through their judges, the final expositors of its meaning.

Adhering to the order observed in the instrument itself, it may here be said that the manner in which the Constitution deals with questions of finance and trade has been a subject of bitter controversy. In each of these colonies, the principal sources of revenue are the customs and excise, and it was clearly necessary to hand over to the central body, with the control of inter-state freetrade, the receipt of this revenue and the making of future tariffs. With six different tariffs operating not only upon external but also upon internal trade, there has, of course, grown up an apparent difference in the rates of consumption per head. It is an actual difference in the rates of consumption of dutiable articles. But here the difficulty arises, well known to American readers, of de

termining the total rate of consumption when plain data exist for ascertaining the rate as to articles imported, while there are few or no data as to articles internally produced. It will be seen that this difficulty led to many of the misapprehensions of the opponents of the bill as to its financial provisions. The chief of these provisions are as follows: As soon as the Constitution takes effect, the collection and control of all customs and excise duties will pass to the Federal Government, but the proceeds of these duties will be far more than sufficient for any probable purposes of the Commonwealth. A Federal tariff must be passed within two years from the establishment of the Constitution, and, on its passage, trade and intercourse among the States, whether by land, river or sea, are to be forever free. Until the first Federal tariff is passed, the Commonwealth is to credit to each State the revenues collected therein by the Commonwealth. It is to debit to each State, first, whatever the Commonwealth spends in that State for keeping up, as at the time of transfer, any department transferred from the State to the Commonwealth; and, secondly, it is to debit to each State its proportion per capita of all other expenditure of the Commonwealth. The resultant balance is to be paid each month to the State. But this system will also go on, with a slight change, during the five years following the passage of the first tariff. As the enactment of the tariff brings with it inter-state free-trade, it is provided that, during the five years following the enactment, customs duties chargeable on goods imported into a State, and afterwards passing into another State for consumption, shall be taken to have been collected not in the former, but in the latter, State; and the same consideration is to apply to excise duties paid on goods produced or manufacured in a State, and afterwards passing into another State for consumption. With this deviation, the crediting of revenue, the debiting of expenditure, and the payment of balances to each State will proceed, for the five-year period, just as they are to be carried on for the period preceding the making of the first tariff. When the five years shall have elapsed, the Parliament will have collected the necessary data as to the operation of inter-state free-trade, and the consequent changes in the commercial and financial conditions of the several States; and it will then be more clearly apparent in what degree the consumption, per head, of dutiable articles has approximated in different parts of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is

then charged to provide, on such basis as it deems fair, for the monthly payment to the several States of all surplus revenues of the Commonwealth.

But is the expenditure of the Commonwealth to be unrestricted? No. A clause which is to operate for ten years after the establishment of the Commonwealth, and afterwards until the Parliament makes other provision, deals with the net revenue of the Commonwealth from customs and excise, and provides that, out of this, the Commonwealth may not spend more than one-fourth, and must return the balance to the several States, subject, of course, to the financial provisions I have outlined. If, however, a certain other provision is acted upon, a deduction may be made from the balance payable to any State. This will occur if the Commonwealth takes over any part of the public debts of the States. If it does, the interest paid by the Commonwealth on such proportion of debt will be deducted from the balance payable to that State. It is wisely provided that the Commonwealth may take over from the States either the whole of their public debts, as existing at the establishment of the Constitution, or a per capita proportion. Such debts, or any part of them, may be converted, renewed or consolidated. It is the general hope that this enactment may be turned to account at a very early stage in the life of the Common; wealth, with the result that the superior credit of the Commonwealth will much reduce the interest as the process of renewal and conversion goes on.

The requirement that the Commonwealth must not retain for its own expenditure more than one-fourth of the net customs and excise revenue has been the butt of bitter attack. Passed at the instance of Sir Edward Braddon, the Premier of Tasmania, it has been vituperated in New South Wales under the name of "Braddon Blot." Its object was to afford some security against extravagance on the part of the Commonwealth, and consequently some. guarantee of a return to the States substantial enough to prevent any severe dislocation of their finances; but because the restriction of the Commonwealth to the expenditure of one-fourth makes it necessary that the remaining three-fourths should be distributed among the States, it has been asserted that the Commonwealth will be obliged to raise an enormous customs revenue, amounting in every case to four dollars as against every dollar which it may require. The fact that the Commonwealth is not bound to raise