FINAL CHAPTER 257 



maturity to ripen its wisdom. The great fight of the next 

 century will be to evolve such restrictions and limits to the 

 extra liberties that modern legislation is granting to the 

 masses of its people, who have not yet evolved the power to 

 reason, and who consequently are in danger of using their in- 

 creased liberties of action and thought, to jeopardise the 

 freedom of their neighbour by arbitration courts and prefer- 

 ence to union combines. Hence all trade and labour disputes 

 should be earmarked as strictly state or local matters of legis- 

 lation, and one of the duties of, and also one of the most 

 important ones in the future of the Council of Federated 

 nations, will be the limitations of these rights of central 

 governments. The power of the Popes of old to decide inter- 

 national disputes is gone, never to return. But we must 

 evolve some federated international council to settle interna- 

 tional disputes in its place. The difference will have to be ; 

 the Papal power was based on superstition and fanaticism ; 

 the new power must be based on the world's united and most 

 tried wisdom, judgment and political experience. 



These errors will not have been made in vain, for, 

 as I have already mentioned, it is only by going wrong at 

 the start we can learn the wisdom to go right at the finish, 

 and these errors if committed in a small and poorly populated 

 country will not produce the evils they would in a larger and 

 more densely populated community. Being a young 

 nation, Australia will be better able to remove the effect of 

 the errors she makes and her follies will be an object lesson 

 to older and wiser nations to help them in evolving a more 

 perfect federation of nations in the future, to which the pos- 

 session of too extensive powers would spell ruin, and Aus- 

 tralia's faults will be fresh in the memory of mankind, which 

 has a great aversion to be taught by the experience of past 

 history. So they will help in this manner to show future 

 statesmen during the coming century where these limitations 

 require to be made, so as to restrict the extra liberty given 

 to the community by their increased freedom of thought and 

 literary knowledge. They even help older nations to see 

 how they will have to restrict their limitations, so as to pre- 

 vent overlapping and interference with the individual liberty 

 of each nation in forming a federation of nations. The 

 American federation is also likely to help in this direction, 



