Excerpt from The Round Table, Vol. 1: A Quarterly Review of the Politics of the British Empire In order to dispel the ignorance on which misgivings rest, we need information of two kinds. On the one hand we ought to know the truth of what is going on in the several portions of the Empire. On the other hand we ought to be able to find out how the Empire is faring as a whole. But how is the truth to be found? No one who has other business on hand can follow affairs on the Indian frontier, the reciprocity negotiations between Canada and America, the proposals whereby the British Constitution is to be mended or destroyed in a federal reconstruction, the Asiatic menace in Australia, the complications which might follow in Africa from a revolution in Portugal, and steer his way to a clear judgement about each separately, or of the upshot of them all. That would be a task to be entrusted to a council of the wisest men to be found. But we are practical people who dislike creating governments to rule over us unless we are quite certain that we shall be the better for them, and we have got on very well hitherto with an arrangement by which the Imperial Government has no authority over the larger part of the Empire which it may be called upon to defend. Failing, therefore, a body which can Speak for every part, we must contrive a makeshift, and the makeshift is the round table. The aim of the round table is to present a regular account of what is going on throughout the King's dominions, written with first-hand knowledge and entirely free from the bias of local political issues, and to provide a means by which the common problems which con front the Empire as a whole, can be discussed also with knowledge and without bias. For that, in the opinion of the promoters, who reside in all parts of the Empire, is what is most needed at the present day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.