En Australasia, Norteamérica y Sudáfrica se han establecido diecisiete colonias autónomas, dotadas de formas reducidas de la constitución británica. En el caso de Australia y de Canadá, el crecimiento del autogobierno ha sido formal y efectivamente impulsado por leyes de federación, las cuales han compensado, de hecho —especialmente en Australia—, la restricción del poder de los Estados federados con un incremento más que equivalente del poder de gobierno investido en el Gobierno federal.
Great Britain has in the main learned well the lesson of the American Revolution; she has not only permitted but favoured this growing independence of her Australian and American colonies. During the very period when she has been occupied in the conscious policy of extending her Empire over lands which she cannot colonise and must hold by force, she has been loosening her “imperial” hold over her white colonies. While 1873 removed the last bond of economic control which marked the old “plantation” policy, by repealing the Act of 1850 which had forbidden Australian colonies from imposing differential duties as between the colonies and foreign countries, and permitting them in future to tax one another’s goods, the Australian Commonwealth Act of 1900 has, by the powers accorded to its Federal Judicature, reduced to the narrowest limits yet attained the constitutional control of the Privy Council, and has by the powers enabling the Federal Government to raise a central armed force for defence obtained a new substantial basis for a possible national independence in the future. Though it is unlikely for some time to come that the federal Government which is contemplated for British South Africa will be accorded powers equivalent to those of the Australian or even the Canadian Federations, the same tendency to increased self-government has in the past steadily