73 
colonies, settlements and other extraneous parts, but 
as a grand marine dominion, consisting of our pos- 
sessions in the Atlantic and in America, united into 
a one empire, into a one centre where the seat of 
government is.” * The Preface to the second part of 
his work was dated November 1774, and in this 
volume he wrote that ¢ A British union of all the 
British Dominions, by admitting the American colonies 
into Parliament, has been now for near twenty years 
repeatedly recommended to this country by those who 
knew the circumstances of both countries as they stood 
related to and connected with each other’? ‘I very 
seriously recommended such a British union,” he wrote 
on an earlier page, as the only sure means which 
would prevent the certain alternative of an American 
union distinct from and independent of Great 
Britain.’ Edmund Burke ridiculed any plan which 
would have involved holding elections through the 
length and breadth of great spaces on the other side 
of the Atlantic and transporting the elected members 
across the ocean to sit in a House of Commons in 
London as wholly impracticable, if only on account of 
the time which must have been spent in the process ; 
and impracticable it must surely have proved, hadit 
been put to the test, in the eighteenth century. Nor in 
the later generations of the Empire, though difficulties 
of distance have been and are being largely removed, 
has colonial representation in the House of Commons 
of the Mother Country ever commended itself, except 
1688-1783 
Ls The Administration of the British Colonies, Part 1 (fifth edition, 
(774), p- 10. 
2 Juid., Part II (1774), p. 82. 
8 Ibid., p. 8.