[492 IMPERIAL UNITY [PART VIII 
receive full recognition in this manner. But at the time 
Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman was unwilling to accept the 
proposal and of necessity the project dropped. It had not 
been revived by any other Dominion, and the resolution as 
to the constitution of the Colonial Office proposed by Sir 
Joseph Ward was expressly opposed to the separation of the 
office at all, for it contemplated merely that the Secretary 
of State should receive a new title, namely the Secretary of 
State for Imperial Affairs, and that two permanent Under- 
Secretaries of State should be created. 
Of the other resolutions the most important were those 
(Nos. 3 and 4) which suggested that if any naval contribution 
was given by a Dominion to the Imperial Government it 
should be permitted to deduct from the amount of that 
contribution any sums which it might expend in connexion 
with naval defence or the creation of naval bases, and that 
in place of the existing preferences granted by the Dominions, 
there should be substituted a system of contribution to 
Imperial naval and local defence. Naturally in this form 
the last resolution was hardly likely to be acceptable to the 
Imperial Government. Canada and Australia had definitely 
recognized responsibility in part at least for their own naval 
defence, and were creating navies with that end in view, 
while New Zealand had preferred to make a direct contribu- 
tion towards the cost of the navy. But in either case there 
had been no disposition to suggest that the existing pre- 
ferences should be modified or reduced, and the adoption of 
the proposal would have been purely disadvantageous to the 
Imperial Government. 
The whole proposal was no doubt to be explained by the 
domestic circumstances of the Union. A direct payment was 
made by the Cape and Natal towards the cost of the navy, 
and the Union Government presumably wished to charge 
against that sum the amounts which it expended in local 
naval defence on land, and in this form the proposal was 
obviously reasonable, but to sacrifice for any naval contribu- 
tion the benefits of the British preference would have been 
most unfortunate, and the Union Government later with-