1496 IMPERIAL UNITY [PART VIII 
The proposals which the Australian Government desired 
to lay before the Imperial Conference were brought before 
the Commonwealth Parliament on November 25, in connexion 
with the Supplementary Estimates! The list of subjects 
was laid before the House by Mr. Hughes in a short speech 
in which he coupled the question with that of the invitation 
which had been sent by a committee of members of both 
Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom to members of 
Parliament of the Commonwealth to be present as their guests 
during the period of His Majesty’s Coronation. Mr. Deakin 2 
strongly approved the invitation to members of Parliament 
bo be present at the Coronation, and he dwelt at some length 
on the advantages of the system of Imperial Conferences. 
Up to 1887 the Dominions ranked only as dependencies, and 
practically communicated only by dispatches. There was no 
recognition of the fact that British people whose homes were 
oversea were entitled to Imperial citizenship. The meeting 
of 1907, if less fruitful than it might have been in actual 
achievement, marked a distinction. Never before was such 
weight attached to such a gathering ; never before were so 
many great questions exhaustively considered ; never before 
was so strong an impetus given to the further development 
of this great institution. He regretted very much that the 
proposal put forward by the Government had not been 
debated, in order that the ministers might have spoken in 
Conference with the support of Parliament. He suggested 
that patents and trade marks and trade statistics should be 
added to the agenda, and he asked that the establishment 
of a single Imperial Court of final appeal should be accepted. 
If the Court of Appeal that was given to Australia, however 
eminent it might be—and he admitted that it had been 
immensely improved during the last few years—was not 
good enough for the citizens of the British Isles, it was not 
good enough for Australia, and he hoped that the question 
would be again urged at the forthcoming Conference. All 
Australian appeals should go to the House of Lords, which 
t Parliamentary Debates, 1910, pp. 6852-71, 
* Ibid., pp. 6854 seq.