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On the other hand, events march and natural forces show their power. The action of the great forces often is long suspended by that of secondary forces; but in the end the great forces prevail. It was so in the cases of Italy and Germany. Statesmen renowned for sagacity said, after the failures in each case, that union would never come. It came, with the hour of destiny and with the man. So to all appearances it will be in the case of this northern Continent of America.

To know what Canada really is, the inquirer must use not the political but the physical map. The political map presents her as an unbroken expanse embracing half of the North American Continent, including the North Pole; colored red in the Jubilee stamp, and more than equalling in extent all the rest of the British Empire. In reality the Dominion consists of four different sections of territory forming a broken line across the Continent and separated from each other by wide spaces or great barriers of nature, while each of them is closely connected in every way with the country to the south. The railway which links them has to carry wide unpaying tracts as well as the liabilities of a subarctic climate. Apart from the present movement into the newly opened wheat fields of the North-West, there is little interchange of population. There would hardly be any commercial interchange were it not for the tariff. Ontario draws her coal from Pennsylvania, while Nova Scotia sends her coal to New England. An attempt by means of a protective tariff to force Ontario to buy her coal of Nova Scotia failed. It took a thirty

five per cent. tariff in the early days of the North-West to force the poor settler in Manitoba to buy his reaping machine at a distant factory in Ontario when the works of Minneapolis were at hand. He sometimes bought at Minneapolis in spite of the duty. British Columbia, the Canadian Province on the Pacific, is clasped between the adjacent State of the American Union and the American territory of Alaska.

There is already to a great extent practical fusion of the people of Canada with people of the United States. There are 1,200,000 native Canadians on the south of the line. A Canadian boy thinks no more of going to New York or Chicago for a start in life than a Scotch or Yorkshire boy thinks of going to London, and the Canadian in the American market finds himself at a premium. Of French Canadians there are believed to be 150,000 in Massachusetts alone. There is a counter current of Americans into the North-West. Churches interchange ministers. Associations and fraternities of all kinds span, some totally ignore, the Line. The sporting worlds of the two countries are one. The summer resorts are in common. Canadians read the American magazines. American newspapers have a considerable circulation in Canada. American currency circulates everywhere but in Government offices. New York is the Canadian Stock Exchange. American investments in Canada are rapidly increasing. Intermarriage is frequent; and as Canada, in deference to the Catholics, is without a divorce court, Canadians resort to the divorce courts of the United States. The writer attended the other day a great farmers' picnic, at which met the sections of a clan settled, one on the Canadian, the other on the American side of the Line. In fact, nothing separates the two portions of the Eng

lish speaking people on this Continent but the political and fiscal lines. The spirit and largely the form of the political institutions is the same.

The relation of a dependency to the Imperial country can hardly fail to cause friction when the dependencies are aspiring to be nations. Again and again the pen of the present writer has been taken up to defend the British Government against the charge of betraying the interest of the Colonies in disputes with the United States and to show that British diplomacy has done all that was in its power, while it would have been absolutely out of the question to ask the people of England to go to war about a boundary question in North America. Considerable peril was faced in the cases of Maine and Oregon. Now Newfoundland is claiming diplomatic Home Rule to be enjoyed and enforced at the risk of Great Britain. There is a difficulty, which is daily showing itself, in combining with the character of a dependency that of a nation.

tario under a leader afterwards knighted passed a vote of censure on Lord Salisbury for renewing the Crimes Act. The other day the Prime Minister of the Dominion, a member of the Imperial Privy Council, welcomed an Irish Nationalist of distinction fresh from the Fenian platform of New York, attended his meeting, moved a vote of thanks to him and subscribed to his fund. It is true these demonstrations have been confined to the politicians who alone needed the Irish vote. There has been nothing of the kind among people at large, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier must have evolved out of his own consciousness the assurance that "all true Canadians were in favor of Home Rule."

That there is such a thing as antiAmerican feeling in Canada is true. It resides chiefly in certain circles, especially those of the descendants of U. E. Loyalists or of the Tories of the Family Compact. Perhaps a certain sense of social superiority also is flattered by looking down upon the Yankee. We have had some efforts of late to stimulate this sentiment, but they were very limited in their range and very meagre in their fruits. Distinct from anti-Americanism, though akin to it and connected with Imperialism, is the worship of the flag, which in the United States has reached an extravagant height and has its evangelists in Canada. It cannot be supposed that sentiments or fancies of this

On the other hand, Canada is upbraided by Englishmen because she fails to contribute to British armaments. If Canada contributes to Imperial armaments, will the Empire undertake the defence of Canada's open frontier of four thousand miles, and of her two sea frontiers, one of them facing the Japanese Navy, the other all the navies of Europe? To settle an angry question, let any high military authority give a candid opin-kind will in the end prevail over the ion as to the practicability of a combination of England with Canada for the purposes of military defence.

That British sentiment is not all powerful with Canadian politicians seems to be shown by their votes of sympathy with the Irish movement for Home Rule, the real tendency of which they could not fail to know. The first of those votes drew on them an Imperial rebuke. The Legislature of On

manifest interests of the great body of the people on both sides of the line.

Of Imperial Federation it is hardly necessary to speak. It has been preached for a generation without presenting a plan. We have only been exhorted to "think Imperially" and propagate the sentiment. What is the government of the Imperial Federation to be? How is it to be elected or appointed? What are to be its

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can be done without exciting Colonial jealousy. It will be at all events a step backwards towards dependence, not forwards towards Imperial Federation, which is to be a union of kindred States on an equal footing.

You in England made much of the contingent. You paid for it yourselves, and if the facts could be known you would very likely find that military adventure was the predominant motive, and that of those who enlisted not a few were unsettled spirits such as in Colonies are sure to abound. Sir John Macdonald stated as an ascertained fact that there had been 40,000 Canadian enlistments in the American Army in the course of the War of Secession.

not drawn by Great Britain into a European war.

You are by this time disillusioned on the subject of the preferential tarifi. You see that in matters of business the Canadian, though he loves you well, like other thrifty people in business obeys his head rather than his heart. You see that such Chamberlainism as existed in Canada was general sympathy with Protectionism and Imperialism, not by any means a disposition to remit or lower duties on British goods. On your part, you have been long solicited in vain to remove the embargo on Canadian cattle.

You know on the other hand what Canada, like the Colonies and dependencies generally, has cost you publicly in her defence, setting aside thè private loss in the construction of Canada's early railways. But the greatest cost of all is the loss of your insular security. It is strange to see how the idea that you enjoy insular security seems still to haunt the British mind, when, in fact, owing to your scattered possessions, you are the most vulnerable of all nations. Here in Canada alone you have a military frontier open to attack, probably the longest military frontier in the world.

In building on Canadian sentiment it should be borne in mind that Canada has been and now more than ever is undergoing a loosening of the tie of race by foreign immigration. If we exclude the Catholic Irish, who not British in sentiment, barely half the population is now British.

are taken a serious step toYou have wards the dissolution of political connection in withdrawing as a military power from this continent. The Canadian Minister of Militia avows, in effect, that Canada is protected by the immunities of her own continent; in other words, by the Monroe Doctrine, which is upheld by the power of the United States. Unquestionably the United States would repel invasion of this continent, provided Canada were

Political parting from the Mother Country will not be the parting of the heart. On the contrary, the bond of the heart, which, as things are, is in some danger, will be assured by it. At present we have seen that there is a good deal of friction between the the Mother Colony; Country and the Mother Country calling on

the Colony for military and naval aid

which the Colony cannot give; the Colony complaining that the Mother Country fails to assert its interest in dealings with foreign Governments, gradually intrenching on the Imperial prerogative, and seeking to combine the immunities of a dependency with the character and privileges of a nation. The hawser is being fretted all the time.

The feeling of British Canadians towards the Mother Country being what it is, the union of Canada with the United States, should it ever come, in place of a precarious, uneasy, and barren supremacy, with an impracticable duty of military defence, would give England a strong moral influence in the Councils of the Western Continent.

There was not a little to be said in favor of a two-fold trial of democracy on this continent. A Canadian republic permanently independent of the United States might have been possible so long as anything like the unity of territorial basis apparently indispensable to the existence of national unity remained. But when the Dominion was stretched in widely-separated sections across the whole continent, the semblance of territorial unity ceased to exist.

From the Mother Country the Colonies have derived in many ways an inestimable heritage. In one way they have derived a heritage not so clearly blessed. It is that of the party system of Government prolonged when the principle of division is extinct.

While the consequences of the Revolution of 1837 were being worked out; while the Church was being disestablished, Universities were being rid of tests, and those who had suffered by the rebellion were being compensated for their losses, there was still the basis of principle for party. Thenceforward party ceased to have a basis of principle and became faction. John,

afterwards Sir John, Macdonald, a young man with remarkable address in managing his kind, and little encumbered with fixed opinions, arose to perform for Canadian Toryism an operation something of the same sort as that which Peel had performed for Toryism in England, by disencumbering it of Eldonism and adapting it to a new era. For thirty years this man practically ruled Canada, corrupting others, but, so far as ever was known, free from corruption himself, and so long as he was allowed to govern freely, liking to govern well. His rival was George Brown, at once leader of the other party and master of The Globe, then the dominant journal, whose personal use of his journal showed the evils of that conjunction. Durham had assumed that the French Province yoked with the English Province, would succumb to its stronger mate, and that the British element would completely prevail. The contrary was the result. The French Province, perhaps from very consciousness of its weakness, preserved its solidity and became the pivot of all the cabal and intrigue which followed, and, at last issuing in a deadlock, forced the leaders of the factions to seek an escape in Confederation. There has been much dispute about the man to whose memory the credit of Confederation is due. It is due to the memory of deadlock.

The Constitution of the Dominion is modelled on the British, formally monarchical, really parliamentary. The Governor-General is constitutional, and scarcely has he or any one of his constitutional vice-gerents, the LieutenantGovernors, ever been called upon to do a political act which might not have been done by a stamp. His part is social headship. It was played very quietly by Lord Lisgar, a shrewd old man of the world; more ostentatiously by his successors, especially by Duf

ferin, by whom the character of the office was greatly changed. Ottawa is now a miniature court, with social effects, close observers say, such as miniature courts are apt to produce. The craving for titles is great, forming no inconsiderable link in the chain which binds Ottawa to Windsor. From imperfect knowledge of Canada the selection of subjects for knighthood is sometimes strange. Democracy need not, nor is it desirable that it should, any more than monarchy, go bare, or discard such vestments of state as are really expressive, or such titles as, unlike obsolete titles of feudal chivalry, bespeak public respect and trust. But knighthood surely has had its day.

The House of Commons is elected with almost manhood suffrage, the Senate is nominated by the Prime Minister. Like the British Premier and unlike the American President, the Canadian Premier sits with his colleagues in Parliament and is dependent for his tenure on its vote. The Houses are divided down the middle for the working of the party system, which is thus distinctly recognized. Nominations to the Senate are claimed by superannuated politicians of the party and, as nobody seems to doubt, by large subscribers to the party fund. In the British House of Lords some room has been found for representatives of great professions and for personal distinction. Not so in the Canadian Senate. By the party now in power when it was out of power the Senate was denounced in unmeasured terms, as a useless and costly burden on the State, but power having changed hands, and death vacancies in the Senate having reversed the balance there, the voice of reform is hushed and the sessional salaries of Senators are increased.

Parliament is bilingual, English and French; but this is a formal compliment to the French and little more.

In its federal element, the Provinces, the Canadian Constitution departs from the British model and approaches that of the United States, making the whole national with a federal strucure. But the Canadian Province, while it has special subjects of legislation assigned to it by the North America Act, has no State right. In deciding legal questions between the Dominion and any one of the Provinces the part of the judicial

committee of the United States is played by the British committee of Privy Council.

The sovereign power is still in the Parliament of Great Britain, which could abrogate or amend in any way it pleased the Canadian Constitution. The judicial appeal in the last resort, the supreme military command, and the fountain of honor, are still in the Imperial country. When therefore Canadians speak of their country as a nation, which they habitually do, they anticipate her coming emancipation.

Ontario and Quebec came into Confederation willingly; at least their political leaders did. New Brunswick hesitated. Nova Scotia was dragged in by the hair of her head, a legislature elected to oppose being by some mysterious influence suddenly induced to consent. Prince Edward Island came in afterwards. To bring in British Columbia, far away on the Pacific, the Pacific Railway was built. The great North-West now has been taken in. The framers of the Constitution seem hardly to have given a thought to the question whether it was possible to make of territories so far separated from each other, and each of them so strongly drawn in another direction, the seat of a united nation. One speaker, when the example of the bundle of staves increasing their strength by union was cited, had the wit to retort that the example hardly applied to seven fishing-rods tied together by the ends. A parallel in

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