Kingdom of Canada." In these he endeavours to prove that the present status of Canada both with regard to Great Britain and to the rest of the world is unsatisfactory and that an immediate declaration of independence can alone preserve our self-respect. This view he has reinforced with much detail in his "Kingdom Papers," a series of pamphlets of which the first twelve have now appeared in a bound volume. Among other arguments he endeavours to show that such a declaration is along the line of our historical development, that the argument that we are joined to great Britain by bands of tradition and of the spirit, and cannot abandon her without an ungrateful refusal to pay the price of our nurture, is valueless, because the history of the relations between Great Britain and Canada is one on which no Englishman can look without humiliation. He supports with vigour and rigour the thesis, once epigrammatically expressed by Sir Richard Cartwright, that "Canada owes nothing to Great Britain beyond a great deal of Christian forgiveness." "On some fast approaching day," says Mr. Ewart, "Canada will separate not from a mother, but from an owner who has always used her for his own selfish purposes." Or again, "If I should shut up some ostriches within a fence and protect them from their enemies, in order that I might make money, by plucking their feathers, would the ostriches owe me anything? No. And if, besides confining them, I treated them harshly, would their case call for pæans of gratitude? No. Well, that is a very fair parallel to the relations between the United Kingdom and Canada down to 1846." In proof of these assertions, we are given several quotations, including one from that well-known scientific historian, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.

Unfortunately, the lawyer is almost invariably a bad historian. His object is to make out his case, to win the verdict, to prove the criminal guilty or not guilty. He thus tends to an artificial lucidity, and in history nothing is more deceiving. He tends to see single, and in history at least it is true that the singleminded man is unstable in all his ways. Nothing in history is simple, and while the historian must indeed disen

1Kingdom Papers, No. iii, p. 90.

2K. P., No. xii, p. 44.

tangle the threads, he must always be careful to remember that the threads are not one but many.

Moreover, the lawyer is a man of case and precedent. He tends to prove his point by heaping up examples, leaving to his opponent those that do not suit. In dealing with history such a man tends to think that he has proved everything by an appropriate quotation, and as Goldwin Smith very truly said, "Nothing can stand against a really resolute quoter."

Even if I admitted the verdict on the old Colonial System of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Ewart, I should not necessarily accept either of their singularly different conclusions. Admitting that Canadians may be compared to ostriches, birds whose chief characteristics are their stupidity, voracity, and spasmodic ferocity, I have it on unimpeachable South African authority that under "protection" a much larger proportion of the birds grow to maturity and live to a comfortable old age, than when they were exposed to all the dangers from the wild beasts of the Veldt and the Karoo. So in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Algiers was still a menace, when the United States was bulging out on every side, it was no small boon to infant colonies that they grew up secure under the care of the most efficient sea-policeman in the world. He may not indeed have acted pour le bon motif, but the boon conferred is undoubted.

But the view of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Ewart is really unjust to the Old Colonial System, as artificially simple as it would be to say that the colonies were founded from motives of the purest altruism. If I wished to heap up quotations against Mr. Ewart I would quote the noble reply of Sir Robert Walpole, to the suggestion in 1739 of a Stamp Act: "I have old England against me, and do you think I will have New England against me too?" I would recall to him, how Pitt, surely a typical Englishman, used of the colonies Othello's words of Desdemona: "There where I had garnered up my heart." However imperfectly it worked out in practice, the ideal of the old Colonial System was a self-contained Empire, in which Mother Country and Colonies combined for the joint profit of both, according to the effectual working in measure of every part. If the colonies were in some ways restricted, they were in other ways encouraged. If the Mother Country was in some ways encouraged, she was in other ways restrict

ed. If certain colonial commodities were enumerated and so restricted to the British market, they were ensured that market by a system of heavy preferential duties. Under this system Canadian Canadian wheat-growing and lumbering were built up at great cost to the British consumer. It would be absurd for me to say that this was done out of pure unselfishness. Considerations came in of the balance of trade, and of the security of supply in time of war, but it is equally absurd for Mr. Ewart to suppose that every time an Englishman crossed the sea he at once became to the Mother Country an outcast and an alien.

About 1840, says Mr. Ewart, Great Britain found out that the colonies did not pay, and with the triumph of Free Trade "the facts are undeniable, that British Imperialism disappeared when the profit of it disappeared." As a result, says Mr. Ewart, from that time till the rise of the present German scare, the history of British diplomacy is the record of a series of undignified surrenders of Canadian interests to the United States. Mr. Ewart, like a good many Canadians, rather hugs the idea that he is despised by the Mother Country. "I know that until very recently the United Kingdom had no love for us. I know that Canada was treated as a dependency as long as she was of commercial value, that she was told to "break the bonds and go" when her commercial value ended, and that only since she has appeared to be able to supply military assistance has effusive affection been lavished upon her. And I know too well the patronizing disdain with which colonists were regarded till a few years ago." Mr. Ewart is really overtouchy. Doubtless there is a touch of undue complacency in the attitude of the average British matron to the colonial, but it is certainly neither more offensive nor more undeserved than the touch of bumptiousness in the behaviour of the average Canadian westerner to the Englishman. We really cannot afford to found our international policy upon such trifles. Yet Mr. Ewart, after telling us of the high tone in which in 1861 Great Britain demanded the release of Mason and Slidell, assures us that we may be very certain that had they been on board a Canadian ship, the tone of Great Britain would have been lower. This admits of the somewhat easy disproof that

*K. P., iii, p. 31.

in the most similar case during the period in question, Great Britain asserted the rights of Canada with at least equal vigour. In 1838, some rebel Canadians, aided by some Buffalo longshoremen, set up a provisional government on Navy Island, and declared war on Canada. They were provisioned by an American steamer. One night some boat loads of Canadians rowed across, cut her out as she lay moored to an American wharf, under the guns of an American fort, killed one or more of her American crew, set her on fire, and sent her blazing over Niagara Falls. Let Kingstonians try to imagine a somewhat similar situation. Suppose that some rebel Americans had fortified Grindstone Island and were being provisioned at good profitable rates by Kingston merchants. In the dead of night, as a Kingston steamer lies moored at a Kingston wharf, some Americans row across from Cape Vincent, kill one or two of her Kingston crew, cut her out, and send her blazing down the St. Lawrence. What would be our feelings?

A year or two after this Canadian outrage upon an American vessel, one of its supposed perpetrators named McLeod visited the United States and was promptly arrested on the charge of arson and murder. Of course he was only a Canadian and Great Britain therefore did nothing about it,especially as it was at a time when Imperialism was beginning to be recognized as a thing of little profit. On the contrary, the British minister at Washington wrote to the American Government formally demanding his immediate release, entirely approving of his action in setting fire to the Caroline, "for the reason that the transaction was one of a public character, planned and executed by persons duly authorized by the Colonial Government, to take such measures as might be necessary for protecting the property and lives of her Majesty's subjects. As doing therefore an act of public duty, they cannot be held responsible to the laws and tribunals of any foreign country.” "If the Yankees really hanged him it would be a case of war," wrote Lord Sydenham, the British Governor of Canada, to Lord John Russell, the British Colonial Secretary. So hot was the British attitude, that the Court of the State of New York was fain to pronounce a highly diplomatic verdict of acquittal. Not content with this the British Government granted McLeod in recompense for his wrongs a yearly pension of £200.

It is Mr. Ewart's misfortune, not his fault, that he was born in Ontario and spent his prime in Manitoba. Living so far inland, he tends to forget that Canada exists not in a vacuum but in a world. Had he been born in Nova Scotia or

New Brunswick; had he

spent his youth among

"the black wharves and the slips

And the sea-tides tossing free,

And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips

And the beauty and mystery of the ships,

And the magic of the sea,"

he would realize that international questions are international, that there is no such thing as dealing with them in independent action, and that at every turn we are bound in a subtle network of international relations from which we may as easily escape as an Ethiopian from his skin.

What is the outstanding fact in the history of British North America, during the past 130 years? In 1783 the United States set off on their great career, which in sixty years flung material civilization from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. At that time two European powers had possessions on a large scale on the North American continent, Spain and Great Britain. Later on, France came in for a time under Napoleon, and Russia made extensive acquisitions on the Pacific slope. Where is Spanish North America to-day? In part the independent Republic of Mexico; in part the territory of the United States, acquired partly by purchase, partly by conquest. Where is French North America? Save for St. Pierre and Miquelon, it was long ago sold to the United States. Where is Russia North America? Sold to the United States. Now if British diplomatic relations with the United States have been one long series of surrenders, if the United States had only to bluff for Great Britain to throw down her cards, how is it that British North America still exists? If the U.S.A. was willing to give $5,500,000 for Florida, $7,200,000 for Alaska, and $15,000,000 for Louisiana, how much would she have given for British North America? Granting that Great Britain has not been all wise or all powerful, surely we owe her a little gratitude for preserving for us so many million square miles. She has at least kept, and eventually handed over to us, the great heritage which other European powers sold for a mess of pottage. Whatever her errors in detail, she at least rises