to say that the present system will be perpetual; certainly not the advocates of imperial confederation, who warn us that unless England by a total change of system draws her colonies nearer to her, they will soon drift further away.

Apart from lingering sentiment, it seems not easy to give reasons, so far as Canada is concerned, for struggling to prolong the present system. The motives for acquiring and holding dependencies in former days were substantial if they were not good. Spain drew tribute directly from her dependencies. England thought she drew it indirectly through her commercial system. It was also felt that the military resources of the colonies were at the command of the mother country. When the commercial system was relinquished, and when self-government transferred to the colonies the control of their own resources, the financial and military motives ceased to exist. But the conservative imagination supplied their place with the notion of political tutelage, feigning though, as we have seen, against all the evidence of history-that the colony, during the early stages of its existence, needed the political guidance of the mother country in order to fit it to become a nation. Such was the language of colonial statesmen generally till the present Conservative reaction again brought into fashion something like the old notion of aggrandisement, though for tribute and military contingents, the solid objects of the old policy, is now substituted "prestige." That the political connection between England and Canada is a source of military security to either, nobody, we apprehend, maintains. The only vulnerable point which England presents to the United States is the defenceless frontier of Canada; the only danger to which Canada is exposed is that of being involved in a quarrel between the aristocracy of England and the democracy of the United States. Defenceless, it is believed, the frontier of Upper Canada has been officially pronounced to be, and the chances of a desperate resistance to the invader in the French province can scarcely be rated very high. It is said that the British fleet would bombard New York. If Canada were in the hands of the enemy, the bombardment of New York would hardly

alleviate her condition. But the bombardment of New York might not be an easy matter. The force of floating coast defences seems now to be growing superior to that of ocean-going navies. Besides, America would choose the moment when England was at war with some other nava! power. Soldiers and sailors, and of the best quality, England might no doubt find in Canada; but she would have to pay for them more than she pays for soldiers and sailors recruited at home. Whether morality is embodied in Bismarck or not, modern policy is; and Bismarck seems not to covet distant dependencies; he prefers solid and concentrated power.

"Commerce follows the flag," is a saying which it seems can still be repeated by a statesman; but, like the notion that dependencies are a source of military strength, it is a mere survival from a departed system. Commerce followed the flag when the flag was that of a power which enforced exclusive trading. But exclusive trading has given way, as an imperial principle, to free trade, and the colonies, in the exercise of their fiscal power of self-government, have dissolved the commercial unity of the empire. They frame their independent tariffs, laying, in some cases, heavy duties on English goods. It will hardly be contended that, apart from commercial legislation, colonial purchasers inquire whether goods were produced under the British flag. "The best customer," says Sir George Lewis, "which a nation. can have is a thriving and industrious community, whether it be dependent or independent. The trade between England and the United States is probably far more profitable to the mother country than it would have been if they had remained in a state of dependence upon her." As to Canada, what she needs, and needs most urgently, is free access to the market of her own continent, from which, as a dependency of England, she is excluded by the customs line. With free access to the market of her own continent, she might become a great manufacturing country; but manufactures are now highly specialised, and to produce with advantage you must produce on a large scale. Nor is the evil confined to manufactures; the farm products of Canada are depreciated by ex

clusion from their natural market, and the lumber trade, which is her great industry, will be in serious jeopardy, since, by the fall of wages in the States, the production of lumber there has been rendered nearly as cheap as it is in Canada, while Canadian lumber is subject to a heavy duty. The projects for opening markets in Australia merely serve to show how severely Canada feels the want of a market close at hand. Cut off any belt of territory commercially from the continent to which it belongs, industry will be stunted, the inflow of capital will be checked, and impoverishment will follow isolation. The Canadians wil find this out in time, and the discovery will be the first step towards a change of system.

It is true that Canada has drawn a good deal of British capital into works little remunerative to the investors, though, perhaps, not more than the United States and other countries with which there was no political connection. But, if we consider credit as well as cash, the gain must be pronounced doubtful, and it is balanced by such a work as the Intercolonial Railway, into which Canada has been led by imperial influence, and which, after costing more than four millions sterling, will, as some leading Canadian men of business think, hardly "pay for the grease upon the wheels." The Pacific Railway, and the indemnity which Canada is forced to pay to British Columbia for the non-performance of an impracticable treaty, are too likely, in the opinion of many, to furnish another illustration of the expensiveness of the imperial connection.

That emigration is favorably influenced by political dependency is another lingering belief which seems now to have no foundation in fact, though it had in the days when emigration was a government affair. The stream of emigration, in ordinary times, sets, as has often been proved, not towards Canada, but towards the United States; and of the emigrants who land in Canada a large proportion afterwards pass the line, while there is a constant exodus of French Canadians from their own poor and overpeopled country (overpeopled so long as it is merely agricultural) to the thriving industries and high wages of the States. Emigrants, whose object is to improve their material condition, are probably

little influenced by political considerations; they go to the country which offers the best openings and the highest wages; but English peasants and artisans would be likely, if anything, to prefer the social elevation promised them in the land of equality to anything like a repetition of the social subjection in which they have lived at home, while by the Irishman escape from British rule is deemed escape from oppression.

06

Whether the tutelage of the mother country has ever been useful to a colony even in its infancy, except where there was actual need of military protection, is a question to which the language of the adherents of the colonial system themselves, when reviewing the history of colonial government, seems to suggest a negative reply. "Hitherto," says Mr. Roebuck, those of our possessions termed colonies have not been governed according to any settled rule or plan. Caprice and chance have decided generally everything connected with them; and if success has in any case attended the attempts of the English people to establish colonies, that success has been obtained in spite of the mischievous intermeddling of the English_government, not in consequence of its wise and provident assistance." Such is the refrain of almost all the works on the colonies whether they treat of the general administration or of some special question, such as that of the Crown lands, which appears to have been solved by Downing Street in various ways, but always wrong. Not by government, but by fugitives from the tyranny of government, the great American colony was founded; unaided and unregulated it grew, and laid the deep foundations of society in the New World. With tutelage came blundering, jobbery, mischief of all kinds, and at last a violent rupture, which, injurious as it was to the mother country, inflicted a still greater injury on the colony by launching it on the career of democracy with a violent revolutionary bias, whereas it needed a bias in favor of respect for authority. The presence of the British ambassador at the Centenary was not only the ratification of the revolt, but the condemnation of the colonial system. After the American Revolution, the next step of the British government was to divert the stream of English emigration

from America-where there was abundant room for it, and whither, the pioneer work having then been done, it would have been most profitably directed-to Australia, where the pioneer work had to be done over again, measures being at the same time taken to taint the new society with convict blood. To what good this scattering of English emigration has led, beyond the poetic conception of a boundless empire, it would seem difficult to say; and Canada, before she expresses conventional joy at the annexation of Fiji, should ask herself whether a new colony is anything more to her than a new competitor for the labor which is her prime need. In Canada herself, tutelage, while it was really exercised, led to every sort of evil. Government was jobbed by an oligarchy called the Family Compact, which Downing Street supported, not from bad motives, but from sheer ignorance of facts, till the misrule ended in the insurrection of 1837. Things have gone smoothly only since real tutelage has departed, and left nothing but an image of royalty which reigns with gracious speeches and hospitality, but does not govern. There has been no want of good intentions on the part of English statesmen, nor would it be reasonable to suppose that there has been any special want of wisdom; probably no other statesmen would have done so well; but the task imposed on them was hopeless. One tree might as well be set to regulate the growth of another tree, as one nation to regulate the growth of another nation; and in this case the two trees are of different sorts and planted under different skies.

We can imagine the single mind of a despot moulding the political character of a colony, if not well, at least with adequate knowledge, with intelligence, and upon a definite plan. But England is not a single mind. England is the vast and motley mass of voters, including, since the Conservative Reform Bill, the most uneducated populace of the towns -people who, in politics, do not know their right hand from their left, who cannot tell the name of the leader of their own party, who vote for blue or yellow, and are led by senseless local cries, by bribery, or by beer. These are the political tutors of Canada, a country in which both wealth and education are more

diffused than they are here. How much does the average Englishman, or even the educated Englishman, know about Canadian politics? As much as Canadians know about the politics of Tasmania or the Cape. In Phineas Finn the hero of the tale, being under-secretary for the colonies, goes on a message to Marylebone "to find what the people there think about the Canadas." His report is, "Not one man in a thousand cares whether the Canadians prosper or fail to prosper. They care that Canada should not go to the States, because, though they don't love the Canadians, they do hate the Americans. That's about the feeling in Marylebone, and it's astonishing how like the Maryleboners are to the rest of the world." It will hardly be said that this is an unfair picture of a Londoner's normal frame of mind with regard to Canadian questions, or that Dorsetshire and Tipperary are better informed than London. When did a Canadian question influence an English election? How often is Canada mentioned in a election address? Canadian journals are never tired of exposing what they deem the scandalous ignorance of the leading journals of England on Canadian subjects, but they fail to draw the obvious moral. If the Times blunders, are the leaders of English opinion generally, and their constituents, likely to be better instructed and to decide aright? Burke, writing of the American Revolution, said that he could trace all the mischief" to the single source of not having had steadily before our eyes a general, comprehensive, and well-proportioned view of the whole of our dominions, and a just sense of their true bearings and relations." To say nothing of the ordinary holders of political power, in how many English statesmen, occupied as English statesmen are with home questions and party struggles, would Burke have found this comprehensive view, or the knowledge necessary for the formation of it? The Colonial Secretary himself is as often as not a man personally unacquainted with the colonies, not called to his post by special aptitude, but placed in it by party convenience. He must often depend for his information on such colonists as may find special access to Downing Street, or on the reports of governors, who, being images of royalty, are apt like

royalty to be screened from truth. A peer he may be, but his peerage will not make him a Providence. The annexation of Manitoba and of British Columbia to Canada-with which the latter, at all events, has no geographical connection-is by some thought to have been a disastrous, by all allowed to have been a most critical, step: it was taken under the auspices of the late Lord Lytton, a brilliant and prolific novelist, brought into the government to make set speeches. If any one supposes that the retention in Canada of the forms of monarchy excludes or mitigates any of the political evils, or even the coarseness to which democracy is liable in its crude condition, a year's residence in the country, a month's perusal of the party newspapers, or an hour's conversation with any Canadian man of business who has watched politics without taking part in them, will probably settle his opinion on that subject. That monarchical forms are no safeguard against corruption is a fact of which, unhappily, the colony has of late years had decisive proof. If the inquirer wishes to enlarge the basis of his induction, let him go through a file of Australian journals; he will there find a picture of public life, public character, and senatorial manners decidedly below the level of the better States of the Union. Canada has escaped the elective judiciary, but so has Massachusetts; and both that and the removable civil service were the work not of real Republicans, but of the Democratic party, that is, of the slaveowning oligarchy of the South using as its instruments the Northern mob. Her exemption from the civil war and its fiscal consequences Canada owes merely to her separation from the States; it would have been the same had she been an independent nation. Had the political connection with Great Britain never existed, and had the weight of Canada been early thrown into the scale of freedom, there might have been no civil war.

In the case of the Pacific Railway scandal, the Governor-General may be said to have formally avowed himself a fainéant. He decided that he was absolutely bound to follow the advice of his ministers, even when those ministers lay under the heaviest charges of corruption, and even as to the mode in which the investigation into those charges should

be conducted; and his conduct was approved by the Home Government. He has, therefore, no authority, and of nothing nothing comes.

Most readers of the Fortnightly are probably prepared to regard with tolerance the proposition that figments and hypocrisies do no more good in politics than they do in general life. In Canadian politics they do much evil by blinding public men and the people generally to the real requirements of the situation. The hereditary principle was dead at its root; its work was done, and its age had passed away in the more advanced portion of humanity when the communities of the New World were founded. It lingers on, as things do linger on, in its native soil; but it can furnish no sound basis for government in the soil of reason and equality. The only conceivable basis for government in the New World is the national will; and the political problem of the New World is how to build a strong, stable, enlightened, and impartial government on that foundation. That it is a very difficult problem, daily experience in Canada, as well as in the neighboring republic, shows, and to be successfully resolved it must be seen in its true bearings, which the ostensible retention of the hereditary principle as the security for good and stable government obscures. Canada, though adorned with the paraphernalia of eight constitutional monarchies (one central and seven provincial), is a democracy of the most pronounced kind; the Governor-General was not wrong in saying that she is more democratic than the United States, where the President is an elective king, and where the Senate, which though elective is conservative, possesses great power, whereas the nominated Senate of Canada is a cypher. Demagogism and the other pests of democratic institutions are not to be conjured away by forms and phrases; they can be repressed and prevented from ruining the State only by developing remedial forces of a really effective kind, and by adjusting the actual machinery of the constitution so as to meet the dangers which experience may reveal. The treason law of the Plantagenets with which, as well as with the Lord Chamberlain's code of precedence, Canada is endowed, is not of much use to her while she is left without any legal

means of repressing her real cancer, political corruption. Loyalty to the fainéant deputy of a distant Crown may be in a certain sense real; it may be felt by those who profess it; but it probably does not often prompt to a good political action, and it certainly never restrains from a bad one. Among Canadians, as among American politicians, the most "truly loyal" are often the most unscrupulous and corrupt. They are often, through the whole course of their public lives, disloyal to everything that represents public honor and the public good. A provincial court adds flunkeyism to demagogism without making the demagogue less profligate, less dangerous, or less vile. It does not even make him less coarse. No refining influence can really be exercised by a few dinners and receptions even over the small circle which attends them; while the social expenditure and display which are imposed on the Governor-General as the condition of his popularity in the colony, and of the maintenance of his reputation at home, are anything but a wholesome example for colonial society, which on the contrary needs an example of hospitality and social enjoyment cultivated in an easy and inexpensive way.

At present the bane of Canada is party government without any question on which parties can be rationally or morally based. The last question of sufficient importance to form a rational and moral basis for a party was that of the Clergy Reserves and the Church Establishment, since the settlement of which there has been absolutely no dividing line between the parties or assignable ground for their existence, and they have become mere factions, striving to engross the prizes of office by the means which faction everywhere employs. The consequences are the increasing ascendency of the worst men, and the political demoralisation of a community, which, if a fair chance were given it, would furnish as sound a basis for good government as any community in the world. Of course Engiand cannot be charged with introducing the party system into Canada; but she does fling over it the glamor of British association, and beguile a country really abandoned to all the instability and all the degrading influences of government by faction with the ostensible stability and dignity of the hereditary Crown. Indeed, the

provision in the draught of confederation that both the parties should be considered in the first nomination of senators is, perhaps, the only authoritative recognition which the party system has ever received. In common with the other colonies, Canada is deemed happy in being endowed with a counterpart of the British Constitution. The British Constitution, putting aside the legal forms and phrases, is government by party; and whatever government by party may be in England, where there are some party questions left, in Canada it is a most noxious absurdity, and is ruining the political character of the people.

When Canadian Nationalists say that patriotism is a good thing, they are told to keep their wisdom for the copy-books; and the rebuke woud be just if those who administer it would recognise the equally obvious truth, that there can be no patriotism without nationality. In a dependency there is no love of the country, no pride in the country; if an appeal is made to the name of the country no heart responds as the heart of an Englishman responds when an appeal is made to the name of England. In a dependency every bond is stronger than that of country, every interest prevails over that of the country. The province, the sect, Orangism, Fenianism, Freemasonry, Odd Fellowship are more to the ordinary Canadian than Canada. So it must be while the only antidote to sectionalism in a population with strongly marked differences of race and creed is the sentiment of allegiance to a distant throne. The young Canadian leaving his native country to seek his fortune in the States feels no greater wrench than a young Englishman would feel in leaving his county to seek his fortune in London. Want of nationality is attended, too, with a certain want of selfrespect, not only political but social, as writers on colonial society and character have observed. Wealthy men in a dependency are inclined to look to the imperial country as their social centre and the goal of their social ambition, if not as their ultimate abode, and not only their patriotic munificence but their political and social services are withdrawn from the country of their birth.

Mr. Trollope finds himself compelled to confess that in passing from the United