CHAPTER VII

MR. GOLDWIN SMITH.

No discussion of the relation of Canada to the Empire, much less any more general discussion of British unity, would be complete which omits special reference to Mr. Goldwin Smith and the views on national questions which he has for many years persistently and strenuously advocated. To these views he has challenged attention anew in his latest volume, _Canada and the Canadian Question_, which may fairly be supposed to condense all that can be said in favour of the separation of Canada from the Empire, and generally in support of that form of national disintegration which is involved in the great colonies becoming separate states or annexing themselves to other nations. Very considerable interest is given to this latest utterance of Mr. Smith from the fact that he is almost the last conspicuous representative of a school of thinkers which twenty-five or thirty years ago appeared likely to dominate English opinion on colonial affairs.

To these men the United Kingdom was, and was to be, sufficient unto itself; the outlying portions of the Empire were but incidental and temporary {164} connections; the greater colonies were to be voluntarily dropped when they had developed strength to stand alone, or as convenient opportunities to get rid of them arose.

The splendid edifice of Empire built up by the toil and statesmanship of generations was an illusion which gave nothing more than a false prestige; its dissolution was to herald the dawn of a better day.

It will be generally admitted that in England this school of thought is practically dead. In his vigorous and persistent attempt to revive it in Canada Mr. Smith has met with little success. That one of the most brilliant writers and masters of style in the English world should in a distant colony have devoted well-nigh twenty years of his life to weakening the political bond between Britain and that colony with practically no visible result, is of itself a phenomenon which indicates the true tendency of national life. But that in the pursuit of his fixed idea Mr. Smith has done much harm is, I think, scarcely open to doubt. Both in Britain and the United States he has produced false impressions on Canadian affairs. The useful efforts which he has made for the elevation of journalism and for the purification of public life in Canada, the greater service which he might have done in giving high ideals to the Young Dominion, have been neutralized or made impossible by his intellectual slavery to a set of ideas which rendered him incapable of entering into or sympathizing with the deeper motives of {165} Canadian life. A great contemporary thinker and satirist, James Russell Lowell, made the 'barbed arrows of his indignant wit' the terror of corrupt politicians, while still retaining the love of the people whom he served. This he did in virtue of his constant sympathy with national aspirations and the firm faith in his country's future which shines through every page of his bitterest criticisms. In a similar sphere of effort Goldwin Smith has failed, because he has permitted an atrabilious and pessimistic temperament, a preference of epigram to accuracy, and an impatience at the non-fulfilment of his own political prophecies to distort his studies of Canadian problems, and to take away much of their value.

For those many Canadians who welcomed his coming to Canada, as one of the happiest omens for the political and intellectual life of the country, in whom even yet admiration struggles with disappointment, the duty of pointing out his unfitness to interpret the political history and actual position of Canada, is as painful as it is imperative.

Mr. Smith's book on Canada is manifestly intended primarily for readers in England. It is to his English audience that he appeals when he says that 'he does not think that the honour or true interest of his native country can for a moment be absent from his breast.' Of this, Englishmen must judge; Canadians, who respect patriotic sentiment, only ask of Mr. Smith (and they have some reason for emphasizing the request) that they may be credited with sincerity {166} when they claim that the honour and true interests of their native country compel them to dispute his arguments and repudiate the main conclusions about Canada's destiny which he outlines for his English readers. Unfortunately they must do no more than this. Mr. Smith claims 'that he has done his best to take his readers to the heart of it (the Canadian question) by setting the whole case before them: that his opinions have not been hastily formed: that they have not, so far as he is aware, been biassed by personal motives of any kind.' This is a pledge of fairness and impartiality in discussion. It is a pledge which, in Canadian opinion, is not fulfilled. No man in Canada speaks or writes with a deeper sense of responsibility than Principal Grant, as a clergyman, as the head of an important university, and as one of the most active moral forces in the Dominion. He knows Canada, too, from end to end, better than any living man. Yet in a formal review of _Canada and the Canadian Question_ Principal Grant endorses the opinion of another writer that Mr. Smith's book is 'so brilliant, so inaccurate, so malicious even, that it is enough to make one weep.' The criticism does not seem to me too strong. Nor must Mr. Smith think that it is only upon super-sensitive Canadian minds that this impression is left. One of the closest thinkers and most brilliant writers on political subjects in England, a man of cool judgment, who has observed Canadian institutions on the spot, said to me after perusing _Canada and the Canadian Question_ that he considered {167} it the most unfair book he had ever read. At the high table of an Oxford college a Canadian ventured to deprecate the acceptance by English people of Mr. Smith's brilliant and epigrammatic statement of half-truths as truths upon Dominion affairs. The reply of one of the clearest thinkers in the University was not unsatisfactory to the colonist. 'We in England know Mr. Smith well, and we know that, where every sentence has to be so sharply pointed as his, a liberal allowance must be made for accuracy. Canadians need have no fear that his views are accepted without question here.'

Nor has the impression been different even at the Antipodes. We read in the _Australian Critic_: 'To say that the book before us is written by Mr. Goldwin Smith is to say that it is eminently readable, that its style is forcible and epigrammatic, and that its historical descriptions are clear and vivacious. But we have a right to expect something more in a book describing the history and institutions of a country. We have a right to expect fairness, and fairness in this book we do not get.'

This unfairness of statement, thus generally recognized, and evident to every reader from the moment that those phases of Canadian politics are dealt with which led up to and followed upon Confederation, accounts for the irritation so commonly manifested in Canadian criticism of Mr. Smith's views. It is an unfairness the more irritating because often so clever and subtle that it half eludes criticism, and because {168} it is closely interwoven with much vigorous thought on Canadian affairs. More than this, many to whom it gives the greatest annoyance hesitate to criticise it as they would, from a conviction that it is the offspring of temperament and literary habit, rather than deliberate insincerity[1].

Only a few of Mr. Smith's arguments can be dealt with here, and it is perhaps better first to refer to such as are conspicuous by their fallacy rather than those marked by unfairness.

I have pointed out the remarkable naval position which the Empire holds in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific through the possession of Canada. Let us see what Mr. Smith suggests in substitution for this advantage when, as he proposes, it has been voluntarily abandoned.

'Great Britain may need a coaling station on the Atlantic coast of North America, not for the purposes of blockade, which could no longer have place when all danger of war was at an end but for the general defence of her trade. Safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge, rather than territorial dependencies, are apparently what the great exporting country and the mistress of the carrying trade now wants. Newfoundland would be a safe and uninvidious possession, and it has coal, though bituminous and not yet worked. The Americans do not covet islands, {169} for the defence of which they would have to keep up a navy. The island itself would be the gainer: there would be some chance of the development of its resources; with nothing but the fishing the condition of its people seems to be poor. Let England then keep Newfoundland. Cape Breton is rather too close to the coast, otherwise it has coal in itself, and Louisbourg might be restored.' Clearly we have here an Englishman who has learned in his new home to talk a language unfamiliar for some centuries at least to the English ear, and one who fails to grasp the fundamental conditions of England's existence as a great nation. The greatest naval power in the world, bound to defend a world-wide commerce and above all to defend that main food route across the Atlantic which would almost certainly be the first point of attack in a Great European war, because it is the one point at which a well-nigh mortal blow could be delivered, is quietly asked to hand over to another nation her well-nigh impregnable naval station at Halifax, her command of a hundred minor ports, of the St. Lawrence, and of the splendid coal fields of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, and to relegate herself to the rock-bound, fog-encircled and sometimes ice-beset coasts of Newfoundland: to content herself with coal 'bituminous and not yet worked,' and all because the possession would be 'safe and uninvidious' and because 'the Americans do not covet islands.' In this casual redistribution of the bases of naval power it is {170} extremely characteristic and noteworthy that on the Pacific where the trade of a great ocean is to be protected, and where Russia has a great naval depot, not even an island is reserved for British people, probably because again Vancouver is 'rather too near to the coast,' to be outside the range of American covetousness, and its coal deposits too extensive for it to be considered 'uninvidious.' In reading the lines I have quoted from Mr. Smith expressing his conception of the relation of the United States to Great Britain, it is impossible not to recall the words which Shakspere puts into the mouth of Cassius;--

'Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves.'

Let us not fail, however, to recognize that Mr. Smith does dimly see and admit the conditions under which Britain holds her maritime power. 'Safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge, rather than territorial dependencies are apparently what the great exporting country and the mistress of the carrying trade now wants.' The admission that British naval power rests upon safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge is fundamental. But the most superficial study of the facts or even a glance at the map makes it plain that in the Empire the command of these positions is inseparably connected with territorial possession. Britain cannot turn away her great colonies to work out an independent destiny while {171} at the same time she retains in each the best points in naval and military vantage for the creation of a series of Gibraltars such as Mr. Smith apparently has in his mind. Sir Charles Dilke has clearly pointed out that while we cannot possibly with any regard to commercial security give up the military station which we hold at the extremity of Africa, on the other hand we cannot retain it permanently without the friendship of the colonists and a maintenance of national control over the surrounding country. Still more true is this of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Let Mr. Smith try to arrange a plan by which Australia, South Africa and Canada will accept independence with its national responsibilities and at the same time hand over to England their 'safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge' which he himself admits are the very conditions of her existence, and he will find himself face to face with a problem much more difficult than any which he propounds to Imperial Federationists when he demands of them a plan.

'Surely,' says Mr. Smith, 'the appearance of a world-wide power, grasping all the waterways and all the points of maritime vantage, instead of propagating peace, would, like an alarm gun, call the nations to battle.' To this it must straightway be answered that the case is one in which as things stand no 'grasping' is required. What British people need for their great national purposes they hold already. Their possessions have been won in a long course of national {172} development and are held in most cases under the solemn confirmation of ancient or modern treaty, or at least by the tacit consent of all the nations. No title-deeds in the world are more secure according to any recognized code of international relation. Nor is her moral right to consolidate her position less strong or more likely to be questioned. Self-defence is a primary instinct and admitted necessity of nature--recognized as such by communities as well as individuals. 'In strengthening her navy, England is pursuing a policy in the strict sense defensive. We threaten nobody. We cherish no ambitious design. It is more and more the wise policy of England to keep out of engagements in matters with which neither we of the mother-country nor our sons in the colonies have any concern. The external policy of England is directed to one object, which is to secure from attack the highway of the sea[2].' To different nations the problem of self-defence comes in different forms. France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia, find vast military organization the necessary condition of safe national existence. To none of them would exclusion from commerce with the rest of the world be fatal: their own resources can, in emergency, supply their wants. Resistance to a flood of hostile invasion they must be prepared to make at any moment, and to this the public thought is mainly directed. No one questions their right to equip themselves for this resistance, however much the necessity may be deplored.

{173}

The United States, again, have been hitherto comparatively independent of external commerce. Even the carrying trade has been allowed to slip chiefly into foreign hands. Continental isolation and vast population give a sufficient range for national industry and sufficient security from hostile invasion. They enable the people to turn their attention mainly to internal development and the complex or even threatening problems involved in the assimilation and elevation of the confluent races which are taking possession of the soil. Very different is the position of British people. To them, whether at home or abroad, the steady flow of commerce is as the flow of blood through the veins; the safety of the waterways is practically a question of life or death. The very fact that Britain is not compelled to be a great military power, in the sense that European nations are military powers, adds millions to her armies of industry, increases indefinitely her producing forces and so makes more imperative the necessity for absolutely safe commercial intercourse. Britain, as the result of natural growth, now possesses the unquestionable right and the manifest opportunity, without a single stroke of aggression, to organize a naval power adequate to the protection of the chief waterways of the world, and of the enormous commerce which the industry of her people has created thereon. To any combination thus planned to guard the very life of the nation, what just or reasonable objection can be made? To any objection not just or reasonable {174} what answer must English people make? For a race of traders scattered over all quarters of the globe, peace is a supreme interest, and peace, as the world is now constituted, can only rest on organized power. For the first time in history we see a nation which unites under its flag all the comprehensiveness of a world-wide Empire and a wonderful relative compactness secured by that practical contraction of our planet which has taken place under the combined influences of steam and electricity. No other nation ever has had--it is well nigh impossible to believe that any other nation ever will have--so commanding a position for exercising the functions of what I have called an oceanic Empire, interested in developing and able to protect the commerce of the world. Such an Empire is probably the best guarantee of permanent peace the world has ever had or is likely to have this side of the millennium. Who shall question our right and duty to organize it for the great ends manifestly within our reach?

But Mr. Smith questions not merely our right, but our capacity.

We are told that however much steam and telegraph have annihilated distance 'they have not annihilated the parish steeple. They have not carried the thoughts of the ordinary citizen beyond the circle of his own life and work. They have not qualified a common farmer, tradesman, plough man, or artizan to direct the politics of a world-wide state[3].' Shall we {175} then give up all large statesmanship, and adopt the parish steeple as the measure of our political ideas? The parish steeple has its place and limiting power in England as elsewhere, but it has not prevented the creation of a great Empire, its successful administration and its retention. In the end it is the strongest men and the clearest minds of a country which give direction to its destiny, and nowhere is this more the case than among Anglo-Saxon people. The common farmer, tradesman, plough man, or artizan may not be able to direct the policy of a state, but he has a marvellous instinct for discovering and supporting the man who can, be he a Cromwell or a Cecil, a rail-splitter or a Hohenzollern. When he has made up his mind, moreover, we have more to fear, apparently, from a too complete surrender of his own judgment than from ignorant interference in matters which he does not fully comprehend. That the spread of modern democracy involves no necessity of abandoning large statesmanship the history of the colonies clearly proves. Canadians may not, as Mr. Smith suggests, know much of Australian or South African politics, but they have given themselves up with singular persistence to the guidance of a statesman with an imperial range of ideas and policy. In Australia the masses, however much they may be absorbed in their labour struggles and social problems, choose, as their leaders, with occasional change, but on the whole singular steadiness, men like Sir Henry Parkes, Mr. Service, Sir Samuel Griffiths, Mr. Gillies, or {176} Sir Henry Atkinson, every one of them men who, even when most absorbed with the affairs of their own colonies, are thinking constantly on national questions, and dreaming of some great British unity in the future, as their written and spoken thoughts fully testify. Even in South Africa, with its intensified localism, we see the reins of power committed to a man who stakes his political career equally upon working out a South African unity, and upon securing that it shall be consistent with the policy of a united Empire.

I fear that it is impossible to acquit Mr. Smith of at times making statements disingenuous in themselves and especially misleading to the English reader. Perhaps the peculiar animosity with which he has always regarded those Canadian Railways whose construction has falsified his prophecy that the Dominion could not be welded together, explains, if it does not excuse, a special recklessness of statement when he describes them to English people. Mr. Smith speaks of the Intercolonial Railway as 'spanning the vast and irreclaimable wilderness which separates Halifax from Quebec.' Again he says: 'The maritime Provinces are divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles, through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight by the way.' Would the ordinary reader outside of Canada believe, after reading this description, that in the course of the 688 miles of rail between Halifax and Quebec the {177} Intercolonial traverses large counties like Cumberland and Westmorland, among the most fertile and productive in Canada; that though running through forest country in the immediate rear of the settled coast line it is closely connected by a score of short branches with the coal areas and all the thickly populated districts along the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that for 100 miles it follows the still more populous shores of the River St. Lawrence, and that the comparatively short distance, scarcely more than 100 miles, between the settlements at the head of Bay Chaleur and those of the St. Lawrence is alone responsible for the epithets 'vast and irreclaimable' which Mr. Smith applies to the whole length of the road? Would the reader believe that it is a railway which carries about a million passengers and more than a million tons of freight every year? That it has conferred the enormous advantage of swift communication with the outside world on some hundreds of thousands of people to whom its construction was an object of eager desire for years before it was accomplished? It is true that, worked as a State Railway for the good of the communities through which it passes, for the avowed purpose of uniting the provinces more closely, kept at a high state of efficiency, and under some unusual expense for clearing away snow in winter, a loss is at present annually incurred, but it is doubtful if any public expenditure made in the Dominion confers so great an advantage on so many people, while subserving great national purposes. {178} Not in Canada alone, but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Russia and South America, railways, which do not directly pay, are for the public good, or for prospective and indirect advantage, constructed and worked to the content of those who pay for them. In Great Britain state subventions are given to steamship, postal, and cable lines which would not in themselves be at once commercially profitable. For many years a large deficit has been paid on the ordinary English telegraph system; a deficit which even last year amounted to no less than £190,000 sterling. The money has been paid cheerfully, because it gives to the mass of the people the advantages of the sixpenny telegram.

Why should all the vials of wrath, ridicule, and, we may now add, misrepresentation, be reserved for the one State Railway of Canada, because the people are willing to pay the deficiency of £50,000 or £100,000 involved in its operation, for the sake of the consolidation which it has given to the Dominion, and the unmeasured benefit which it confers on immense districts and large populations which would otherwise be singularly isolated, socially and commercially, from the rest of Canada and the rest of the world.

Once more, speaking in disparagement of the same railway as a military route, Mr. Smith says: 'At the time when the Intercolonial was projected, the two British officers of artillery, whose pamphlet has been already cited, pointed out that the line would be fatally liable to snow blocks. It would be awkward if, at a crisis {179} like that of the Great Mutiny, or that of a Russian invasion in India, the reinforcements were blockaded by snow in the wilderness between Halifax and Quebec.' What can we think of a writer who claims to be fair, and yet parades as authorities two young gentlemen whose haphazard forecast has been belied by twenty years of actual working experience? So far from being 'fatally' liable to snow block, the Intercolonial is operated during the two or three months of deep snow with less risk of delay than is incurred every day of the year by ships passing through the Suez Canal, the other most available route in an Indian Crisis. It has been my own lot to suffer a longer detention on a steamship at Ismailia, a detention accepted by the ship's officers as in the course of ordinary experience, than I can remember having met with in many years' experience of the Intercolonial.

When Mr. Smith turns from the Intercolonial, which does not pay, to the Canada Pacific, which does, we find no improvement in fairness of statement. Of the Canada Pacific he says: 'The fact is constantly overlooked in vaunting the importance of this line to the Empire, that its Eastern section passes through the State of Maine, and would, of course, be closed to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United States.' In a note it is added: 'The _Quarterly Review_, for example, spoke of the Canadian Pacific Railway as running from "start to finish" over British ground, though the line was at that very moment applying for bonding privileges to the Government of {180} the United States.' This is evidently a deliberate statement. What are the facts? During the months of open navigation Montreal is the water terminus of the Canada Pacific Railway, and the only point from which transfers would be made across the continent. From Montreal to Vancouver, that is, from ocean to ocean, from 'start to finish,' the line is entirely on British soil. Connection further east with the winter ports of Halifax and St. John, has from the first been made by means of the Grand Trunk and Intercolonial lines, the route yet from 'start to finish' running over British territory alone. From the St. Lawrence there is even the alternative of a double route to the sea coast, one down the St. John valley, chiefly owned and controlled, I think, by the Canada Pacific, the other along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while a third has been projected by the Grand Trunk, the rival of the Canada Pacific, through the heart of New Brunswick. Only a year and a half ago the Canada Pacific, to save distance, built still another line from Montreal eastward to make connection with the Intercolonial, and it is on the ground that a portion of this third line passes through the State of Maine that Mr. Smith informs English people that Canada's trans-continental railway 'would, of course, be closed to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United States.' Whether this statement, made in a very critical point of Mr. Smith's argument, is a _suppressio veri_ or _suggestio falsi_, I leave others to decide. On which side is the correct statement of {181} facts I can safely leave to the adjudication of the Canadian reader, the Canadian press, or of any person who has access to a good railway map of the Dominion. So flagrant seems to me the distortion of fact that I have sometimes wondered whether Mr. Smith was not testing the limits of that English ignorance of colonial matters of which he makes much in another part of his volume.

I must quote once more: 'In opening a trade among the provinces, a natural trade at least, these inter-provincial railroads have failed, for the simple reason that the provinces have hardly any products to exchange with each other, and that means of conveyance are futile where there is nothing to be conveyed.' The answer to this may be put into a question which business men will appreciate even if an author in his study at Toronto does not. Why is it, if there is nothing to be conveyed between the provinces, that, in addition to the Intercolonial, two competing lines have already been constructed and a third projected, all on purely business principles, to unite the maritime provinces to those of the St. Lawrence?

In his excessive eagerness to make points, Mr. Smith exposes himself to no slight suspicion of a willingness to open up unnecessarily, if not maliciously, old sores between the mother-land and the colony. He says: 'That in all diplomatic questions with the United States the interest of Canada has been sacrificed to the Imperial exigency of keeping peace with {182} the Americans is the constant theme of Canadian complaint. ... By the treaty of 1783, confirming the independence of the United States, England not only resigned the territory claimed by each State of the Union severally, but abandoned to the general government immense territories "unsettled, unexplored, and unknown."' After explaining that this was partly due to ignorance, he continues: 'This is the beginning of a long and uniform story, in the course of which not only great tracts of territory, but geographical unity has been lost. To understand how deeply this iron has entered into the Canadian soul, the Englishman must turn to his map and mark out how much of geographical compactness, of military security, and of commercial convenience was lost when Britain gave up Maine. ... A large portion of Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, and Washington, Canada also thinks she has wrongfully lost. These are causes of discontent; discontent may one day breed disaffection; disaffection may lead to another calamitous rupture; and instead of going forth into the world when the hour of maturity has arrived with the parent's blessing, the child may turn in anger from the parental door.'

To conjure up these historic mistakes as the cause of a possible national rupture will only raise a smile in Canada; upon readers outside of Canada who do not understand the circumstances the passage leaves a false impression. That mistakes were made most people agree; that they were partly due to the ignorance {183} of English diplomatists is true; but Canadians must admit that they were due to Canadian ignorance as well. As late as 1874 a Cabinet Minister of the Dominion on a public platform described the splendid wheat areas of the North-West as a country only fitted to be the home of the wolf and the bear. Among the separate and unsympathetic provinces, prior to confederation, there were ignorance and indifference as well as among English statesmen. 'Every intelligent Canadian now knows that most of these mistakes were far more due to the want of a nexus between the Colony and the Empire which would have brought colonial knowledge and experience to the assistance of British diplomacy. He knows that since the acceptance of this assistance as a part of the public policy of Britain, such mistakes can no longer occur, as the Fishery Award at Halifax and the Fishery Treaty at Washington, when Canadian interests were represented by Canadians, sufficiently testify; as the Behring Sea negotiations testify, in which, acting upon the information supplied by the Dominion Government, and recognizing the justice of the case, Lord Salisbury did not hesitate to say the final word which made aggressive diplomacy pause and submit to impartial arbitration.

'Disintegration, surely, is on the point of being complete,' and 'the last strand of political connection is worn almost to the last thread,' Mr. Smith exclaims, using as the illustration of his point Newfoundland's claim to make a commercial treaty of her own independently {184} of Canada. He refuses to see what others see, that the invitation to Newfoundland to have her interests directly represented in the arbitration with France; the fact that Canada has been thus represented at Halifax, at Washington, in the Behring Sea difficulties; the formal introduction, in short, of colonial opinion and knowledge into national diplomacy, marks the creation of new threads of connection, new bonds of union, which promise to be permanent, because constructed on true and primary political principles.

It is, I think, a fatal flaw in Mr. Smith's discussion of the Canadian Question, a fatal comment on his claim to have 'done his best to take his readers to the heart of it by setting the whole case before them,' that he makes no mention of this decisive change in national policy, or of the consequent change in the Canadian mind, which, if not reconciled to losses in the past, has no reason to dread them in the future, and in this confidence is content. That he should treat as present and gravely irritating, grievances which have become purely historical, is unfair and misleading.

If the difficulties with the United States which have arisen on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts are not settled amicably and justly, it will not be from any want of willingness on the part of British people or Canadians. Britain and Canada agreed to a settlement of the St Lawrence Fishery Question which an American Democratic President and Cabinet accepted as fair. A Republican Senate rejected it as a move in the party {185} game, and has preferred to leave it open ever since. Any reader of the correspondence in the Behring Sea Question can judge for himself on which side was the spirit of conciliation and compromise. Only in the last resort did Lord Salisbury utter the warning words which seem to have done more than anything else to prepare the way for fair adjudication upon the points at issue.

How curiously and completely Mr. Smith is out of touch and sympathy with the organizing movements of the British world: how oddly inconsistent he can be even while pressing his own theories, one or two further illustrations will suffice to show. Apparently he looks upon Australian Federation as a step in the wrong direction. 'We cannot help once more warning the Australians that Federation under the Elective system involves not merely the union of the several states under a central government with powers superior to them all; but the creation of Federal parties with all the faction, demagogism, and corruption which party conflicts involve over a new field and on a vastly extended scale. It is surprising how little this obvious and momentous consideration appears to be present to the minds of statesmen when the question of Federation is discussed[4].' Warnings like this are repeated. Anxious as he seems to be for the unification of the American continent by the absorption of Canada into the United States, Mr. Smith would apparently urge Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland to avoid even the example of Canadian {186} confederation in gaining for themselves effective unity, although he knows, that for them confederation means the freedom of the continental market and the same breaking down of tariff walls which is the one supreme bribe he has to offer to Canadians in exchange for the surrender of their nationality. Another turn of the intellectual wheel and even American unification is forgotten in a new ideal of disintegration. 'There is no reason why Ontario should not be a nation if she were minded to be one. Her territory is compact. Her population is already as large as that of Denmark, and likely to be a good deal larger, probably as large as that of Switzerland; and it is sufficiently homogeneous if she can only repress French encroachment on her eastern border. She would have no access to the sea: no more has Switzerland, Hungary, or Servia ... The same thing might have been said with regard to the maritime Provinces--supposing them to have formed a legislative union--Quebec, British Columbia, or the North West. In the North West, rating its cultivable area at the lowest, there would be room for no mean nation.' This passage may explain to English or Australian readers why Mr. Smith has no acceptance in the Dominion as the prophet of Canada's political future. One remembers with astonishment that it is the writer of these lines who, on the one hand, assures Canadians that they cannot resist absorption into the United States, and who, on the other, tells the advocates of British unity that they are impracticable dreamers.

{187}

After this it does not seem surprising to find that Mr. Smith himself proceeds to knock away the foundations on which his own argument on the Canadian question has been built? These foundations are practically two in number--the fear of war on the American continent arising from irritation at the presence of Britain there--and the necessity for Canada of commercial intercourse with her own continent. These are the reasons why the Empire is to be disintegrated, and Canada is to seek a new national connection.

Following upon this we read: 'Of conquest there is absolutely no thought. The Southern violence and the Western lawlessness which forced the Union into the war of 1812 are things of the past. The American people could not now be brought to invade the homes of an unoffending neighbour. They have no craving for more territory. They know that while a despot who annexes may govern through a viceroy with a strong hand, a republic which annexes must incorporate, and would only weaken itself by incorporating disaffection. The special reason for wishing to bring Canada at once into the Union, that she might help to balance the Slave Power, has with the Slave Power departed. So far as the Americans are concerned, Canada is absolute mistress of her own destiny.'

Canada, therefore, in Mr. Smith's later opinion, has nothing to fear from war with the United States.

Once more, discussing the McKinley tariff, we read:--,

{188}

'However, the manifest faults of the measure, combined with the enormous waste of public money incurred in baling out surplus revenue to avert a reform of the tariff, have proved too much for the superstition or the sufferance of the American people. Symptoms of a change of opinion had even before appeared. New England is now praying for free admission of raw materials. The Republican party in the United States is the war party, kept on foot for the sake of maintaining the war tariff in the interest of the protected manufactures. It has made a desperate effort to retain power and to rivet its policy on the nation by means which have estranged from it the best of its supporters; but in the late elections it has received a signal, and probably decisive overthrow. What all the preachings of economic science were powerless to effect has been brought about at last by the reduction of the public debt, and of the necessity for duties as revenue. A new commercial era has apparently dawned for the United States, and the lead of the United States will be followed in time by the rest of the world.'

This means, if words mean anything, that in Mr. Smith's opinion, the United States are soon to throw open their markets to the world, and so, without political humiliation, Canada will have the commercial freedom of her own continent. One asks why 'Canada and the Canadian Question' was ever written.

An explanation may perhaps be found. Mr. Smith quotes (page 247) Sir Henry Taylor's opinion that {189} the North American colonies are useless and dangerous possessions for Britain, and thus goes on to remark: 'It may be said that this was written in 1852 and that since that time we have had new lights. Some persons have had new lights, but those who have not are no more unpatriotic in saying that the possession and its uses are as dust in the balance compared with its evil contingencies than was Sir Henry Taylor.' That is to say, though within the last half century the relations of the empire have absolutely changed, though the safety of its enormously multiplied commerce has come to depend on steam and coaling stations in every corner of the world, though the colonies have become great self-governing and self-sustaining communities, though the world has been recreated by steam and electricity, Mr. Smith frankly admits that these facts have given him no 'new lights' on questions of empire. He is living among the memories of the past; he devotes himself to the task of maintaining a theory based upon facts which have become fossilized under the drift of half a century of extraordinary change. Even if we are prepared in such a case to admit his sincerity, we have a right from the outset to challenge any claim to adequacy of treatment or correctness of judgment.

One more criticism of British Federation may be referred to as illustrating the inconsistency in argument of which a clever writer is capable:--

'Are the negroes of the West Indies to be included? {190} Is Quashee to vote on imperial policy?' says Mr. Smith, in fine scorn of the British federationist, who doubtless has no special fear or thought about a carefully restricted and controlled coloured vote in a few scattered colonies: a vote which in the aggregate represents not more than a very minute fraction of one per cent. of the enfranchised citizenship of the Empire. Strangely out of place, however, does this scorn seem when we find the same pages embody an argument for Canadians throwing in their political lot with a Republic where the Quashee vote, unconditionally and irrevocably granted, will far outweigh their own; where it will become enormously influential as soon as the free exercise is permitted of the rights granted by constitutional law, as, one would think, must ultimately be the case in a country which claims to give exceptional political freedom. Equally inconsistent does it seem when placed beside the romantic political enterprize to which Mr. Smith would commit Canadians. He says, 'The native American element in which the tradition of self-government resides is hard-pressed by the foreign element untrained to self-government, and stands in need of the reinforcement which the entrance of Canada into the Union would bring it[5].' Nay, more, Mr. Smith wishes Canada to enter the Union for Britain's sake, that she may 'neutralize the votes of her enemies[6].' Does he reflect that if the Canadian {191} vote chanced to be barely insufficient to neutralize the votes of Britain's enemies, Canada would, as I have elsewhere pointed out, be constitutionally forced into active hostility to the mother-land? The path which he points out has on it possible natural dishonour from which Canadians will instinctively shrink. They will prefer to retain the right to neutralize the influence of Britain's enemies, if the necessity arise, by other means, such as they have found effective before.

[1] A _Times_' editorial has spoken of Mr. Smith's views about the relations of Canada to the Empire as 'one of those crazes that are scarcely intelligible in a man of great intellectual power.'

[2] Lord Brassey, _Naval Annual_, 1890

[3] _Canada and the Canadian Question_, p. 260.

[4] _Canada and the Canadian Question_, p. 232.

[5] _Canada and the Canadian Question_, p. 274.

[6] _Idem_, p. 269.

{192}