of the double majority, which was held to be constitutional. When, therefore, he found himself in a minority so far as Ontario was concerned, he was accused of ruling that Province by means of the French-Canadian vote. To add to his difficulties, the social and political consequences of French rule, as well as the crying mistakes of the Colonial Office, became acute problems in his time, and he was called upon to settle them. As he said many years afterwards, all his great battles were fought before Confederation—a fact which no one familiar with Canadian history will dispute. Thus for the first twenty years of his career he was strictly confined to the administrative field, in which, however, he laid the foundations of Canadian Imperialism so solidly that it has the strength and permanence of an Old-World institution. To this early period belongs the abolition of feudal tenures. In England this was the slow work of generations in France it was the work of the Revolution: in Canada it was carried without excitement, disturbance, or individual wrong.' The Clergy Reserves-one of the main causes of the rebellion of 1837—were secularised in the same manner; and indeed nearly all Sir John's great administrative measures distinguish the two decades between 1844 and 1864. The worst constitution with which an English colony was ever burdened would have crushed a smaller man; in him it only served to develope the extraordinary gifts with which he had been endowed by nature.

The tendency of his policy could never be mistaken. Montreal citizens, despairing of a country which tolerated such legislation as the Rebellion Losses Bill, drew up and signed the Annexation Manifesto of 1849, which advocated a friendly separation from the British Empire, as a preliminary step towards union with the United States. Among the signatories were men afterwards honourably known in Canadian_public life, as well as representatives of several United Empire Loyalist families. Sir John's reply to this indiscretion was the formation of the British North American League, which, as it preceded the inauguration of the Royal Colonial Institute by twenty years, was the first English association whose object was the unity of the Empire. Under its influence,' said Sir John to his secretary and biographer, Mr. Pope, the annexation sentiment disappeared, the feeling of irritation died away, and the principles which were laid down by the British North American League in 1850 are the lines on which the Conservative-Liberal party has moved ever since.' These were the maintenance of Canada's connexion with the mother country, the necessity of a confederation of all the Provinces, and the formation of a

national policy. In 1856 Sir John, who was then practically Prime Minister, sent in his resignation to the GovernorGeneral, because the Finance Minister had assumed the responsibility of giving 100,0001. of exchange to the Bank of Upper Canada without such advance being submitted to and approved by his Excellency in Council'-an act which he (Sir John) regarded as a slight to the Crown. The matter was afterwards smoothed over in some way not yet explained. It was, however, only one of many incidents in his political fe which proved that, where the prerogatives of the Queen were concerned, he was as conservative as Lord Beaconsfield himself.

The party which enabled him to carry out his Imperial policy was a creation of his own, and one of his first political triumphs. In it were to be found men of every shade of opinion: French and British Canadians, Orangemen and Roman Catholics, Free-traders and Protectionists, Prohibitionists and Anti-prohibitionists-all held together by his personal magnetism and the confidence inspired by his wisdom and ability. The homage, obedience, and devotion which he received from his followers are absolutely without a parallel in modern times. Alone among party leaders, he could boast that nearly all the statesmen of his country for a generation had, at one time or another, sat in a Cabinet of which he was chief. By 1854 he had made it clear that the bounds of his party were elastic enough to include every person desirous of being called a Progressive Conservative,' and that the existing alliance between the Radicals and the French Canadians was unnatural. In other words he saw that the Provinces could be ruled only by compromise. The problem which confronted him resembled in some respects that which has confronted our statesmen in South Africa, but, owing to the neighbourhood of the United States and the existence of deep religious differences, was yet more complicated. In Ontario the task was more difficult than in Quebec, because, like most British communities, it was divided in politics, varied in origin, and, unlike any other North American colony, aggressively Protestant. In Lower Canada he had to deal with a race problem even more thorny than the race problem in South Africa, because it was intensified by religious differences as well as by the constitutional lack of sympathy between Briton and Gaul. Moreover, French Canadians are solidly entrenched in a Province of their own, and, like the Dutch of the Transvaal, are conservative by instinct, training, and tradition. Sir John saw in their support an element of strength which was absolutely essential to his

party. He therefore detached them from the Radicals-to whose ranks the misguided policy of a generation had driven them and by his scrupulous observance of the Quebec Act, by Old-World courtesy, Celtic charm, and genuine respect for the French Canadians as a people, he carried their sympathies with him till the day of his death. The place taken by Mr. Hofmeyr, as representing the Dutch, in Cape Colony, was occupied in Canada by Sir George Cartier, as representing the French; but, fortunately for Sir John Macdonald, there was no political association in the Dominion which corresponded to the Afrikander Bond. It may be doubted if the FrenchCanadian leader would have countenanced such a body. Had his judgment been at fault, his loyalty would have warned him that, in politics as well as in love, it is dangerous to play with edged tools.

The Imperial policy of Sir John Macdonald was triumphantly justified by confederation. His enemies, to dim the lustre of his fame, denied that the idea was his, waxing eloquent on the labours of other men. On similar grounds, originality might be denied to Bismarck, because German unity was an idea centuries old before his time; or his reputation as a statesman might he depreciated because he had such able allies as Kaiser Wilhelm I and Moltke. Nevertheless the Old-World Empire born in 1870 will always be identified with the name of Bismarck, as the New-World Empire born of England three years earlier will always be associated with the name of Sir John Macdonald. George Brown, Sir Charles Tupper, Mr. Cardwell, Sir George Cartier, and other fathers of the Dominion, were able men, but they could serve better than they could lead; or, to put it in another way, they were excellent officers under a brilliant general. None of them saw beyond the threshold of the future. Joseph Howe, from being an ardent supporter of confederation, became its bitterest opponent. At a most critical moment Lord Carnarvon resigned his office as Colonial Minister, and his successor, from the bent of his mind, was incapable of rising to a great Imperial occasion. George Brown, by his patriotic course in 1864, indeed made union possible, but he merely aimed at setting Upper Canada free from the Lower Canadian yoke.' Consequently he withdrew from the Coalition Ministry the following year, and thereafter did all in his power to render the passage of confederation difficult. Sir John Macdonald, on the other hand, served the cause with a loyalty as unfaltering as it was unselfish. He alone read the full Imperial significance of a united Canada; he alone grasped its changed relations to the mother country,

With the exception of saw in confederation

to the United States, and to the world. Lord Carnarvon, English statesmen nothing more than an arrangement for simplifying the work of the Colonial Office, and a step towards independence; he saw in it the right arm of England, and a powerful auxiliary of the Empire.' To bring it about he made many personal sacrifices-how many his private papers reveal, with a certain pathos which is none the less real because it is unconscious. He even served in a Ministry the leader of which was politically so colourless as to be acceptable to all sections of the Liberal-Conservative Party.

That Sir John himself regarded confederation as his greatest achievement is clear from his letters. True, the Canadas, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick contained a population of less than three millions; nevertheless, divided as they were by provincial jealousies, and racial, religious, commercial, and constitutional differences, the task of bringing them into line on the subject of union was as difficult as the federation of an Empire. Happily for the Dominion, Sir John's unerring instinct chose the right moment. There was deadlock in Canada. The United States, in a fit of petulance, had terminated the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, and had emerged from the Civil War stronger than ever. A Fenian raid and the Trent affair had brought home to each and all of the colonies their weakness and defencelessness. A movement for the union of the Maritime Provinces had found expression in a conference at Charlottetown. This gathering gave Sir John the opening he desired, and in a few weeks his energy had transformed it into the Quebec Conference, empowered to devise a scheme for the federal union of British North America. The result of their labours was a series of resolutions which, after being drafted and redrafted several times, finally became the Confederation Bill of 1867. But between the conception of the Dominion at Quebec and its birth at Ottawa extended three anxious and harassing years. Through a tactical mistake, the movement towards union was checked in New Brunswick; and this encouraged the anti-confederates in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. A second Fenian raid created something like a panic in Canada; and popular excitement, inconsistent in its clamour, enormously increased the difficulty of providing for the defence of the country. The details of the various local constitutions had to be thought out and formulated, a party composed of Conservatives, Liberals, and Radicals kept together, and the ordinary business of Parliament carried through. We can readily

believe Mr. Pope when he says that, at this period of his career, Sir John Macdonald worked night and day.'

As his had been the master mind of the Quebec Conference, so it dominated the conference in London. Without his magnetic personality, tact, persuasiveness, and fertility of resource, the best efforts of the Imperial authorities might have been in vain. His knowledge of constitutional precedent was unsurpassed even in England, while his command of details was such that, when provincial interests threatened to be irreconcilable, and thorny questions of finance, representation, and other matters of federal moment came up for discussion, his guidance was indispensable. Above all he has impressed the British North America Act with his own passionate loyalty. It is, as he said it should be, in his opening speech at the Quebec Conference, an image and transcript of the British Constitution.' That it is a less faithful transcript than it might have been is due to inevitable conditions, to local particularism, and the necessity of conciliation by compromise. For instance, Sir John was in favour of a full legislative union, which he described as 'the best, cheapest, most vigorous, and strongest system of government which the Provinces could have adopted; but unfortunately their constitutions only admitted of a federal union. Again, he was anxious, for Imperial reasons, that the Confederation should be called the Kingdom of Canada; but Lord Derby, afraid that the title might give offence to the United States, opposed the suggestion. The name Dominion,' which was actually adopted, was a compromise between monarchical and republican ideas.

If the negotiations, which led up to the North America Act, required statesmanship of the highest order, no less was required to lay the foundations of the new Dominion. What a herculean

task it was few Englishmen realised at the time, and fewer still realise it now. The danger of the Fenian raids was not yet over. On the south was a strong and ambitious Power, which for eighty years had ostentatiously paraded her desire of annexing, by peaceful means, the British colony which it had twice failed to take by war. When the Dominion was born, that Power was striving to cut off its possible advance to the Pacific; it was encroaching on Canadian fisheries; it was aggravating the San Juan boundary dispute by high-handed proceedings. Nor was the delicate geographical situation of Canada her only danger; internally she was weak by reason of her ethnological diversity. That is to say, Sir John Macdonald had not only to face every internal problem which has vexed he souls of Australian federationists, but, in addition, a hostile