ciprocity Treaty at the first possible date, and by
the connivance of the American authorities in the Fenian raids of 1866
and 1870. Yet for Canada the outcome was by no means ill. If the Civil
War did not bring forth a new nation in the South, it helped to make one
in the far North. A common danger drew the scattered British Provinces
together and made ready the way for the coming Dominion of Canada.

*See "The Day of the Confederacy", by Nathaniel W.
Stephenson; and "The Path of Empire" (in "The Chronicles of
America").

It was not from the United States alone that an impetus came for the
closer union of the British Provinces. The same period and the same
events ripened opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of some practical
means of altering a colonial relationship which had ceased to bring
profit but which had not ceased to be a burden of responsibility and
risk.

The British Empire had its beginning in the initiative of private
business men, not in any conscious policy of state. Yet as the Empire
grew the teaching of doctrinaires and the example of other colonial
powers had developed a definite policy whereby the plantations overseas
were to be made to serve the needs of the nation at home. The end of
empire was commercial profit; the means, the political subordination of
the colonies; the debit entry, the cost of the military and naval and
diplomatic services borne by the mother country. But the course of
events had now broken down this theory. Britain, for her own good, had
abandoned protection, and with it fell the system of preference and
monopoly in colonial markets. Not only preference had gone but even
equality. The colonies, notably Canada, which was most influenced by the
United States, were perversely using their new found freedom to protect
their own manufacturers against all outsiders, Britain included.
When Sheffield cutlers, hard hit by Canada's tariff, protested to
the Colonial Secretary and he echoed their remonstrance, the
Canadian Minister of Finance, A. T. Galt, stoutly refused to heed.
"Self-government would be utterly annihilated," Galt replied in 1860,
"if the views of the Imperial Government were to be preferred to
those of the people of Canada. It is therefore the duty of the present
government distinctly to affirm the right of the Canadian legislature to
adjust the taxation of the people in the way they deem best--even if
it should unfortunately happen to meet the disappr