toil and privation, amid
war and famine, built up a province which they have made their own by
their patience and industry, and who should, differ as we may from
them, evoke our respect for their fidelity to the institutions of
their origin, for their appreciation of the advantages of English
self-government, and for their cooperation in all great measures
essential to the unity of the federation; to the Loyalists of last
century who left their homes for the sake of "king and country," and
laid the foundations of prosperous and loyal English communities by
the sea and by the great lakes, and whose descendants have ever stood
true to the principles of the institutions which have made Britain free
and great; to the unknown body of pioneers some of whose names perhaps
still linger on a headland or river or on a neglected gravestone, who
let in the sunlight year by year to the dense forests of these
countries, and built up by their industry the large and thriving
provinces of this Dominion; above all, to the statesmen--Elgin,
Baldwin, LaFontaine, Morin, Howe, and many others--who laid deep and
firm, beneath the political structure of this confederation, those
principles of self-government which give harmony to our constitutional
system and bring out the best qualities of an intelligent people. In
the early times in which they struggled they had to bear much obloquy,
and their errors of judgment have been often severely arraigned at the
bar of public opinion; many of them lived long enough to see how soon
men may pass into oblivion; but we who enjoy the benefit of their
earnest endeavours, now that the voice of the party passion of their
times is hushed, should never forget that, though they are not here to
reap the fruit of their labours, their work survives in the energetic
and hopeful communities which stretch from Cape Breton to Victoria.

CHAPTER XII

A COMPARISON OF SYSTEMS

In one of Lord Elgin's letters we are told that, when he had as
visitors to government house in 1850, Sir Henry Bulwer, the elder
brother of Lord Lytton, and British minister to the United States, as
well as Sir Edmund Head, his successor in the governorship of Canada,
he availed himself of so favourable an opportunity of reassuring them
on many points of the internal policy of the province on which they
were previously doubtful, and gave them some insight into the position
of men and things on which Englishmen in those days were too i