climbed up to them, and told them with
oratory that they now had a Prince who wore a blue coat and
white breeches, they grasped their rifles, and kissed wife and
children, and went down the mountain and offered their lives
in defense of the white coat and the dear old red breeches.

But did they forsake their relish of and devotion to their customary,
legendary Tyrolese liberties? No more will the Canadian masses, by
reason of their hearty participation in the war, incline to yield jot or
tittle of their usual, long-struggled-for, gradually acquired, valuable
and valued British self-governing rights. Can the Jingoes or
Centralizationists scare them backward? Or the Decentralizationists or
Separatists hurry them forward? Won't they just continue to "plug along"
as their forefathers did in the old country and in the new, gaining a
bit more freedom to do well or ill at their own collective choice--that
is, if the war result "as usual" in British security, according to
confident British expectation.

Such is the Canadian political situation. It has been essentially
similar any time within living memory. The people approve in politics
what they feel, instinctively, to be the profitable or the decent and
reasonable necessary next thing to do. Which signifies that those
controversialists are probably wrong who conceive that a result of the
war, if it be a win for the Allies, will cause any great formal change
in Canada's political relation to Great Britain.

The truly valuable change in such relations is already secured; it
cannot but become more notably established by future discussion; it is
and will be a change by reason of greatly increased influence on Great
Britain by Canada and the other Dominions. And it appears highly
probable that such inevitable change in influence or weight of the new
countries is sufficient for all sentiments concerned, and for all useful
purposes on behalf of which formal changes are advocated by doctrinaires
and idealists.

The British peoples have acquired by long practice in very various
politics a way of making existing arrangements "do" with some slight
patching. They are instinctively seized of the truth of Edmund Burke's
maxim, "Innovation is not improvement." They have "muddled along" into
precisely the institutions that suit any exigency, their sanest
political philosophers recognizing that the exigency must always be
most amenable to the most flexible system.