und Table_, will
conclude that extraordinary progress has been made towards racial
reunion, and that in this respect no serious peril threatens South
Africa. The settlement, by friendly compromise at the end of the last
session, of the very thorny question of language in the education of
children, is a good example of what good-will can accomplish under free
institutions. By a laboured construction of fragments of speeches culled
from the utterances of exceptionally vehement partisans, it would be
still possible to make up a theory of the "disloyalty" of the South
African Dutch. It would have been equally possible for a painstaking
British student of the _Sydney Bulletin_ within recent memory to start a
panic over the imminent "loss" of Australia. Some people think that
Canada is as good as "lost" now. Yet the Empire has never been so strong
or so united as to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] Cd. 2479, 1905.

[36] Cd. 2400, 1905.

[37] "It is true that in the case of Canada full responsible government
was conceded, a few years after a troublous period culminating in a
brief armed rising, to a population composed of races then not very
friendly to each other, though now long since happily reconciled. But
the Canadas had by that time enjoyed representative institutions for
over fifty years, the French-Canadians had since the year 1763 been
continuously British subjects, and the disorders which preceded Lord
Durham's Mission and the subsequent grant of self-government could not
compare in any way with a war like that of 1899-1902. It is also the
fact that in the United Colony of Upper and Lower Canada, during the
period of 1840-1867, parties were formed mainly upon the lines of races,
and that, as the representatives of the races were in number nearly
balanced, stability of Government was not attained, a difficulty which
was not overcome until the Federation of 1867, accompanied by the
relegation of provincial affairs to provincial Legislatures, placed the
whole political Constitution of Canada upon a wider basis."

Few would gather from the first sentence that the races were "not very
friendly to each other" precisely because they lived under a coercive
political system; and that, in the long-run, they were "happily
reconciled" because they received responsible government. Nor could it
be deduced from the obscure reference lower down to the union of the two
Provinces that the Union was the one blot upon Durham's scheme, the o