onstitutions in the last quarter
of the eighteenth century, and all the Australasian Colonies similarly
honoured in the nineteenth century, were placed in direct relation to
the British Crown and in isolation from one another. Upper Canada had no
political ties with Lower Canada, Nova Scotia none with New Brunswick,
Victoria none with Tasmania. Several abortive schemes were proposed at
one time or another for the Federation of the North American Colonies,
but the first measure of amalgamation, namely, the union of the two
Canadas in 1840, was a step in the wrong direction, and bore, as I have
shown, a marked resemblance, particularly in the motives which dictated
it, to the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. It was a compulsory
Union, imposed by the Mother Country, and founded on suspicion of the
French. So far from being Federal, it was a clumsy and unworkable
Legislative Union of the two Provinces, which lasted as long as it did
only because the principle of responsible government, established in
1847, covered a multitude of sins. The somewhat similar attempt in
Australia in 1843 to amalgamate the two settlements of Port Phillip,
afterwards Victoria, and New South Wales, at a time when each had
evolved a distinct individuality of its own, was defeated by the
strenuous opposition of the Port Phillip colonists, and revoked in 1850.

Meanwhile, all aspirations after Federation in the outlying parts of the
Empire were discouraged by the home authorities. The most practical plan
of all, Sir George Grey's great scheme of South African Federation in
1859, was nipped in the bud. Canada eventually led the way. The failure
of the Canadian Union brought about its dissolution in 1867 by the
Provinces concerned, under the sanction of Great Britain (an example of
really sensible "dismemberment"), and their voluntary Federation as
Ontario and Quebec, together with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, under
the collective title of the Dominion of Canada, and the subsequent
inclusion in this Federation of all the North American Provinces with
the exception of Newfoundland.

Note, at the outset, that this Federation differed from that of the
United States in being founded on the recognition of an organic relation
with an external suzerain authority--an authority which the Americans
had abjured in framing their independent Republic. In the matter of
constitutional relations with Great Britain, the Dominion of Canada now
assumed, in its coll