from the Great British Commonwealth. But he was a trifle cynical
about the young nation, just as Disraeli was fifty years ago when he said
that "these colonies would yet be a millstone about Britain's neck".
Neither of them was more cynical about us than we usually are about
ourselves, never in theory, but in practice.

Most of the men sketched in the foregoing pages, as well as hundreds of
others in public life, realize that Parliament and Legislatures have a
hard time to keep themselves from going to the devil, and that so far as
they go along that road the nation travels with them. As an experiment
in nationhood we have some peculiar and original weaknesses, as well as
strengths. Belgium, for instance, could be tacked by Atlas overnight on
to one of our northward coasts, or set down as an island in some of our
northern waters, when only a geographer would notice the difference.
Belgium has a king and two million more people than Canada. We have
slightly more territory than the United States, when New York State alone
has as many people as our whole country. We are as big as many Britains
and we have enough railway mileage to make Britain a spider-web, when our
population is about one-fifth of hers and our ultimate authority in
democratic government comes from Downing Street. Yet there are prophets
among us who predict that we shall yet be the pivot of the Empire.

Once you begin to speculate about the future of this country there is no
end. And the past of the nation has rather little to do with estimating
its future. We have been a wide-open immigration country. In twenty
years we have transformed ourselves by a foreign policy with which
Britain had nothing to do. Twenty years more and we could do it again
with even more disastrous results. In 1867 the great compromise known as
Confederation tied four and a half millions of people into a political
unity. In half a century we doubled our population; built 30,000 miles
of transcontinental and branch lines of railway; made ourselves a race
congress imitation of the United States; enacted a National Policy of
protective tariffs that failed to protect us from ourselves; created an
Oriental problem on the Pacific, exaggerated a race problem on the
Ottawa, and developed an American-penetration system clear across the
country; sent a small army to help establish a similar government and
dual problem to our own in South Africa and a huge army to Europe to help
m