art, and of over-ruling protection on the part of
the Mother Country, and more a case of healthy and cordial alliance.
Instead of looking upon us as a merely dependent colony, England will
have in us a friendly nation--a subordinate but still a powerful
people--to stand by her in North America in peace or in war. The
people of Australia will be such another subordinate nation. And
England will have this advantage, if her colonies progress under the
new colonial system, as I believe they will, that though at war with
all the rest of the world, she will be able to look to the subordinate
nations in alliance with her, and owning allegiance to the same
Sovereign, who will assist in enabling her again to meet the whole
world in arms, as she has done before."[52]

These words serve as a fitting close to the argument and story of
Canadian autonomy. A review of the years in which it attained its full
strength {345} gives the student of history but a poor impression of
political foresight. British and Canadian Tories had predicted
dissolution of the Empire, should self-government be granted, and they
described the probable stages of dissolution. But all the events they
had predicted had happened, and the Empire still stood, and stood more
firmly united than before. British progressives had advocated the
grant, while they had denied that autonomy need mean more than a very
limited and circumscribed independence. But the floods had spread and
overwhelmed their trivial limitations, and the Liberals found
themselves triumphant in spite of their fears, and the restrictions
which these fears had recommended. Canadian history from 1839 to 1867
furnishes certain simple and direct political lessons: that communities
of the British stock can be governed only according to the strictest
principles of autonomy; that autonomy, once granted, may not be
limited, guided, or recalled; that, in the grant, all distinctions
between internal and imperial, domestic and diplomatic, civil authority
and military authority, made to save the face of British supremacy,
will speedily disappear; and that, up to the present time, the measure
of local independence has also been the measure of local loyalty {346}
to the mother country. It may well be that, as traditions grow
shadowy, as the old stock is imperceptibly changed into a new
nationality, and as, among men of the new nationality, the pride in
being British is no longer a natural incident of