. The legislative union was Lord Durham's plan of
assimilating the races that he had found "warring in the bosom of a
single state." The plan had failed. The line of cleavage was as
sharply defined as ever. The ill-assorted union had produced only
strife and misunderstanding. Yet to break the tie when new duties and
new dangers had emphasized the necessity for union seemed to be an act
of folly. To federalize the union was to combine the advantage of
common action with liberty to each community to work out its own
ideals in education, municipal government and all other matters of
local concern. More than that, to federalize the union was to
substitute for a rigid bond a bond elastic enough to allow of
expansion, eastward to the Atlantic and westward to the Pacific. That
principle which has been called provincial rights, or provincial
autonomy, might be described more accurately and comprehensively as
federalism; and it is the basic principle of Canadian political
institutions, as essential to unity as to peace and local freedom.

The feeble, isolated and distracted colonies of 1864 have given place
to a commonwealth which, if not in strictness a nation, possesses all
the elements and possibilities of nationality, with a territory open
on three sides to the ocean, lying in the highway of the world's
commerce, and capable of supporting a population as large as that of
the British Islands. Confederation was the first and greatest step in
that process of expansion, and it is speaking only words of truth and
soberness to say that confederation will rank among the landmarks of
the world's history, and that its importance will not decline but will
increase as history throws events into their true perspective. It is
in his association with confederation, with the events that led up to
confederation, and with the addition to Canada of the vast and fertile
plains of the West, that the life of George Brown is of interest to
the student of history.

Brown was not only a member of parliament and an actor in the
political drama, but was the founder of a newspaper, and for
thirty-six years the source of its inspiration and influence. As a
journalist he touched life at many points. He was a man of varied
interests--railways, municipal affairs, prison reform, education,
agriculture, all came within the range of his duty as a journalist and
his interest and sympathy as a man. Those stout-hearted men who amid
all the wrangling and intri