British race; it was a foreshadowing of the happy time when this
governing and triumphant people would give the world the blessing of
the pax Britannica. "We are not yet," said Ruskin in his inaugural
address, "dissolute in temper but still have the firmness to govern
and the grace to obey." In this address he preached that if England
was not to perish, "she must found colonies as fast and far as she
is able," while for the residents of these colonies "their chief
virtue is to be fidelity to their country (i.e. England) and their
first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea."
Seely got rid of all problems of relationship and of status by
expanding England to take in all the colonies; the British Empire
was to become a single great state on the model of the United
States. "Here, too," he said, "is a great homogeneous people, one
in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a
boundless space." Such a conception was vastly agreeable to the more
aggressive and assertive among the English Canadians. It kindled
their imagination; from being colonists of no account in the
backwash of the world's affairs, they became integrally a part of a
great Imperial world-wide movement of expansion and domination; were
they not of what Chamberlain called "that proud, persistent,
self-asserting and resolute stock which is infallibly destined to be
the predominating force in the future history and civilization of
the world"? Moreover, it gave them a sense of their special
importance here in Canada where the population was not "homogeneous
in blood, language and religion;" it was for them, they felt, to
direct policy and to control events; to take charge and see that
developments were in keeping with suggestions from headquarters
overseas.

What these Canadian parties to the great Imperial drive thought of