THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH

For a hundred years England's colonies have been distinctively
dependencies--self-governing dependencies, if you will, in the case of
Canada and Australia--but distinctively dependent on the Mother Country
for protection from attack by land and sea. Has the day come when
these colonies, are to be, not lesser, but greater nations--offshoots
of the parent stock but transcending in power and wealth the parent
stock--a United Kingdom of the Outer Meres, becoming to America and
Australasia what Great Britain has been to Europe?

Ten years ago this question would have been considered the bumptious
presumption of flamboyant fancy. It isn't so considered to-day.
Rather than a flight of fancy, the question is forced on thinking minds
by the hard facts of the multiplication table. Between 1897 and 1911
there came to Canada 723,424 British colonists; and since 1911 there
have come half a million more. At the outbreak of the war settlers of
purely British birth were pouring into Canada at the rate of two
hundred thousand a year. A continuation of this immigration means that
in half a century, not counting natural increase, there will be as many
colonists of purely British birth in Canada as there are Americans west
of the Mississippi, or as there were Englishmen in England in the days
of Queen Elizabeth. It means more--one-fourth of the United Kingdom
will have been transplanted overseas. If there be any doubt as to
whether the transplanting be permanent, it should be settled by
homestead entries. In one era of something less than three years out
of 351,530 men, women and children who came, sixty thousand entered for
homesteads. In other words, if each householder were married and had a
family of four, almost the entire immigration of 351,530 was absorbed