Newcastle—"As to our American possessions I have long held and often expressed the opinion that they are a sort of damnosa hereditas; and when your Grace and the Prince of Wales were employing yourselves so successfully in conciliating the colonists I thought you were drawing closer ties which might better be slackened if there were any chance of their slipping away altogether." Sixty years after that another Prince of Wales came to Canada; the ties had not slackened much in the meantime, though we had had responsible government all the time and self-government had been widening all these years (applause).

What are the considerations which make for the unity of the empire... Every influence that operated in August, 1914, is in full vigor today. All those spiritual ties, the common flag, the common language and literature and laws Which we had in August, 1914, we have still. This is the morrow of the war. We are all exhausted by the strain and labors of the terrible sacrifice and there is a temptation to disparage what the war meant to us, but no one who has any imagination or any knowledge of human nature or has read history with discernment can question that the result of such a war, fought for such a cause, won by the valor of citizen soldiers must mean a permanent enrichment of all the basic qualities of citizenship, and must permanently reinforce the foundations upon which the commonwealth rests (applause). Those memories of the war are common to us all. Therefore all we had before the war in the way of sentiment and spiritual ties are enormously strengthened today. We have, therefore, the heritage of the past and the common sacrifice of the present to unite us. More than that we have the common aspirations of the future (hear, hear).

I know that it is rather the custom to speak of the war now as simply a great catastrophe and to say that the world is as it was before the war only worse; but I believe that looking back through the perspective of the years we shall see that the war was a great turning point in human history; and does mean a definite break in the old order. The characteristic of the old order which I believe is passing away, though it has not passed away and is dying hard, was the aggrandisement of peoples, nations, in a military sense or in a commercial sense. It was the nation which was first and everything was for the glory of the nation and those persons who were more intimately connected with its government. The new order is for the enlargement of individual life, and the bettering of the life of the common people of whom Lincoln said that the Lord must love them since He made so many of them; and this common ideal by which the British dominions are animated will give us a new bond of union which will reinforce those historic ties which have proved their enduring worth.

In a future dedicated to such tasks can we not count upon the friendship and co-operation of that great sister-nation kindred to ourselves, with the same blood-strains, who are of us by virtue of their past and of their common sacrifice in the defence of Anglo-Saxon civilization? In the ampler air of the new day the break in the historic continuity of their association with the kindred English-speaking nations will appear a very little thing; and the fact that they express their national views and policies in different form of government, a matter of no consequence at all. May we not then hope that in the society of English-speaking nations, in whose solidarity the hopes of the race and perhaps the future of the world are bound up, an honored place may be found by the side of the Motherland, now first among equals, for the great Republic of the United States of America.