a measure which, if suddenly put in operation, would seriously injure New Brunswick merchants; and he urged as a reason for due consideration for that interest, that it was not represented in Parliament. Mr. Gladstone did not condescend to give any explanation or reply, but led his willing majority to the vote, and the Bill was passed.

People sometimes cite what occurred at this debate as a proof that “Judge Haliburton was not a success in the House of Commons;” but it is difficult to imagine a more uncongenial audience for an advocate of Imperial Unity.

Gladstone, as if to remove any doubt as to his animus in these proceedings, sent a singularly insolent reply to a letter written to him by a New Brunswick timber merchant protesting against this unexpected measure. “You protest, as well as remonstrate. Were I to critically examine your language, I could not admit your right, even individually, to protest against any legislation which Parliament may think fit to adopt on this matter.” Had the protest only been in the form of dynamite he would have submissively bowed down at the sound of that “chapel bell” which has since then from time to time called him and his cabinets to repentance. His two attempts to destroy the Empire, first by attacking its extremities through Imperial disintegration, and, next, its heart by Home Rule, alike failed; and he has retired from public life, leaving behind him the fragments, not of a great Empire, but of a shattered party.

Though a majority of both parties, Conservatives as well as Liberals, agreed with their two leaders in their wish to get rid of the Colonies, (for Disraeli, as far back as 1852, wrote, “These wretched Colonies will all be independent in a few years, and are a millstone around our neck”), the people were wiser and more patriotic than their politicians; and in 1869 (only four years after Judge Haliburton’s death) over one hundred and four thousand workingmen of London signed an address to the Queen protesting against any attempt to get rid of that heritage of the people of England—the Colonial Empire. This memorial was not considered worthy of any reply or acknowledgment.^[8] At that time, when the fate of England as a first-class power was in the balance, there was no need for the masses to be “educated up” to the subject; it was rather their statesmen and politicians that required to be educated down—down to the common sense of the common people.

The next move against the Disintegrationists was made four years later, in 1872, when “The United Empire Review” revived the now familiar watchword of the old “U. E. Loyalists” of 1776 (those Abe Lincolns, who fought for the Union a hundred years ago), “a United Empire;” and in 1873 an agitation was begun in the Premier’s own constituency (Greenwich) against the dismemberment policy of the Government, that six months later drove them out of power at the general election.

While Gladstone was deliberately striving to breed disunion between the people of England, Scotland, Ireland and “gallant little Wales,” and to get rid of our Colonial Empire, his exact antipodes in everything, Bismarck, that Colossus of the Nineteenth Century, was devoting his giant energies to his life-work,—the unity of Germany, and the creation of a German Colonial Empire. It is possible that, as Sam Slick’s works are among his favorite books, he may have imbibed to some extent Sam Slick’s ideas as to the value of our colonies, and the incredible folly of those that wished to get rid of them; and that we may here find a clue to the unmeasured contempt which the Prince used so often to openly express for English politicians. But he must have been most interested in Rule and Misrule of the English in America, one of the most profoundly philosophical and prophetic works to be found in the literature of any country. Published in England, and by Harper Brothers, New York, in 1851, a troubled time all over Europe, and even in America, which had its Tammany Hall rule, and, later on, its “Know-nothing Movement,” it pointed out that American republican institutions, which dated back to the old Puritans, were of slow growth, and could not be acquired or preserved in European countries by revolutions and universal suffrage; and he foretold the collapse of the French Republic, the rise of Communism, the stern rule of self-imposed Imperialism, and nearly all the leading features of the political history of Europe and America since that date.

Time, however, had a marvel in store, the fruit of half a century of social and political development, which even he did not foresee—a French-Canadian Roman Catholic, supported by a Liberal majority from Quebec, ruling from ocean to ocean over a new Dominion!

Some of his views, visionary as they may have appeared fifty years ago, seem to have taken a practical shape at the Queen’s Jubilee.

“The organization is all wrong. They are two people, but not one. It shouldn’t be England and her colonies, but they should be integral parts of one great whole—all counties of Great Britain. There should be no tax on colonial produce, and the colonies should not be allowed to tax British manufactures. All should pass free, as from one town to another in England; the whole of it one vast home market from Hong-Kong to Labrador. . . . They should be represented in Parliament, help to pass English laws, and show them what laws they want themselves. It should no more be a bar to a man’s promotion, as it is now, that he lived beyond the sea, than being on the other side of the channel. It should be our navy, our army, our nation. That’s a great word, but the English keep it to themselves, and colonists have no nationality. They have no place, no station, no rank. Honors don’t reach them; coronations are blank days to them; no brevets go across the water except to the English officers, who are ‘on foreign service in the colonies.’ No knighthood is known there—no stars—no aristocracy—no nobility. They are a mixed race; they have no blood. They are like our free niggers. They are emancipated, but they haven’t the same social position as the whites. The fetters are off, but the caste, as they call it in India, remains. Colonists are the Pariahs of the Empire.”

Many persons have been surprised that the ablest colonial statesman and journalist since the days of Franklin, the Hon. Joseph Howe, “the father of Responsible Government,” and an advocate of the Unity of the Empire, died without having received any mark of Imperial recognition, while a motley crowd of Maltese, Levantines and stray Englishmen in the colonies were able to add a handle to their unknown names. That this was the case need not surprise us, for the dispensing of such favors was (and we must trust no longer is) in the hands of those who were able, from behind the scenes, to pull the strings of the Dismemberment movement.

The Rev. George Grant, D.D., in a very able address at Halifax, on the life and times of Joseph Howe, said:

“We are, all of us, pupils of Haliburton and Howe. Is not this a proof that, if you would know those secrets of the future which slumber in the recesses of a nation’s thought, unawakened as yet into consciousness, you must look for them in the utterances of the nation’s greatest sons?”

Before closing this sketch it is but right to mention an instance (the only one) in which the British Government seemed disposed to pay a tribute to the ablest author and the most profound thinker that the Colonial Empire has