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A BRIEF FOR CONTINENTAL UNITY.
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through the Suez Canal, open all the year round.

It must be remembered also that the continental countries of Europe are separated by a barrier that the history of the world from the time of label has proved to be almost insuperable the difference of language. The only really distinctive Canada is the old Canada of the French, of which Quebec and the quaint villages along the St. Lawrence are the historic remnants, a mediæval province, in which the street cars and telegraphs strike one as something strange and out of harmony. The English cities and provinces of the Dominion could all be dropped into New York and Massachusetts without one's discovering any in congraity. They are not English; they are American, only a little sleepier than most American cities of the same size.

The isolation enforced upon communities by the conservation of distinct tongues is shown in Canada, where the French hove remained French, after a century of commingled commercial interests with the English and a common citizenship. Europe, on the other hand, contains a wonderful example in the German Empire of different elements, springing from a common stock, only held apart by political and superficial diversities, being forged together by the genius of one man, and the sympathy of a common tongue, into one of the greatest of nations. The English speaking race on this continent has the same advantages. It has the same language, the same ideals and fundamental principles of law and religion, and behind all this there is the force of commerce impelling it onward to a complete unification. Mr. Gladstone, in a recent public utterance, said that he thought in another century the American people would number six hundred millions, and to them must be committed the conservation of that civilization England has built up by centuries of effort. Canada could not want a better national future than to form a part of such a nation.

Professor Goldwin Smith, throughout the whole agitation for and against the political union of Canada and the United States, has taken the most independent and rational view, pandering neither to the blatant partisans of the Canadian or Imperial Government, nor to the Anglophobists, who are as strong in the Dominion as in an Irish ward in New York City; and nothing could be more clear and convincing than what he writes in "Canada and the Canadian Question" on this subject. He is eminently practical and unprejudiced, avoiding the pitfall of reckless over-zealous championship, and of wavering incertitude and concession to nebulous sentiment. He does not wait to see which way the "cat is going to jump": he is one of the few public men in the Dominion who can afford to have convictions, or at least avow them. He says:

"Annexation is an ugly word; it seems to convey the idea of force or pressure applied to the smaller state, not of free, equal, and honorable union, like that between England and Scotland. Yet there is no reason why the union of the two sections of the English-speaking people on this continent should not be as free, as equal, and as honorable as the union of England and Scotland. We would rather say their reunion than their union, for before their unhappy schism they were one people. Nothing but the historical accident of a civil war ending in secession, instead of amnesty, has made them two. When the Anglo-Saxons of England and those of Scotland were reunited they had been many centuries apart: those of the United States and Canada have been separated for one century only. The Anglo-Saxons of England and Scotland had the memory of many wars to estrange them; the Anglo-Saxons of Canada and the United States have the memory, since their separation, only of one war. That a union of Canada with the American Commonwealth, like that into which Scotland entered with England, would in itself be attended with great advantages cannot be questioned, whatever may be the considerations or the other side, or the reasons for delay. It would give to the inhabitants of the whole continent as complete a security for peace and immunity from war taxation as is likely to be attained by any community or group of communities on this side of the millenium. Canadians almost with one voice say that it would greatly raise the value of property in Canada: in other words, that it would bring with it a great increase of prosperity. The writer has seldom heard this seriously disputed, while he has heard it admitted in the plainest terms by men who were strongly opposed to union on political or sentimental grounds, and who had spent their lives in the service of separation. . . . The Americans, on the other hand, would gain in full proportion as England gains by her commercial unions with Wales and Scotland. These inducements are always present to the minds of the Canadian people, and they are specially present when the trade of Canada, with the rest of the continent, is barred by such legislation as the McKinley Act, when her security is threatened by the
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