THE POLITICAL DESTINY OF CANADA. 



11 



cruited at home. Whether morality is embodied 

 in Bismarck or not, modern policy is ; and Bis- 

 marck seems not to covet distant dependencies ; 

 he prefers solid and concentrated power. 



"Commerce follows the flag," is a saying 

 which it seems can still be repeated by a states- 

 man ; but, like the notion that dependencies are 

 a source of military strength, it is a mere sur- 

 vival from a departed system. Commerce fol- 

 lowed the flag when the flag was that of a power 

 which enforced exclusive trading. But exclusive 

 trading has given way, as an imperial principle, 

 to free-trade, and the colonies, in the exercise of 

 their fiscal power of self-government, have dis- 

 solved the commercial unity of the empire. 

 They frame their independent tariffs, laying, in 

 some cases, heavy duties on English goods. It 

 will hardly be contended that, apart from com- 

 mercial legislation, colonial purchasers inquire 

 whether goods were produced under the British 

 flag. " The best customer," says Sir George 

 Lewis, " which a nation can have, is a thriving 

 and industrious community, whether it be de- 

 pendent or independent. The trade between 

 England and the United States is probably far 

 more profitable to the mother-country than it 

 would have been if they had remained in a state 

 of dependence upon her." As to Canada, what 

 she needs, and needs most urgently, is free ac- 

 cess to the market of her own continent, from 

 which, as a dependency of England, she is ex- 

 cluded by the customs-line. With free access to 

 the market of her own continent, she might be- 

 come a great manufacturing country ; but manu- 

 factures are now highly specialized, and to pro- 

 duce with advantage you must produce on a 

 large scale. Nor is the evil confined to manu- 

 factures; the farm-products of Canada are de- 

 preciated by exclusion from their natural mar- 

 ket, and the lumber -trade, which is her great 

 industry, will be in serious jeopardy, since, by 

 the fall of wages in the States, the production 

 of lumber there has been rendered nearly as 

 cheap as it is in Canada, while Canadian lumber 

 is subject to a heavy duty. The projects for 

 opening markets in Australia merely serve to 

 show how severely Canada feels the want of a 

 market close at hand. Cut off any belt of ter- 

 ritory commercially from the continent to which 

 it belongs, industry will be stunted, the inflow 

 of capital will be checked, and impoverishment 

 will follow isolation. The Canadians will find 

 this out in time, and the discovery will be the 

 •first step toward a change of system. 



It is true that Canada has drawn a good deal 



of British capital into works little remunerative 

 to the investors, though, perhaps, not more than 

 the United States and other countries with which 

 there was no political connection. But, if we 

 consider credit as well as. cash, the gain must be 

 pronounced doubtful, and it is balanced by such 

 a work as the Intercolonial Railway, into which 

 Canada has been led by imperial influence, and 

 which, after costing more than four millions ster- 

 ling, will, as some leading Canadian men of busi- 

 ness think, hardly " pay for the grease upon the 

 wheels." The Pacific Railway, and the indemnity 

 which Canada is forced to pay to British Colum- 

 bia for the non-performance of an impracticable 

 treaty, are too likely, in the opinion of many, to 

 furnish another illustration of the expensiveness 

 of the imperial connection. 



That emigration is favorably influenced by 

 political dependency is another lingering belief 

 which seems now to have no foundation in fact, 

 though it had in the days when emigration was a 

 government affair. The stream of emigration, in 

 ordinary times, sets, as has often been proved, 

 not toward Canada, but toward the United States ; 

 and of the emigrants who land in Canada a large 

 proportion afterward pass the line, while there is 

 a constant exodus of French-Canadians from their 

 own poor and overpeopled country (overpeopled 

 so long as it is merely agricultural) to the thriv- 

 ing industries and high wages of the States. Emi- 

 grants, whose object is to improve their material 

 condition, arc probably little influenced by politi- 

 cal considerations ; they go to the country which 

 offers the best openings and the highest wages ; 

 but English peasants and artisans would be likely, 

 if anything, to prefer the social elevation promised 

 them in a land of equality to anything like a rep- 

 etition of the social subjection in which they have 

 lived at home, while by the Irishman escape from 

 British rule is deemed escape from oppression. 



Whether the tutelage of the mother-country 

 has ever been useful to a colony, even in its in- 

 fancy, except where there was actual need of mili- 

 tary protection, is a question to which the lan- 

 guage of the adherents of the colonial system them- 

 selves, when reviewing the history of colonial 

 government, seems to suggest a negative reply. 

 " Hitherto," says Mr. Roebuck, " those of our 

 possessions termed colonies have not been gov- 

 erned according to any settled rule or plan. Ca- 

 price and chance have decided generally every- 

 thing connected with them ; and if success has in 

 any case attended the attempts of the English peo- 

 ple to establish colonies, that success has been ob- 

 tained in spite of the mischevious intermeddling 



