[RoURINOT] A STUDY IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS 5 
South Africa, which Mr. Lucas has well described, in his introduction to 
his edition of Sir George Cornewall Lewis's Government of Dependencies, 
“as a congeries of British provinces in different stages of dependence on 
the mother country, intermixed with protected territories and indepen- 
dent states,” the federal idea has necessarily taken no practical form, and 
it is not likely to do so for many years to come, though something has 
been gained by the establishment of a customs union between some of the 
political divisions of a great country with enormous possibilities before it. 
No doubt the Australian and other delegates who visited Canada 
took away with them some well-formed impressions of the value of federal 
union that will have effect sooner or later upon the legislation of their 
respective countries. Travelling, as many of them did, over the Dominion, 
from the new and flourishing city of Vancouver, on the Pacific coast, to 
the ancient capital of Quebec, on the St. Lawrence, and even to the old 
seaport of Halifax, on the Atlantic shores of the maritime provinces, they 
could not fail to be deeply interested by the great wealth of natural 
resources and the many evidences of national growth which they saw in 
the rich mineral districts of British Columbia, in the fertile prairies of the 
Northwest, in the fairly prosperous cities, towns and agricultural settle- 
ments of the premier province of Ontario, in the enterprising and hand- 
some city of Montreal, which illustrates the industrial and commercial enter- 
prise of Canada above all other important centres of population, in the 
abundant fisheries and mines of the maritime provinces, and in the large 
‘facilities that are everywhere given for education, from the common 
school to the university. But the most instructive fact of Canadian 
development, in the opinion of statesmen, would be undoubtedly the suc- 
cessful accomplishment of a federal union throughout a vast territory, 
reaching from ocean to ocean, embracing nearly one-half the continent of 
America, and divided by nature into divisions where diverse and even 
antagonistic interests had been created during the century that had elapsed 
between the formation of their separate provincial governments and the 
establishment of confederation, which has brought them out of their polit- 
ical isolation and given a community of interest to all of British North 
America, except Newfoundland. This great island, which has been well 
described “as a huge bastion thrown out into the north Atlantic which, 
if duly fortified and armed, could be made the Gibraltar of the surround- 
ing seas,” ! has stood selfishly aloof, and is now suffering under conditions 
of financial and commercial adversity and political embarrassment which 
could never have occurred had it, years ago, formed a part of the Canadian 
confederation ; but there is still reason to hope that, after years of isola- 
tion, it, too, must ere long yield, like the old province of Canada, to the 


1 The Rev. Dr. Moses Harvey, F.R.S.C., the well-known historian of the island, 
in Baedeker’s Canada, p. 99. 
