[wrong] fifty years OF CONFEDERATION 67 



point, and he will not be likely to shrink from the obligations which 

 equality involves. 



It is useful to glance at the future. What changes will our 

 descendants be celebrating in 1967 ? The first question that we are 

 interested in asking is what will be the population of Canada in 1967 ? 

 Roughly speaking Canada is just one hundred years behind the 

 United States in numbers. In 1900 Canada had almost the same 

 number of people that the United States had in 1800. In 1867, 

 the United States had rather more than thirty-five million people 

 and it is perhaps fair to estimate that in 1967 Canada will have about 

 the same number. That is to say, during the next fifty years, we may 

 expect to secure a population nearly as numerous as that of France 

 at the present time. We may find the parallel with the United States 

 illusive. During the last fifty years, we have barely doubled our 

 population. It is, however, likely that the future rate will be more 

 rapid and probably there will be at least thirty million people in 

 Canada fifty years from now. 



With this prospect we may ask what is our equipment for taking 

 rank as a great nation ? The answer is that we have a self-reliant 

 people, who, as the war has shown, are fit, in respect to manly quali- 

 ties, to consider themselves the equals of any other people in the world. 

 It is something that the war has demonstrated our genuine virility. 

 We have the material for developing a powerful state and it remains 

 to achieve this task. We cannot begin too soon to complete the fabric 

 of a national life, to make the theoretical coincide with the actual, 

 and to give Canada the full rank of nation side by side and in union 

 with the sister nation of Great Britain. Probably the most general 

 political aspiration of Canadians at the present time is to free them- 

 selves even from the suspicion of being any longer a colony. 



There is a ferment in respect to these things all over the British 

 Empire, as much in Great Britain itself as in Canada; and nowhere 

 more than in Great Britain is it understood that the old colonial 

 system is dead except in respect to the minor states in the Empire, 

 too small to have a national life of their own. Fifty years ago, other 

 aspects of our relations with Great Britain were in evidence. That was 

 no time for scattered and feeble colonies, just united in face of an 

 armed and triumphant nation on their south, to talk of equality with 

 the great state which protected them. The intervening half century 

 has brought a national temper to succeed the colonial. What will 

 the next half century bring forth ? Will it be a world-wide federated 

 Empire in which states on every continent, Canada in America, Great 

 Britain in Europe, the South African union in Africa, Australia, a 



