[WILLIAMS] SECOND PRESIDENT LINCOLN 141 



Canada pays no tribute and owes no obedience to England; she 

 frames her own tariff, and when that tariff conflicts with some old 

 treaty that England had made which in form bound Canada, she 

 insists that it be denounced and denounced it is. 



Canada has her own Army and her own Navy commanded by 

 Canadians; she put half a million men under arms in the last war, 

 and sixty thousand of them made the supreme sacrifice- — the Mother 

 Country could not call upon her for a man or a dollar except as 

 Glendower could call spirits from the vasty deep. "But will they 

 come?" said the sceptical Hotspur. Canadian soldiers crossed the 

 sea in 1914 and following years until 1918 as Canadians, with Can- 

 adian uniforms, Canadian rifles, Canadian horses, Canadian cannon, 

 Canadian ammunition, under Canadian officers paid by the Canadian 

 Government and cared for by Canadian doctors and Canadian 

 nurses. And w^hen Canadians were dying for freedom and democracy 

 their government demanded a part in determining the course of the 

 struggle; Canada's Prime Minister joined the Prime Ministers of the 

 other self-governing Dominions and the Prime Minister of Britain in 

 a War Cabinet on equal terms and with equal authority, and the War 

 Cabinet directed the war on behalf of the British Empire. Canada 

 took part in negotiating the Peace Treaty and signed it as a party 

 after a vain protest against Article X; her representatives joined 

 Australia in refusing to consent to a declaration of Japanese equality 

 and fought England and the United States to a standstill on the 

 question; her Parliament approved the Treaty with the reservation 

 of the right to have it amended; she has taken a prominent part at 

 Geneva and pays no heed to the wishes of England where these con- 

 flict with her own interests. Canada is an independent self-governing 

 nation but she will not allow anything to separate her from the rest 

 of the British world. She is British to the last drop of her blood and 

 intends to remain so. England has not for many a day ruled, and 

 never will, rule Canada. She may try it when Ab'm Linkum becomes 

 President of the United States, but assuredly not a minute sooner. 



All of which is unintelligible to the lawyer who reads the Statutes 

 only; but is a living truth, the glory and the pride of Canadians. 

 When the lawyer is puzzled beyond all bearing let him contemplate 

 little Onyx with her gay stockings on the White House lawn." 



