264 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 



future. It afforded at this time, as it had afford 

 ed earlier, and would afford later, a transition 

 topic from controversies in which the mother- 

 country was the chief protagonist against the 

 United States to those in which the British- 

 American provinces held the leading position. 

 Not the least important of the results which are 

 traceable in a distinct if not a wholly decisive 

 way to the influence of the desperate war in the 

 United States, was the great political transfor 

 mation in British America made effective by 

 the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867. 

 This was a capital event in the history of the 

 relations of the English-speaking peoples of the 

 earth and to it our attention must be for a time 

 directed. 



