CENTRAL IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT. 347 



in her turn, to give a President to the vast Confedera 

 tion 5 and what a prize to run for does this at present 

 seem to a Canadian politician ? But independent of this 

 highest office, which few can reach, a thousand ways to 

 wealth and influence would be open before them, at or 

 through Washington, for which they now look in vain. 



That cause is safe which can contrive, generation after 

 generation, to enlist on its side the talent and ambition 

 of rising men. A system which naturally stands in the 

 way of, and opposes itself to, the highest strivings of all 

 the highest talent of successive generations, is sure to 

 become weaker as the power increases which the posses 

 sors of this talent can bring to bear against it. 



We have given parliaments and assemblies to nume 

 rous colonies ; and though the material interests they 

 severally wield are for the most part puny as yet, in 

 comparison with those which are directed by the British 

 Parliament, they are hourly increasing in individual 

 importance, and in a very few years will, taken together, 

 equal all else which our Houses of Lords and Commons 

 hold under their control. Could we, while time still 

 amply remains, organise a central assemblage in which 

 each of these colonies or parliaments should be repre 

 sented, we should at once cement together, by a new 

 bond, all the scattered elements of our power, and open 

 up to the gifted and aspiring of the whole Empire a far 

 wider career than even the Home Parliament now pre 

 sents one in which all who are fitted to rise would 

 equally attain their level, whether born amid the snows 

 of Canada and New Brunswick, beneath the fiery suns 

 of India, in the wide Cape colonies, in Australasia, or in 

 what we patriotically fancy our happier island homes. 

 The sphere which Washington offers, though broad and 

 bright in North American eyes, would dwindle in com 

 parison with one on which the sun never sets, and in 

 which the prizes of a large army, a magnificent navy, a 



