I9OI-2 TRANSACTIONS. 95 



in Canada as to that of the mother-country ; because that the 

 prerogatives of the Crown, so far as they intersect the domain 

 of colonial legislative powers, are as amenable to par- 

 liamentary control here as they ^re in England, is a matter 

 of which every political student is cognizant. But our 

 forefathers did not obtain the proud measure of constitutional 

 liberty that lies behind that declaration without a series of 

 conflicts which searched the very marrow of the stuff whereof 

 they were made. Only in the travail of great souls may civil 

 liberty be born. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick we 

 repeated, in miniature, the post-Conquest history of Constitu. 

 tion-building in England, starting with a sort of Curia Regis^ 

 represented by an autocratic Governor and his Council, and end- 

 ing with a form of representative Government which bears upon 

 it the hall-mark of the truest freedom. In Prince Edward 

 Island the attainment of a similar boon was complicated and 

 retarded by a system of landlordism which reproduced some of 

 the worst features of feudal tenures in the middle ages. In 

 the two Canadas it was in the dispensation of Providence that 

 civil war should lay its baleful shadow over the land before 

 the people should be privileged to greet the coming of free 

 political institutions in the train of 'white-robed Peace'. 

 And so in these detached provinces were laid the found- 

 tion-stones of constitutional liberty and self-reliance upon 

 which the great Dominion was thereafter to be built by 

 the genius of native statesmen. Was not their conception of 

 a federal State the best possible cement to unite tliese se- 

 gregated political crystals? And may I not justly ask if the 

 world has ever seen better nation-building than theirs, and 

 that, too, in the face of obstacles which to the mind of the 

 speculative publicist seemed wholly insurmountable ? 



And so I am brought to conclude the examination of my 

 theme with the observation that inasmuch as the executive 

 power of Government is now in the hands of the Cabinet, 

 both Lord Salisbury in England and Sir Wilfred Laurier in 

 Canada have more concern with the maxim Rex non potest 



