ery
forefront of the drive for the consolidation of the Empire. The
English-speaking Canadians were traditionally and aggressively
British. The basic population in the English provinces was United
Empire Loyalist, which absorbed and colored all later accretions
from the Motherland--an immigration which in its earlier stages was
also largely militarist following the reduction of the army
establishment upon the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. It was
inspired with a traditional hostility to the American republic. The
hereditary devotion to the British Crown, of which Victoria to the
passing generations appeared to be the permanent and unchanging
personification, threw into eclipse the corresponding sentiment in
England. English-speaking Canadians were more British than the
British; they were more loyal than the Queen. One can get an
admirable idea of the state of Ontario feeling in the addresses at
the various U.E. L. celebrations in the year 1884; in both its
resentments and its affections there was something childish and
confiding.

Imperialism, on its sentimental side, was a glorification of the
British race; it was a foreshadowing of the happy time when this
governing and triumphant people would give the world the blessing of
the pax Britannica. "We are not yet," said Ruskin in his inaugural
address, "dissolute in temper but still have the firmness to govern
and the grace to obey." In this address he preached that if England
was not to perish, "she must found colonies as fast and far as she
is able," while for the residents of these colonies "their chief
virtue is to be fidelity to their country (i.e. England) and their
first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea."
Seely got rid of all problems of relationship and of status by
expanding England to take in all the colonies; the British Empire
was to become a single great state on the model of the United
States. "Here, too," he said, "is a great homogeneous people, one
in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a
boundless space." Such a conception was vastly agreeable to the more
aggressive and assertive among the English Canadians. It kindled
their imagination; from being colonists of no account in the
backwash of the world's affairs, they became integrally a part of a
great Imperial world-wide movement of expansion and domination; were
they not of what Chamberlain called "that proud, persistent,
self-asserting and resolute s