ational life in these young communities." He
was "possessed," he used the word advisedly, "with the idea that it
was possible to maintain on the soil of North America, and in the face
of Republican America, British connection and British institutions, if
you give the latter freely and trustingly." The history of Canada from
the day those words were penned down to the beginning of the twentieth
century proves their political wisdom. Under the inspiring influence
of responsible government Canada has developed in 1902, not into an
independent nation, as predicted by Lord John Russell and other
British statesmen after him, but into a confederation of five millions
and a half of people, in which a French Canadian prime minister gives
expression to the dominant idea not only of his own race but of all
nationalities within the Dominion, that the true interest lies not in
the severance but in the continuance of the ties that have so long
bound them to the imperial state.

Lord Elgin in his valuable letters to the imperial authorities, always
impressed on them the fact that the office of a Canadian
governor-general has not by any means been lowered to that of a mere
subscriber of orders-in-council--of a mere official automaton,
speaking and acting by the orders of the prime minister and the
cabinet. On the contrary, he gave it as his experience that in
Jamaica, where there was no responsible government, he had "not half
the power" he had in Canada "with a constitutional and changing
cabinet." With respect to the maintenance of the position and due
influence of the governor, he used language which gives a true
solution of the problem involved in the adaptation of parliamentary
government to the colonial system. "As the imperial government and
parliament gradually withdraw from legislative interference, and from
the exercise of patronage in colonial affairs, the office of governor
tends to become, in the most emphatic sense of the term, the link
which connects the mother country and the colony, and his influence
the means by which harmony of action between the local and imperial
authorities is to be preserved. It is not, however, in my humble
judgment, by evincing an anxious desire to stretch to the utmost
constitutional principles in his favour, but, on the contrary, by the
frank acceptance of the conditions of the parliamentary system, that
this influence can be most surely extended and confirmed. Placed by
his position above t