ne
point in which, fearing the predominance of a French majority in Lower
Canada, he shrank from his own principles and recommended an unworkable
Union which tended to encourage the formation "of parties on the lines
of races." From the further allusion to the Federal Union of 1867, no
one would imagine that that great scheme was founded on a cessation of
racial antipathy inside the Quebec Province, and on a voluntary
recognition among all races and parties that it was best for that
Province to have a local autonomy of its own, parallel with that of the
Ontario Province and under the supreme central authority of the
Dominion.

[38] February 26, March 27, 1906.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ANALOGY

Let the reader endeavour to see the closely related stories of Ireland
and of these more distant communities as a whole, undistracted by the
varying degrees of their proximity to the Mother Country, making his
study one of men and laws, and remembering that Ireland was the first
and nearest of the British Colonies. Does not she become a convex
mirror, in which, swollen to unnatural proportions, the mistakes of two
centuries are reflected? Principles of government universal in their
nature, transcending geography, and painfully evolved in more distant
parts of the Empire, we have thrown to the winds in Ireland. Economic
evils, resembling, in however distant a degree, those of Ireland, have
irritated and retarded every community in which they have been allowed
to take root. A sound agrarian system has been the primary need of every
country. To take the closest parallel, if absentee proprietorship and
insecurity of tenure kept little Prince Edward Island, peacefully and
legally settled, backward and disturbed for a century, it is not
surprising that Ireland, submitted to confiscation, the Penal Code, and
commercial rum, did not flourish under a land system beside which that
of Prince Edward Island was a paradise. Tardy redress of the worst Irish
abuses is no defence of the system which created them and sustained them
with such ruinous results. No white community of pride and spirit would
willingly tolerate the grotesque form of Crown Colony administration,
founded on force, and now tempered by a kind of paternal State
Socialism, under which Ireland lives to-day. Unionism for Ireland is
anti-Imperialist. Its upholders strenuously opposed colonial autonomy,
and but yesterday were passionately opposing South African autonomy.
To