teroom inquired ironically, "That so?" and the speaker
felt advised to turn to more immediate considerations.

He said he had had the great pleasure on his arrival in this country
to find a political party, the party in power, their Canadian Liberal
party, taking initiative in a cause which he was sure they all had
at heart--the strengthening of the bonds between the colonies and the
mother country. He congratulated the Liberal party warmly upon having
shown themselves capable of this great function--a point at which he was
again interrupted; and he recapitulated some of the familiar arguments
about the desirability of closer union from the point of view of the
army, of the Admiralty, and from one which would come home, he knew, to
all of them, the necessity of a dependable food supply for the mother
country in time of war. Here he quoted a noble lord. He said that he
believed no definite proposals had been made, and he did not understand
how any definite proposals could be made; for his part, if the new
arrangement was to be in the nature of a bargain, he would prefer to
have nothing to do with it.

"England," he said, loftily, "has no wish to buy the loyalty of her
colonies, nor, I hope, has any colony the desire to offer her allegiance
at the price of preference in British markets. Even proposals for mutual
commercial benefit may be underpinned, I am glad to say, by loftier
principles than those of the market-place and the counting-house."

At this one of his hearers, unacquainted with the higher commercial
plane, exclaimed, "How be ye goin' to get 'em kept to, then?"

Hesketh took up the question. He said a friend in the audience asked
how they were to ensure that such arrangements would be adhered to. His
answer was in the words of the Duke of Dartmoor, "By the mutual esteem,
the inherent integrity, and the willing compromise of the British race."

Here someone on the back benches, impatient, doubtless, at his own
incapacity to follow this high doctrine, exclaimed intemperately, "Oh,
shut up!" and the gathering, remembering that this, after all, was
not what it had come for, began to hint that it had had enough in
intermittent stamps and uncompromising shouts for "Murchison!"

Hesketh kept on his legs, however, a few minutes longer. He had a
trenchant sentence to repeat to them which he thought they would take as
a direct message from the distinguished nobleman who had uttered it.
The Marquis of Aldeburgh was