gishness, added a rankling, poisonous sense of shame to our
humiliation. That the same year saw further electoral privileges
extended to the humble classes in England, beyond what even the last
Reform Bill had conferred, which might prove of advantage afterwards,
but was an imperfect consolation at the time. Another grief fell upon
the Queen in this year in the early death of Leopold, Duke of Albany,
a Prince whose intellectual gifts were nearly allied to those of his
father, but on whom lifelong delicacy of health had enforced a life
of comparative quietude. His widowed bride and infant children have
ever since been cared for tenderly by his royal mother.

[Illustration: Duchess of Albany. _From a Photograph by A. BASSANO,
Bond Street, W._]

CHAPTER VIII.

OUR COLONIES.

[Illustration: Sydney Heads.]

If now we turn our eyes a while from the foreign and domestic
concerns of Great Britain proper, and look to the Greater Britain
beyond the seas, we shall find that its progress has nowise lagged
behind that of the mother Isle. To Lord Durham, the remarkable man
sent out in 1838 to deal with the rebellion in Lower Canada, we owe
the inauguration of a totally new scheme of colonial policy, which
has been crowned with success wherever it has been introduced. It has
succeeded in the vast Canadian Dominion, now stretching from ocean to
ocean, and embracing all British North America, with the single
exception of the Isle of Newfoundland. In 1867 this Federation was
first formed, uniting then only the two Canadas with New Brunswick
and Nova Scotia, under a constitution framed on Lord Durham's plan,
and providing for the management of common affairs by a central
Parliament, while each province should have its own local
legislature, and the executive be vested in the Crown, ruling through
its Governor General. It had been made competent for the other
provinces of British North America to join this Federation, if they
should so will; and one after another has joined it, with the one
exception mentioned above, which may or may not be permanent. The
population of the Dominion has trebled, and its revenues have
increased twenty-fold, since its constitution was thus settled.

The same system, it may be hoped, will equally succeed in that
wonderful Australasia where our colonists now have the shaping of
their destinies in their own hands, amid the yet unexplored amplitude
of a land where "in the softest and sweetest air, and