Lord Dorchester forwarded these proposals with a few words indicating that he was in general sympathy with the views of the Chief Justice. He wrote of the scheme of a general government for British North America as one ‘whereby the united exertions of His Majesty’s North American provinces may more effectually be directed to the general interest and to the preservation of the unity of the Empire’. They were the proposals of a trained lawyer, of an American colonist of standing and position who had thrown in his lot with the mother country as against the revolting colonies, and who stated in the letter from which passages have been quoted above, that for more than twenty years, that is to say through all or nearly all the years of strife with the colonies, he had held the same view as to the radical defect in the relations between Great Britain and her colonies and the remedy which might have been applied at an earlier date. How far, we may ask, did Chief Justice Smith truly diagnose the disease, if disease it was, that had proved fatal to the old British Empire in North America? How far did he indicate what, if the disease had been taken in time, would or might have been an adequate remedy? and how far did he outline the Canadian Dominion of later days and anticipate views which are widely held at the present time as to the future of the British Empire? [Illustration: _to face page 257_ =THE TWO CANADAS= under Constitutional Act of =1791= and =THE MARITIME PROVINCES= From a map of 1823, in the Colonial Office Library B. V. Barbishire, Oxford, 1908. ] [Sidenote: Democracy in America was coeval with its colonization.] [Sidenote: It should have been controlled from within, not from without.]