it was this principle kindled the beacons which yet burn on the rocks of Uri; it was this principle that broke the dykes of Holland and overwhelmed the Spanish with the fate of the Egyptian oppressor. It is a principle capable of inspiring a noble ambition and a most salutary emulation. You have sent your young men to guard your frontier. You want a principle to guard your young men, and thus truly defend your frontier. For what do good men who make the best soldiers fight? For a line of scripture or chalk line--for a text or for a pretext? What is a better boundary between nations than a parallel of latitude, or even a natural obstacle?--what really keeps nations intact and apart?--a principle. When I can hear our young men say as proudly, 'our Federation,' or 'our Country,' or 'our Kingdom,' as the young men of other countries do, speaking of their own, then I shall have less apprehension for the result of whatever trials the future may have in store for us. It has been said that the Federal Constitution of the United States has failed. I, Sir, have never said it. The Attorney- General West told you the other night that he did not consider it a failure; and I remember that in 1861, when in this House I remarked the same thing, the only man who then applauded the statement was the Attorney-General West,--so that it is plain he did not simply adopt the argument for use the other night when advocating a Federal Union among ourselves. It may be a failure for us, paradoxical as this may seem, and yet not a failure for them. They have had eighty years' use of it, and having discovered its defects, may apply a remedy and go on with it eighty years longer. But we also were lookers on, who saw its defects as the machine worked, and who have prepared contrivances by which it can be improved and kept in more perfect order when applied to ourselves. And one of the foremost statesmen in England, distinguished alike in politics and literature, has declared, as the President of the Council informed us, that we have combined the best parts of the British and the American systems of government; an opinion deliberately formed at a distance, without prejudice, and expressed without interested motives of any description. We have, in relation to the head of the Government, in relation to the judiciary, in relation to the second chamber of the Legislature, in relation to the financial responsibility of the General Government, and in relation to the public officials whose tenure of office is during good behaviour instead of at the caprice of a party--in all these respects we have adopted the British system; in other respects we have learned something from the American system, and I trust and believe we have made a very tolerable combination of both.