measure was rejected. Mr. Sandfield Macdonald, after the failure of this proposal, introduced and carried a measure which gave the Government a permissive power to call out the unmarried militiamen for six days’ drill in every year, and which provided that militia officers might be attached to the regular regiments serving in Canada for two months every year in order to learn their duties. By the fundamental law of Canada the Government has the power of calling out in time of war, first, all eligible unmarried men between 18 and 45 years of age; secondly, married men between 18 and 45; and finally, those males fit to carry arms between 45 and 60 years of age. Under these laws Canada should have a force of 470,000 men available for service, and of these there are actually on the muster rolls of the militia 197,000 unmarried men between 18 and 31 years of age, whose service would be compulsory in case of need. The Canadian Parliament voted half a million of dollars in each of the years 1863 and 1864 for military purposes, but the greater proportion of these sums was expended on the volunteers and on the staff of the militia. There has been no adequate return for the heavy drain such a sum causes on the Provincial exchequer. The best commentary on the voluntary system in militia drills is to be found in the fact that less than 10,000 men have been in attendance on them. With the experience we have had of the unstable character of volunteer forces in the field, it is not prudent for Canada to rely on her volunteers so much as she does. They have within their very body the seeds of dissolution. Some corps can decree their disbandment at two months’, others at six months’ notice--in other words, they may melt away at the very crisis of the war. Does American volunteering teach us nothing? In all human probability the South would have been struck to the earth at the first Battle of Bull Bun, if the Pennsylvania volunteers had not presented to the world the extraordinary and disgraceful spectacle of whole battalions under arms marching off from the field, as their unfortunate General McDowell expressed it, “to the sound of the enemy’s guns.” That was no isolated case. The desertion, at the same time, of other volunteer battalions under the equally unfortunate General Patterson in the Shenandoah Valley, left him unable to prevent the Confederate General Johnston marching with all his men to the aid of Beauregard. Over and over again the Federal leaders have been paralysed by similar defections, and it was not till they became strong enough to hold the volunteers by force, as Meade did before he made his attempt against Richmond, that the evil was cured. Had the Federals gained Bull Bun, they were ready to have marched on Richmond at once--they would have found the city defenceless, and the South disorganised. Such a proof of Federal power as a decisive victory would, I believe, from what I saw in the South, have crushed the Secession party, and have