By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) the possession of Hudson Bay (the history of which I shall glance at later), Acadia and Newfoundland was definitely vested with Great Britain, France retaining authority over a vast stretch of territory. Thirty years afterwards the war of the Austrian Succession justified a resumption of hostilities, which were interrupted by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. A few years later the two Powers reached the final stage of their long contest for mastery in North America; and, following Wolfe’s victory at Quebec in 1759, French rule in Canada came to an end. But the French people remained, and their descendants remain, in Canada; and their presence there—those two million fine, happy, prosperous French-Canadians, who combine loyalty to the British Empire with a love for France—supplies, I think, the noblest object-lesson in international fraternity anywhere to be found on the earth. It is an object-lesson that grows in distinctness as our eyes open to new possibilities of unarmed amity; for at last we are slowly awakening to the knowledge that brotherhood is a higher interest of the human race, and may even call for a loftier type of bravery than bloodshed. There was, of course, some little initial unrest in the Franco-English colony, but this was largely allayed when, in 1774, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which restored the French civil code and defined Canada as extending from Labrador to the Mississippi, and from the watershed of Hudson Bay to the Ohio—in other words, as including the present Provinces of Quebec and Ontario, and a number of States over which the Stars and Stripes now float. Then came the War of Independence, which turned our brothers into our cousins, and caused the Great Lakes to be Canada’s southern boundary, instead of her waist-belt. The English population of Canada—far smaller than the French population—was now increased by the arrival from the south of 25,000 persons who, loyal to the old tie with Great Britain, refused their allegiance to the newly-created United States. French and English were soon united in a desire to enjoy such constitutional privileges as had already been granted to the Maritime Provinces; but while the majority were anxious that their own national traditions should be followed, the minority wished for institutions modelled on English lines. The British Government solved the problem by splitting Canada into two—an Upper Canada for the English, and a Lower Canada for the French—and giving to each a Legislature of its own, though a Legislature in which the people’s representatives were under the thumb of Crown nominees.