All nations are influenced by the events which they experience, and no people were more moulded into a new development than the Anglo-Saxon race in the Eleventh century, when the Norman crossed the channel and wrung the sovereignty of the country from the reigning monarch. Traces of customs, of laws, of thought, of language, of feeling, of the character of those earlier centuries still remain. But in a few generations the descendants of those who fought in the battle near Hastings had no sentiment but for English soil. They had ceased to be Norman, and it was by the children of the conquering race that the liberties of the country were affirmed in the Great Charter. In the Province of Quebec there yet remains the unmistakeable impress of its early settlement: of those Normans and Bretons who settled on the shores of the St. Lawrence and in Acadia, and of those who claim ancestry with the noble race which, south and east of the Loire, extending to Rochelle, so constantly battled for freedom of thought. One hundred and twenty years have passed since the last remnant of the power of France disappeared from the northern part of the continent. Great changes have taken place within this period. It was only step by step, in confusion and difficulty, that the present system of self-government became established: a truth evolved out of much complication and from want of the comprehension of Imperial and Colonial relations. The effect has been of imperfect accomplishment in much. This positive good has, however, been achieved, even if in other respects the consummation has been incomplete. The whole of the inhabitants of the several Provinces are united by the one feeling of advancing the common prosperity, and the French Canadian is found in the advanced ranks when the progress of the whole Dominion is in any way concerned. Of the five great colonial empires which arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Great Britain, the British Empire is the only one which survives. The remaining powers possess but a few remnants of their once outstanding colonies. No one of them retains the character of its former strength. The loss of the thirteen colonies of North America a century back by Great Britain was a wound to the national greatness which it was feared by many would never be healed. It was a serious and painful separation which prudence and good government might have averted.