The best political institutions which can work out such great advantages for the populations enjoying them, are too often diverted from their beneficient course by the vicious passions of those who are charged with, and responsible for, their administration. It would be most illogical to draw the inference that good institutions become bad by their guilty management. Free and autocratic governments are essentially different in their natural structure. Though liable to mismanagement by unscrupulous politicians, free institutions can, under ordinary favourable conditions, be trusted to be productive of much good for the peoples living under their protection. Autocracy--the whole human history proves it--by nature engenders absolutism. Crowned or revolutionary despots as a rule are not imbued with the patriotism nor purified by the virtues required for the good government of a country. Kaiserism, Terrorism and Bolshevikism are equally despicable and unfit to contribute to the sound progress which liberty, practiced by sensible and wise men, can develop. Reverting to the Nationalist bugbear, which does not in the least move me to despair of Canada's future, I consider that Imperialism, sensibly appreciated, is of two kinds: Autocratic Imperialism; Democratic Imperialism:--Absolutism is the foundation stone of the former; Political Liberty that of the latter. I am energetically opposed to the first. I sincerely believe that the second can do a great deal for the prosperity of the countries where it has regularly and justifiably been developed according to the natural laws of its growth. Autocratic Imperialism, in contemporaneous history, is almost exclusively typified by its Teutonic production. A general review of the world shows that for the last century, and more, with one sad exception, all the nations have been moving along the path leading to a greater freedom of their institutions. Even Japan and China have joined in the race. Russia had deliberately done so. Much was expected from her first efforts, and much would certainly have been reaped in due course had not the calamitous war still raging at first opened an opportunity for the reactionary Russian element, strongly influenced by German intrigues, spies and money, to check, through the Petrograd Court, the forward movement of Russian political liberty, and to impede, for Germany's sake, the success of the Russian military operations. Under those circumstances--as was also to be expected--the advancing wave of the aspirations of the great Russian people for more political freedom, was bound either to recede before the autocratic outburst, or to rush impetuously against the wall Germany was to her best helping to raise against it. The latter prevision happened, history once more repeating itself.