The Honorable T. H. Haviland—who now holds the office of colonial secretary—replied to the toast of our sister colonies. “He desired to draw attention to some peculiar facts connected with the present movement. They might recollect that this was not the first time that states had met together to organize a constitution; for in times gone by the states of Holland had met to resist the tyranny of the Spanish Government; and the old thirteen states of America had also assembled under the cannon’s mouth, and the roar of artillery; but the peculiarity of this meeting was, that it was held in a time of peace, with the approbation, and he believed, with the sanction of Her Majesty; that the colonies might throw aside their swaddling clothes, to put on themselves the garb of manhood, and hand down to posterity the glorious privileges for which their ancestors contended from age to age in the old country, and which had been brought into these new countries under the protecting shadow of the flag that had braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze. Although Prince Edward Island had only eighty thousand inhabitants, principally engaged in agriculture, yet, small as it was, it did not come as a beggar to the conference doors. Its revenue was not certainly very great, but there was yet a surplus of about four thousand pounds sterling to the credit of the province, over and above the thirty-six thousand pounds it spent for the government last year. Thus it had not come as a pauper, but was honestly prepared to do something—all in its power—to organize, here in America, a constitutional monarchy, which should be able to spread those institutions in which there was the soul of liberty.” The delegates proceeded afterwards to Ottawa and Toronto, where similar festive gatherings took place. But business was not neglected, as appears from the report subsequently published, which embodied the conclusions at which the delegates had arrived as the basis of the proposed confederation.