GALLOWS HILL 161 AUTOCRATS ALL 202 HURON’S AGE HEROIC 272 DEBORAHS OF ’37 308 HUMOURS OF ’37. Baneful Domination. “_Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age._” The vivacious Pompadour enlivens the twenty years of her boudoir conspiracies playing _les graces_ with her lord’s colonies. She throws the ring; Pitt, at the other end of the game, catches Canada. The mills of the gods in their slow grind have reversed the conditions of the contestants; the Norman conquest of England becomes a British conquest of New France. The descendants of the twenty thousand barbarians who landed at Hastings have but come to claim their own. Life is “moving music.” The third movement in this historic sonata comes back to the original subject, even if the return to the tonic opens in a minor mode. “Gentlemen, I commend to your keeping the honour of France,” says the dying Montcalm. “Now, God be praised, I die in peace!” and Wolfe expires. The fiercest of the conflict ever rages round a bit of bunting on the end of a stick. The lilies of France come down; up goes the Union Jack to usher in the birthday of the Greater Britain, and Horace Walpole says, “We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of missing one.” Voltaire gives a fête at Fernay to celebrate the deliverance from fifteen hundred leagues of frozen country; the Pompadour tells her Louis that now he may sleep in peace; and outsiders ask of Pitt that which a celebrated novelist, a century later, asks of his hero--“What will he do with it?” “The more a man is versed in business,” said the experienced Pitt, “the more he finds the hand of Providence everywhere.” But Providence would need to have broad shoulders if generals, kings and statesmen are to place all their doings there. * * * * * By 1837 Canada was no longer a giant in its cradle. Colonial boyhood had arrived; a most obstreperous and well-nigh unmanageable youth, with many of the usual mistakes of alternate harshness and indulgence from the parent. For it was not all wisdom that came from Downing Street, either in despatches or in the gubernatorial flesh. It is easy now to see that much emanating therefrom came from those whose vision was confined to the limits of a small island. The great lubberly youth was given to measuring himself from time to time; for Canadian epochs are much like the marks made by ambitious children on the door jamb, marks to show increase in height and a nearer approach to the stature of the parent.