Mr. Smith's book on Canada is manifestly intended primarily for readers in England. It is to his English audience that he appeals when he says that 'he does not think that the honour or true interest of his native country can for a moment be absent from his breast.' Of this, Englishmen must judge; Canadians, who respect patriotic sentiment, only ask of Mr. Smith (and they have some reason for emphasizing the request) that they may be credited with sincerity {166} when they claim that the honour and true interests of their native country compel them to dispute his arguments and repudiate the main conclusions about Canada's destiny which he outlines for his English readers. Unfortunately they must do no more than this. Mr. Smith claims 'that he has done his best to take his readers to the heart of it (the Canadian question) by setting the whole case before them: that his opinions have not been hastily formed: that they have not, so far as he is aware, been biassed by personal motives of any kind.' This is a pledge of fairness and impartiality in discussion. It is a pledge which, in Canadian opinion, is not fulfilled. No man in Canada speaks or writes with a deeper sense of responsibility than Principal Grant, as a clergyman, as the head of an important university, and as one of the most active moral forces in the Dominion. He knows Canada, too, from end to end, better than any living man. Yet in a formal review of _Canada and the Canadian Question_ Principal Grant endorses the opinion of another writer that Mr. Smith's book is 'so brilliant, so inaccurate, so malicious even, that it is enough to make one weep.' The criticism does not seem to me too strong. Nor must Mr. Smith think that it is only upon super-sensitive Canadian minds that this impression is left. One of the closest thinkers and most brilliant writers on political subjects in England, a man of cool judgment, who has observed Canadian institutions on the spot, said to me after perusing _Canada and the Canadian Question_ that he considered {167} it the most unfair book he had ever read. At the high table of an Oxford college a Canadian ventured to deprecate the acceptance by English people of Mr. Smith's brilliant and epigrammatic statement of half-truths as truths upon Dominion affairs. The reply of one of the clearest thinkers in the University was not unsatisfactory to the colonist. 'We in England know Mr. Smith well, and we know that, where every sentence has to be so sharply pointed as his, a liberal allowance must be made for accuracy. Canadians need have no fear that his views are accepted without question here.'