To conjure up these historic mistakes as the cause of a possible national rupture will only raise a smile in Canada; upon readers outside of Canada who do not understand the circumstances the passage leaves a false impression. That mistakes were made most people agree; that they were partly due to the ignorance {183} of English diplomatists is true; but Canadians must admit that they were due to Canadian ignorance as well. As late as 1874 a Cabinet Minister of the Dominion on a public platform described the splendid wheat areas of the North-West as a country only fitted to be the home of the wolf and the bear. Among the separate and unsympathetic provinces, prior to confederation, there were ignorance and indifference as well as among English statesmen. 'Every intelligent Canadian now knows that most of these mistakes were far more due to the want of a nexus between the Colony and the Empire which would have brought colonial knowledge and experience to the assistance of British diplomacy. He knows that since the acceptance of this assistance as a part of the public policy of Britain, such mistakes can no longer occur, as the Fishery Award at Halifax and the Fishery Treaty at Washington, when Canadian interests were represented by Canadians, sufficiently testify; as the Behring Sea negotiations testify, in which, acting upon the information supplied by the Dominion Government, and recognizing the justice of the case, Lord Salisbury did not hesitate to say the final word which made aggressive diplomacy pause and submit to impartial arbitration. 'Disintegration, surely, is on the point of being complete,' and 'the last strand of political connection is worn almost to the last thread,' Mr. Smith exclaims, using as the illustration of his point Newfoundland's claim to make a commercial treaty of her own independently {184} of Canada. He refuses to see what others see, that the invitation to Newfoundland to have her interests directly represented in the arbitration with France; the fact that Canada has been thus represented at Halifax, at Washington, in the Behring Sea difficulties; the formal introduction, in short, of colonial opinion and knowledge into national diplomacy, marks the creation of new threads of connection, new bonds of union, which promise to be permanent, because constructed on true and primary political principles. It is, I think, a fatal flaw in Mr. Smith's discussion of the Canadian Question, a fatal comment on his claim to have 'done his best to take his readers to the heart of it by setting the whole case before them,' that he makes no mention of this decisive change in national policy, or of the consequent change in the Canadian mind, which, if not reconciled to losses in the past, has no reason to dread them in the future, and in this confidence is content. That he should treat as present and gravely irritating, grievances which have become purely historical, is unfair and misleading.