Who will venture to say that the faith of the Loyalist has not been as fully justified as that of the Revolutionist? American institutions have not developed any higher forms of political or religious freedom than those which are found in Canada and in other colonies of the Empire today under British institutions. They have not produced a higher tone of public morals or a greater purity of social life. They have not even diminished the risk of great national convulsion. They have not made impossible the oppression or abuse of inferior races, black, red, or yellow. They have not rendered statesmanship more noble and unselfish, justice more incorruptible, human life more sacred, domestic ties more holy, the people more God-fearing. I do not believe that there is a Canadian from one end of the Dominion to the other who honestly believes that American institutions have equalled, much less surpassed, his own in anyone of these particulars. If these are the things which ennoble a nation--if these are marks of true success--the descendants of the Loyalists have no reason to regret the choice which their ancestors made at the time of the Revolutionary war. The strain under which that choice was made, and the courageous loyalty which inspired it, have never had the recognition throughout the Empire which they deserved. One English historian, however, has done justice to the United Empire Loyalists. Mr. Lecky says: 'There were brave and honest men {129} in America; who were proud of the great and free Empire to which they belonged, who had no desire to shrink from the burden of maintaining it, who remembered with gratitude all the English blood that had been shed around Quebec and Montreal, and who, with nothing to hope for from the Crown, were prepared to face the most brutal mob violence, and the invectives of a scurrilous press, to risk their fortunes, their reputations, and sometimes even their lives, in order to avert civil war and ultimate separation. Most of them ended their days in poverty and exile, and, as the supporters of a beaten cause, history has paid but a scanty tribute to their memory, but they comprised some of the best and ablest men America has ever produced, and they were contending for an ideal which was, at least, as worthy as that for which Washington had fought.' That ideal was the conception of a United Empire. How profoundly this great Loyalist tradition, reinforced as it has been by many other considerations and circumstances, has affected Canadian life, can be gauged only by the actual state of Canadian feeling. Mr. Goldwin Smith has spared no endeavour to prove that the assimilation of Canadian and American sentiment is well-nigh complete. Let us, instead of consulting his imaginative statements, study the actual and quite recent expressions of representative public men and bodies.