Commencing in Eastern Canada, we find Attorney-General Longley, of Nova Scotia, a pronounced {130} opponent of the present Dominion Government, who in past times has seemed to approach very nearly to the advocacy of annexation, now writing in the _Fortnightly_ for March, 1891: 'There is still a deep-seated objection in the minds of a large majority of the people of Canada to union with the United States. It may be unphilosophical, it may be irrational, but it exists. ... It is not very easy to blot out a century of history in a day, and the record of the past hundred years has had a constant tendency to confirm British Americans in their devotion to British as against American interests. ... It is simply not a practical solution of the future of Canada to suggest political union with the United States, because the preponderating majority of the people will not hear of it. Time is the great miracle worker and may change all this; but we must speak of things as they are. No material considerations will induce the Canadian people at present to accept political union with the United States.' Archbishop O'Brien, also a Nova Scotian, and the most representative and influential Roman Catholic of Eastern Canada, has in many public utterances expressed his conviction that annexation to the United States would involve for Canada moral damage and political degradation. New Brunswick, out of its sixteen Parliamentary representatives, had in the last Parliament one whose attitude was ambiguous, since as an editor he seemed to advocate, as a politician he abjured, the idea of {131} annexation. Journalistic ability of a high order and the fact that he represented a commercial constituency having closer trade connection with the New England ports than any other Canadian town made tenable for a time this anomalous position. A decisive vote in the last election left him out of public life, and thus deprived Mr. Goldwin Smith of perhaps the only illustration of his claim that the advocacy of annexation does not exclude from the Dominion Parliament. Passing on to Quebec we find Mr. Mercier, till lately the local French Canadian leader, hastening to supplement, as he not long since did in Paris to a _Times_ correspondent, an expression of opposition to Imperial Federation by the statement that there is 'no party in Canada ... in favour of annexation to the United States.' In Ontario we find Mr. Blake, the strongest man of the Liberal party, withdrawing from public life because he thought he discovered, in the policy of his political friends, a tendency towards annexation. This, at least, is the interpretation which suggests itself to the ordinary reader of his published explanation. The repudiation of any desire for annexation was general, vehement, and doubtless sincere, on the part of the more conspicuous Liberal leaders against whom it had been charged.