Roughly speaking, therefore, the French of Canada stand to the whole people as, at the most, a million and a half to five millions. The many provinces which are still to be carved out of the north-west will be English speaking. It is true that the French _habitans_ have large families, and the natural increase of the race is somewhat greater than that of British colonists, but on the other hand the whole inflow of immigration increases {155} the weight of the English-speaking provinces; the outflow to New England lessens that of Quebec. The relative influence and numbers of the French element in Canada will never be greater than they are at present, but rather less, partly owing, as I have said, to the formation of new provinces, but even more to the hesitation of French Canadians to follow the advice of their wiser leaders like Mr. Laurier, and throw themselves more entirely than they have hitherto done into the tide of Anglo-Saxon movement on the continent. More than one historian has pointed out that the efforts of French kings and ministers to make Quebec a preserve for a single set of ideas paralyzed the energies of the colonists in early days. There seems to me to be a like danger now, arising from similar causes, that it may become the less energetic community of a strenuously progressive continent. But it can never dominate Canadian development, or permanently block the general movement of the Dominion in any given direction. From another point of view French Canada today represents one of the most interesting triumphs of British constitutional government. When the Province of Quebec came under British dominion in 1763, it had never known what free government by the people meant. Governors and Intendants, with almost despotic power, or taking their orders even in minute detail from a French king or minister in Paris, left no room for popular control. Striking indeed was the contrast which the province presented to the {156} English colonies further south, which from their very foundation began to organize a system of local self-government. In Quebec the beginnings of self-government had still to be made after 1763, or, rather, after 1774, the date of the Quebec Act. Yet the remark of Montalembert, that the Frenchman in Canada under British institutions has attained a liberty which the Frenchman of France never knew, is in strict accord with fact. France, which seems to have wasted few regrets on a colony which had always been poor and a drain upon her resources, plunged into all the horrors of the Revolution to win a liberty which after all for more than a century has wavered between name and reality. The people of her surrendered colony, carrying on, along with the British provinces, the agitation for responsible government by methods entirely constitutional, save for the slight outbreak of 1837, have gained and continue in the secure enjoyment of a popular freedom as complete as that of any