One hundred and twenty-three years after Franklin and Pownall so discussed the migration of the seat of government of the English-speaking {190} peoples, another Colonial and another Englander corresponded on the same subject. Cecil John Rhodes wrote to William T. Stead: "What an awful thought it is that if we had not lost America, or if even now we could arrange with the present members of the United States Assembly and our House of Commons, the peace of the world is secured for all eternity! We could hold your federal parliament five years at Washington and five at London."[190-1] Stead has recorded a conversation of the same year in which Rhodes "expressed his readiness to adopt the course from which he had at first recoiled--viz. that of securing the unity of the English-speaking race by consenting to the absorption of the British Empire in the American Union if it could not be secured in any other way. In his first dream he clung passionately to the idea of British ascendancy--this was in 1877--in the English-speaking union of which he then thought John Bull was to be the predominant partner. But in 1891, abandoning in no whit his devotion to his own country, he expressed his deliberate conviction that English-speaking reunion was so great an end in itself as to justify even the sacrifice of the monarchical features and isolated existence of the British Empire . . . and from that moment the ideal of English-speaking reunion assumed its natural and final place as the centre of his political aspirations."[190-2] As Franklin and Pownall foresaw, the race {191} centre moved out of England. Emerson in 1856 realized that in America "is the seat and centre of the British race,"[191-1] a statement strengthened since by the growth of Canada. North America is now the centre of Pan-Angle civilization, and Canada is the key of the Britannic world.