[1] See _The Seigneurs of Old Canada_, chap. iv. {161} EPILOGUE The twelve years that followed Elgin's regime saw the flood-tide of Canada's prosperity. Apart altogether from the advantage of the Reciprocity Treaty, the country flourished. The extension of railways, the influx of population, developed rapidly the immense natural resources of the country. Politically, however, things did not move so well. The old difficulties had disappeared, but new difficulties took their place. There was no longer any question of the constitution, or the relation of the governor to it, or of orderly procedure in the mechanics of administration; but there was violent strife between parties too evenly balanced. The remedy lay in the formation of a larger unity, and, in 1867, the four provinces effected a confederation, which was soon to embrace half the continent from ocean to ocean. Dominion Day 1867 was the birthday of a new nation, and a true poet has precised {162} Canada's relation to Britain and the world in a single stanza. A Nation spoke to a Nation, A Throne sent word to a Throne: 'Daughter am I in my mother's house, But mistress in my own! The doors are mine to open, As the doors are mine to close, And I abide by my mother's house,' Said our Lady of the Snows. _Quis separabit_? The confident prophecies of 'cutting the painter' have all come to naught. In the supreme test of the Great War, Canada never for a moment faltered. She gave her blood and treasure freely in support of the Empire and the Right. No severer trial of those bonds that knit British peoples together can be imagined. To look back upon the time when British soldiers had to be sent to suppress a Canadian insurrection from a time when French Canadians and English Canadians are fighting side by side three thousand miles from their homes for the maintenance of the Empire is to envisage the most startling of historical paradoxes. That old, bad time seems as unsubstantial as a dream; this seems the only reality; and yet the two periods are separated only by the span of a not very long human life. {163} The truth is that in those days there were no Canadians. There were French on the banks of the St Lawrence, but their political horizon was bounded by the parish limits. Their most renowned leader had no vision but of an independent French republic, or of one more state in the Union. The people of the western province consisted of diverse elements. The solid kernel was of United Empire Loyalist stock, which gave the province its distinctive character. The Scottish, Irish, English immigration could not be reckoned among the genuine sons of the soil. They built their log-huts in the wildwood clearings, but their hearts were in the sheiling, the cabin, the cottage they had left beyond the sea. Their allegiance was divided, a fact of which the perpetuation of the various national societies is indubitable evidence.