If England Should Send To Canada An
Unpopular Governor, Canada Has No Power To Reject His Services.
As
long as Canada is a colony so called, she cannot be independent,
and should not be expected to walk alone.
It is exactly the same
with the colonies of Australia, with New Zealand, with the Cape of
Good Hope, and with Jamaica. While England enjoys the prestige of
her colonies, while she boasts that such large and now populous
territories are her dependencies, she must and should be content to
pay some portion of the bill. Surely it is absurd on our part to
quarrel with Caffre warfare, with New Zealand fighting, and the
rest of it. Such complaints remind one of an ancient pater
familias who insists on having his children and his grandchildren
under the old paternal roof, and then grumbles because the
butcher's bill is high. Those who will keep large households and
bountiful tables should not be afraid of facing the butcher's bill
or unhappy at the tonnage of the coal. It is a grand thing, that
power of keeping a large table; but it ceases to be grand when the
items heaped upon it cause inward groans and outward moodiness.
Why should the colonies remain true to us as children are true to
their parents, if we grudge them the assistance which is due to a
child? They raise their own taxes, it is said, and administer
them. True; and it is well that the growing son should do
something for himself. While the father does all for him, the
son's labor belongs to the father. Then comes a middle state in
which the son does much for himself, but not all. In that middle
state now stand our prosperous colonies. Then comes the time when
the son shall stand alone by his own strength; and to that period
of manly, self-respected strength let us all hope that those
colonies are advancing. It is very hard for a mother country to
know when such a time has come; and hard also for the child-colony
to recognize justly the period of its own maturity. Whether or no
such severance may ever take place without a quarrel, without
weakness on one side and pride on the other, is a problem in the
world's history yet to be solved. The most successful child that
ever yet has gone off from a successful parent, and taken its own
path into the world, is without doubt the nation of the United
States. Their present troubles are the result and the proofs of
their success. The people that were too great to be dependent on
any nation have now spread till they are themselves too great for a
single nationality. No one now thinks that that daughter should
have remained longer subject to her mother. But the severance was
not made in amity, and the shrill notes of the old family quarrel
are still sometimes heard across the waters.
From all this the question arises whether that problem may ever be
solved with reference to the Canadas.
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