These words serve as a fitting close to the argument and story of Canadian autonomy. A review of the years in which it attained its full strength gives the student of history but a poor impression of political foresight. British and Canadian Tories had predicted dissolution of the Empire, should self-government be granted, and they described the probable stages of dissolution. But all the events they had predicted had happened, and the Empire still stood, and stood more firmly united than before. British progressives had advocated the grant, while they had denied that autonomy need mean more than a very limited and circumscribed independence. But the floods had spread and overwhelmed their trivial limitations, and the Liberals found themselves triumphant in spite of their fears, and the restrictions which these fears had recommended. Canadian history from 1839 to 1867 furnishes certain simple and direct political lessons: that communities of the British stock can be governed only according to the strictest principles of autonomy; that autonomy, once granted, may not be limited, guided, or recalled; that, in the grant, all distinctions between internal and imperial, domestic and diplomatic, civil authority and military authority, made to save the face of British supremacy, will speedily disappear; and that, up to the present time, the measure of local independence has also been the measure of local loyalty to the mother country. It may well be that, as traditions grow shadowy, as the old stock is imperceptibly changed into a new nationality, and as, among men of the new nationality, the pride in being British is no longer a natural incident of life, the autonomy of the future may prove disruptive, not cohesive. Nothing, however, is so futile as prophecy, unless it be pessimism. The precedents of three-quarters of a century do not lend themselves to support counsels of despair. The Canadian community has, after its own fashion, stood by the mother country in war; it may be that, in the future, the attempt to seek peace and ensue it will prove a more lasting, as it must certainly be a loftier, reason for continued union.
[[1]] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 26 April, 1847.
[[2]] He was reporting (18 December, 1854) the passing of acts dealing with the Clergy Reserves, and Seigniorial Tenure.
[[3]] Pope, Life of Sir John Macdonald, i. p. 151.
[[4]] Life and Speeches of the Hon. George Brown, pp. 47-48.