No one with the least notion of International Law would for a moment hesitate to give the true answers to those questions.
But the very different question to participate, or not, in the war, was for us alone to decide according to our constitutional charter. We have freely, deliberately, decided to do our share in the great war. We continue and persevere in our noble task, freely and deliberately.
It is admitted by all that under the actual constitutional organization of the Empire, the Imperial Parliament could not require the autonomous colonies to participate in the war. But no one can assuredly deny to that Parliament the right, in the case of an imminent peril, to formulate the desire that the autonomous colonies would help Great Britain to conjure the threatened calamity.
But, in the present case, the Imperial Parliament has not even been under the necessity of expressing such a legitimate wish, for the obvious reason that the colonies at once took their patriotic stand in favor of the cause of England and her Allies. If the colonies had not so decided, of their own free will, it is most likely that the Imperial Parliament would not have expressed the wish for the assistance of the Dominions overseas.
The hearty support granted by the colonies to Great Britain, to develop its full value, had to be spontaneous, enthusiastic. Such it was, such it is, and such it will be to the last day of the conflict which victorious conclusion we are so strongly determined to achieve.
CHAPTER X.
Had Canada The Right To Help England?
Not satisfied to do the best it could to persuade our French-Canadian countrymen that they had been coerced into the war by England, our "Nationalist School" extensively used the argument that Canada had not the right to intervene into the European struggle. I refuted this erroneous pretension by the following propositions, the very essence of our constitutional rights and liberties:—