B—The federal system adopted for the Dominion of Canada purposely for the protection of the French Canadians whose special interests are entrusted to the Legislature of the Province of Quebec.
C—The South African Union Charter is the guarantee of the Boers' control of the future of that vast stretch of country, by means of the two fundamental principles of the British constitutional system:—government by the majority combined with ministerial responsibility.
No Empire in the world grants as large a measure of freedom as the British Empire does, to the various national groups living under the protection of her flag.
3—British Imperialism, contrary to Mr. Bourassa's assertion, was never deluded by the wild dream of a world wide supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, of her thoughts, of her language, of her political conceptions, of her commerce and her wealth.
Surely, I have yet to learn that Great Britain has dreamt, and is dreaming, to impose by Force her "mentality," her language, her political institutions to China, to Japan, to Russia, to France, to all the South American Republics, to Italy, to Spain, to Germany, to Austria-Hungary, to Turkey, &c., which, considered as a whole, represent, any one must admit, a pretty large part of the universe.
4—Mr. Bourassa's assertion that England aspires to dominate the world, economically, commercially, is most positively contradicted by the history of the last eighty years. Who does not know—and I cannot for a moment suppose that Mr. Bourassa ignores it—that, nearly a century ago, Great Britain, finally rallied in favour of a Free Trade Policy, has opened her market free to the products of all the nations of the world. Is that not a rather strange way of aspiring to an economical domination! And whilst all the countries of the earth, the British colonies as well as foreign nations, can freely sell their goods in the British market, they protect their own markets by high customs duties—in some cases almost prohibitive—against British goods.
National commercial statistics are opened to the "Nationalist" leader's perusal as to any one else. If he had referred to them, he would have learned that the Foreign Trade of Great Britain, in 1913, the year preceding the outbreak of the war, amounted to $7,017,775,335; exports were valued at $3,174,101,630; imports totalized $3,843,673,695, exceeding the exports by the large amount of $669,572,065.
By looking at the figures, Mr. Bourassa would only have had to call upon his common sense to draw the conclusion that England was certainly not moving along an easy road to the commercial domination of the world by maintaining a policy resulting in an import trade larger, by an annual average of nearly twenty per cent., than her exportations.
Before the war, Germany, by rapid strides, had succeeded in attaining the second rank amongst the great trading nations, coming next after Great Britain. In the same year—1913—her Foreign Trade totalized $5,351,500,000, divided as follows:—Imports $2,801,675,000; exports $2,549,825,000.
The really wonderful industrial and commercial expansion of Germany, during the last forty years previous to the war, offered another opportunity to Mr. Bourassa to show his spite against Great Britain. He would have been sorry not to make the best of it. Calling into play his fertile imagination, he unhesitatingly charged England with deep rooted jealousy of Germany's trade success and the guilty intent to crush it out of existence.