The public service enjoys all the advantages that arise from permanency of tenure and appointment by the crown.  It has on the whole been creditable to the country and remarkably free from political influences.  The criminal law of England has prevailed in all the provinces since it was formerly introduced by the Quebec act of 1774.  The civil law of the French regime, however, has continued to be the legal system in French Canada since the Quebec act, and has now obtained a hold in that province which insures its permanence as an institution closely allied with the dearest rights of the people.  Its principles and maxims have been carefully collected and enacted in a code which is based on the famous code of Napoleon.  In the other provinces and territories the common law of England forms the basis of jurisprudence on which a large body of Canadian statutory law has been built in the course of time.

At the present time all the provinces, with the exception of Prince Edward Island, have an excellent municipal system, which enables every defined district, large or small, to carry on efficiently all those public improvements essential to the comfort, convenience and general necessities of the different communities that make up the province at large.  Even in the territories of the north-west, every proper facility is given to the people in a populous district, or town, to organise a system equal to all their local requirements.

Every Englishman will consider it an interesting and encouraging fact that the Canadian people, despite their neighbourhood to a prosperous federal commonwealth, should not even in the most critical and gloomy periods of their history have shown any disposition to mould their institutions directly on those of the United States and lay the foundation for future political union.  Previous to 1840, which was the commencement of a new era in the political history of the provinces, there was a time when discontent prevailed throughout the Canadas, but not even then did any large body of the people threaten to sever the connection with the parent state.  The Act of Confederation was framed under the direct influence of Sir John Macdonald and Sir George Cartier, and although one was an English Canadian and the other a French Canadian, neither yielded to the other in the desire to build up a Dominion on the basis of English institutions, in the closest possible connection with the mother country.  While the question of union was under consideration it was English statesmen and writers alone who predicted that this new federation, with its great extent of territory, its abundant resources, and ambitious people, would eventually form a new nation independent of Great Britain.  Canadian statesmen never spoke or wrote of separation, but regarded the constitutional change in their political condition as giving them greater weight and strength in the empire.  The influence of British example on the Canadian Dominion