Cattle-driving and all manner of iniquities of that order in Canada; the boycott adopted not as a class, but as a national, weapon in Cape Colony; the Eureka stockade in Australia; Christian De Wet and the crack of Mausers in the Transvaal—­such were the propaedeutics to the establishment of freedom and the dawn of loyalty in the overseas possessions.  But in this field of government the gods gave England not only a great pioneer, Lord Durham, but also the grace to listen to him.  His Canadian policy set a headline which has been faithfully and fruitfully copied.  Its success was irresistible.  Let the “Cambridge Modern History” tell the tale of before and after Home Rule in the Dominion: 

“Provincial jealousies have dwindled to vanishing point; racial antipathies no longer imperil the prosperity of the Dominion; religious animosities have lost their mischievous power in a new atmosphere of common justice and toleration.  Canada, as the direct outcome of Confederation, has grown strong, prosperous, energetic.  The unhappy divisions which prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which darkened with actual revolt and bloodshed the dawn of the Victorian era, are now only a memory.  The links which bind the Dominion to Great Britain may on paper seem slight, but they are resistless.  Imperial Federation has still great tasks to accomplish within our widely scattered Imperial domains, but its success in Canada may be accepted as the pledge of its triumph elsewhere.  Canada is a nation within the Empire, and in Kipling’s phrase is ’daughter in her mother’s house and mistress in her own.’”

This is the authentic harvest of freedom.

The “unity” of the old regime which, in a Bismarckian phrase, was like paper pasted over ever-widening cracks, was abandoned.  The Separatist programme triumphed.  And the outcome?  The sham unity of government has been replaced by a real unity of interest, affection and cultural affinity.  We find administrators like Mr Lyttleton, former Tory Secretary for the Colonies, engaged to-day not in suppressing but in celebrating the “varied individuality” of the overseas possessions.  As for the political effects of the change, every English writer repeats of the Colonies what Grattan, in other circumstances, said of the Irish:  Loyalty is their foible.  There is indeed one notable flaw in the colonial parallel.  I have spoken as if the claim of the Colonies on foot of the principle of nationality was comparable to that of Ireland.  That of course was not the case.  They were at most nations in the making; she was a nation made.  Home Rule helped on their growth; in its benign warmth Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa have developed not only a political complexion characteristic of each but a literature, an art and even a slang equally characteristic.  Ireland, on the other hand, has manifested throughout her whole history an amazing faculty of assimilating and nationalising everything that came to her from without.