rights.  Can the Jingoes or Centralizationists scare them backward?  Or the Decentralizationists or Separatists hurry them forward?  Won’t they just continue to “plug along” as their forefathers did in the old country and in the new, gaining a bit more freedom to do well or ill at their own collective choice—­that is, if the war result “as usual” in British security, according to confident British expectation.

Such is the Canadian political situation.  It has been essentially similar any time within living memory.  The people approve in politics what they feel, instinctively, to be the profitable or the decent and reasonable necessary next thing to do.  Which signifies that those controversialists are probably wrong who conceive that a result of the war, if it be a win for the Allies, will cause any great formal change in Canada’s political relation to Great Britain.

The truly valuable change in such relations is already secured; it cannot but become more notably established by future discussion; it is and will be a change by reason of greatly increased influence on Great Britain by Canada and the other Dominions.  And it appears highly probable that such inevitable change in influence or weight of the new countries is sufficient for all sentiments concerned, and for all useful purposes on behalf of which formal changes are advocated by doctrinaires and idealists.

The British peoples have acquired by long practice in very various politics a way of making existing arrangements “do” with some slight patching.  They are instinctively seized of the truth of Edmund Burke’s maxim, “Innovation is not improvement.”  They have “muddled along” into precisely the institutions that suit any exigency, their sanest political philosophers recognizing that the exigency must always be most amenable to the most flexible system.

It is because the existing arrangements between London and the several Dominion capitals don’t suit logicians that they do suit experienced statesmen pretty well.  Because these institutions can be patched as occasion may require, they are retained for patching on occasion.  Because the loose, go-as-you-please organization of the so-called “empire” has revealed almost incredible unity of sentiment and purpose, practiced statesmen regard it as a prodigious success.  They are mighty shy of affiliating with any of the well-meaning doctrinaires who have been explaining any time within the last century that the system is essentially incoherent and absurd and urgently needs profound change with doctrinaire improvements.

Sir Robert Borden, for instance.  Some days ago he most amiably gave me a little private talk on these matters, of course on the tacit understanding that he was not to be “interviewed” as for close reporting of his informal sentences.  He was, by the way, apparently in robust health, as if, like Mr. Asquith, of a temperament to flourish under the heaviest responsibilities ever laid on a Prime Minister