On this matter I have had the pleasure and benefit, during the last twelve years, of talking with Sir Wilfrid Laurier often.  In the quoted Jebb view he agreed closely when I saw him a few days ago.  He remarked, with special regard to this article for THE NEW YORK TIMES, that his point of insistence at the Imperial Conferences of 1902, 1907, 1911, and on all proper occasions, has been that local autonomy—­that is, complete self-government for each of the Dominions—­is not only consistent with British unity but necessary thereto as promoting and conserving that unity.

When Mr. Asquith’s denial of the practicability of giving the Dominions a direct share in control of Great Britain’s foreign policy is considered, the Jebb-Laurier view would appear one to which Sir Robert Borden, cautious statesman, must be led by recognition that potent influence on foreign policy cannot but come to Dominions energetically providing at once for their own defense and for their power to aid Great Britain all along the line.

As to imperial federation, Sir Wilfrid remarked that he has ever been openly attracted by that aspiration toward permanent British union, on which advocacy of the vague project has ever been bottomed.  He is, as he said to me, and as all his long series of political actions have manifested, British in heart and way of political thinking, as indeed substantially all his French-Canadian compatriots are.  British liberality, not to say liberalism, has attached them to the British system as firmly as any community originating from the United Kingdom.  It was a French-Canadian statesman who asserted, some fifty years ago, when many British-Canadians seemed tending toward union with the United States, “The last shot fired in Canada for British connection will be from a French-Canadian.”  That was before the civil war abolished slavery.

But, even as the Britishism of Old Country liberals is strongly tinctured by devotion to ideals which Americans are wont to regard as theirs—­ideals making for settled peace, industry, the uplift of the “common people,” fair room and reward for those abilities which conspicuously serve the general welfare—­so Sir Wilfrid and his compatriots acknowledge their Britishism to be acutely conscious of political kinship with the American people.  The French-Canadian yearning, like that of many Canadians of British origin, is rather for English-speaking union—­a union of at least thorough understanding and common designs with the American people—­than for the narrower exclusive British union sought by Canadian imperial federationists.

Sir Wilfrid said, in effect, (I do not profess to report his very words,) that federation of those British communities widely separated by geography, but alike in race, language, laws, principles, has always attracted him as a project of excellent intentions.  It is at worst a noble dream.  That dream has become less impracticable than it was formerly, he thinks, by reason of the essential diminution of the world, diminution of distances and of time by latter-day inventions.