Such Canadians as hold Edmund Burke to have been a spokesman of consummate political wisdom are apt to regard the busy stir of doctrinaires, who scream for closer political junction of the British peoples, even as Burke regarded the hurry of some of the same kidney in his time.  Resolute to bind the thirteen colonies forever to England, they proceeded to offend, outrage, and drive those colonies to independence.  Be it remembered that these colonies had contributed so loyally, so liberally to England’s armaments and wars that grateful London Parliaments had insisted on voting back to them the subsidies they had granted, holding the contributions too generous.  To later proposals of foolish henchmen of George III., proposals that the colonies, since they had revealed themselves as strong and rich, should be dragged into some formal political subordination by which, as by latter-day Imperial Federation, they might be involuntarily mustered and taxed for imperial purposes, Burke said: 

Our hold on the colonies is the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection.  These are the ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron.  Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your Government; they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance....

As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces toward you.  The more they multiply, the more friends you will have.  The more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience.  Slavery they can have anywhere.  It is a weed that grows on every soil.  They may have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia; but until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.

This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly....  Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, ... your letters of office and your instructions and your suspending clauses are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole.  These things do not make your Government.  Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them.  It is the spirit of the English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even to the minutest member.

And the doctrinaires of Centralization, vociferating their fad of Imperial Federation, would have that Constitution, in the moment of its supreme triumph for unity, cast away!  Cast away for a new and written one by which Great Britain and all her children alike would chain themselves together!  Well may practical statesmen view the doctrinaires with some disdain, not unmindful of Burke’s immortal scorn of such formalists: