“Self-government, in my opinion, when it was conceded, ought to have been conceded as part of a great policy of imperial consolidation.  It ought to have been accompanied by an imperial tariff; by securities for the people of England for the enjoyment of the unappropriated lands which belonged to the sovereign as their trustee; and by a military code which should have precisely defined the means, and the responsibilities, by which the colonies should be defended, and by which, if necessary, this country should call for aid from the colonies themselves.  It ought, further, to have been accompanied by the institution of some representative council in the metropolis, which would have brought the colonies into constant and continuous relations with the home government.”

From the day Disraeli uttered these words down to this present time there has been a persistent, continuous, well-financed and resourceful movement looking towards the establishment in London of some kind of a central governing body—­parliament, council, cabinet, call it what you will—­which will determine the foreign policies of the British Empire and command in their support the military and naval potentialities of all the dominions and dependencies.  It fell to Laurier to hold the pass against this movement; and this he did for fifteen years with patience, sagacity and imperturbable firmness against the enraged and embattled imperialists, both of England and Canada.  Laurier, in the comment quoted above, said that in 1897 the imperialists had looked to him to act as the bell-wether.  They had good reason to be hopeful about his usefulness to them.  The imperial preference just enacted by the Canadian parliament had been hailed both in Canada and Great Britain as a great concession to imperialistic sentiment, whereas it was in reality an exceedingly astute stroke of domestic politics by which the government lowered the tariff and at the same time spiked the guns of the high protectionists.  In 1897, when Laurier first went to England, the imperial movement was at its crescent, synchronous with the great welling up of sentiment and reverence called forth by the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.  Strachey has a penetrating word about the strength which Queen Victoria’s “final years of apotheosis” brought to the imperialistic movement: 

“The imperialist temper of the nation invested her office with a new significance exactly harmonizing with her own inmost proclivities.  The English policy was in the main a common-sense structure; but there was always a corner in it where common-sense could not enter. . . .  Naturally it was in the crown that the mysticism of the English polity was concentrated—­the crown with its venerable antiquity, its sacred associations, its imposing spectacular array.  But, for nearly two centuries, common-sense had been predominant in the great building and the little, unexplored, inexplicable corner had attracted small attention.  Then with the rise of imperialism