Imperialism, on its sentimental side, was a glorification of the British race; it was a foreshadowing of the happy time when this governing and triumphant people would give the world the blessing of the pax Britannica.  “We are not yet,” said Ruskin in his inaugural address, “dissolute in temper but still have the firmness to govern and the grace to obey.”  In this address he preached that if England was not to perish, “she must found colonies as fast and far as she is able,” while for the residents of these colonies “their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country (i.e.  England) and their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea.”  Seely got rid of all problems of relationship and of status by expanding England to take in all the colonies; the British Empire was to become a single great state on the model of the United States.  “Here, too,” he said, “is a great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space.”  Such a conception was vastly agreeable to the more aggressive and assertive among the English Canadians.  It kindled their imagination; from being colonists of no account in the backwash of the world’s affairs, they became integrally a part of a great Imperial world-wide movement of expansion and domination; were they not of what Chamberlain called “that proud, persistent, self-asserting and resolute stock which is infallibly destined to be the predominating force in the future history and civilization of the world”?  Moreover, it gave them a sense of their special importance here in Canada where the population was not “homogeneous in blood, language and religion;” it was for them, they felt, to direct policy and to control events; to take charge and see that developments were in keeping with suggestions from headquarters overseas.

What these Canadian parties to the great Imperial drive thought of Sir Wilfrid’s dilatory, evasive and blocking tactics is not a matter of surmise.  Upon this point they did not practise the fine art of reticence; and their angry expostulations are to be found in the pages of Hansard, in the editorial pages of the Conservative press, in the political literature of the time, in heavy condemnatory articles which found publication through various mediums.  Thus Sir George Foster could see in Laurier’s statements to the Ontario club nothing but “foolish, even mischievous talk.”  “If,” he added, “they are merely for the sake of rhetorical adornment they are but foolish.  If, however, they are studied and serious they are revolutionary.”  And to the extent that they could they made trouble for Sir Wilfrid, in which labor of love they were energetically assisted, upon occasion, by high officials from the other side of the Atlantic.  Laurier had five years of more or less continuous struggle with Lord Minto, a combination of country squire and heavy dragoon, who was sent to Canada as governor-general in 1898 to forward by every means in his power the Chamberlain