Mr Hesketh paused and coughed.  His audience neglected the opportunity for applause, but he had their undivided attention.  They were looking at him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality as it offered itself to them—­it was a thing new and strange.  Far out in the Northwest, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all the summer, Hesketh’s would have been a voice from home; but here, in long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other things.  They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.

“If we in England,” Hesketh proceeded, “required a lesson—­as perhaps we did—­in the importance of the colonies, we had it; need I remind you? in the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa.  Then did the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial sons.  Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and victories to the British cause.”

Still no mark of appreciation.  Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome lot.  He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded.  He dilated on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive comment “Yah!”

Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation—­

   What should they know of England
   Who only England know?

which he could not, perhaps, have been expected to forbear.  His audience, however, were plainly not in the vein for compliment.  The same voice from the anteroom inquired ironically, “That so?” and the speaker felt advised to turn to more immediate considerations.

He said he had had the great pleasure on his arrival in this country to find a political party, the party in power, their Canadian Liberal party, taking initiative in a cause which he was sure they all had at heart—­the strengthening of the bonds between the colonies and the mother country.  He congratulated the Liberal party warmly upon having shown themselves capable of this great function —­a point at which he was again interrupted; and he recapitulated some of the familiar arguments about the desirability of closer union from the point of view of the army, of the Admiralty, and from one which would come home, he knew, to all of them, the necessity of a dependable food supply for the mother country in time of war.  Here he quoted a noble lord.  He said that he believed no definite proposals had been made, and he did not understand how any definite proposals could be made; for his part, if the new arrangement was to be in the nature of a bargain, he would prefer to have nothing to do with it.