of seventy-eight members, appointed by the Crown, and a House of Commons of 213 members, elected by universal suffrage in nearly all the provinces. This government has jurisdiction over trade and commerce, post-office, militia and defence, navigation and shipping, fisheries, railways, and public works of a Dominion character, and all other matters of general or national import. The appointment of a Governor-General by the Crown, the power of disallowing bills which may interfere with imperial statutes and treaties, the right which Canadians still enjoy of appealing to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from the courts of the provinces, as well as from the Supreme Court of Canada; the obligation which rests upon England to assist the colony in time of danger by all the power of her army and fleet, the fact that all treaties with foreign Powers must necessarily be negotiated through the imperial authorities - these are the most patent evidences of Canada being still a dependency of the Empire. Even the restraint imposed upon Canada with respect to treaties has been modified to a great degree by the fact that England has acknowledged for thirty years that Canada should be not only consulted in every particular, but actually represented in all negotiations that may be carried on with foreign Powers affecting her commercial or territorial interests.

One of the most encouraging results of this political system has been not merely the material development of the Dominion, but the creation of that powerful national sentiment which best enables the whole political structure to resist successfully any storms of racial antagonism or passionate partyism which may from time to time beat against its walls. French Canada, with its population of more than a million and a quarter of people, still maintaining their language and special institutions, is no longer restive and uncertain of its future as in the years preceding and following the rebellion. It is true that at

times, when the French Canadians press their national prejudices to extremes, a spirit of antagonism is at once evoked between them and the English classes, but the unfortunate state of things that existed before 1837 is no longer likely to return, and whatever jealousies or rivalries break out now and then above the surface are sooner or later carried away by a current of a sound public opinion, anxious for the harmony of all classes and creeds, and only solicitous for the safe working of the Union.

The next great step in the political career of Canada is a question which frequently occurs to imperial as well as to Canadian statesmen. It is not annexation to the United States-that is impossible; it is not independence -that is not even discussed under existing conditions. These are days of a dominant imperialism throughout the British Empire, and the influence of that sentiment in Canada can be estimated from the enthusiasm with which Canadians have rallied to the aid of England in South Africa. One thing is quite certain, that the national movement among all British-speaking people— indeed, among all such thoughtful French Canadians as Sir Wilfrid Laurier-is towards the placing of the relations between the parent state and its great dependencies on such a permanent basis as will strengthen the Empire and give Canada even greater influence in the councils of the imperial state.

A

MEXICO

BY CHARLES F. LUMMIS

LTHOUGH, with the sole exception of the United States, no other country in the western hemisphere has been so organically renovated, remodelled, and replaced, since the death of Washington, for Mexico the nineteenth century might almost as well have begun in its last quarter, so far as modernisation goes. The decades antecedent were picturesque, instructive, thrilling, doubtless preparatory, but by any present-day standard of development they count chiefly as showing what Mexico did not have before the Plan of Tuxtepec. The seventy-six years had been not of logical (if slow) accretion, concretion, and amelioration, but the rawest, bloodiest, and most wasteful apprenticeship-a harder service, and less to show for it, than any other modern nation can offer. Yet, perhaps, they were not wholly in vain. No one, certainly, can soberly study them and then the Mexico of to-day, and ever again talk glibly of the unfitness of any people for self-government.

In 1800, Mexico was the very apodixis of colonialism; a type we shall never see again, whether for its splendour or its consistency. Never more was any nation to be able to hold colonies without some apology to the moral sense of civilisation some plea in mitigation. The mother of the colonial system held colonies because she wished to, because she could, and because she was shortsighted enough to fancy they paid. And she begged no one's pardon. Mexico was her paragon, the richest, the

most profitable, the most consummate colony in history. It had outstripped Peru, its only rival. Its viceroyal capital was not only the greatest, wealthiest, and most magnificent city in the New World,-it outranked Madrid. It was the apotheosis not only of the colonial, but of the protective system. A plum for Spanish politicians and Spanish merchants, why divide it with heretics? Trade followed the flag,-but no alien need tag after the procession. Mexico had no relations with the world-there was no world, except Spain. All other peoples were exofficio enemies. No foreign vessel could enter a Mexican port. No foreigner could own mines or lands. The religious, political, social, economic, and personal destinies of New Spain were administered from Old Spain with a logical absolutism for which "mediæval" is a loose word; yet with so much conscientiousness and humanity and wisdom as, perhaps, imperialism has not since shown. For Mexico had "good government," as we venture to use the word now. Spain kept her American colonies contented and loyal about twice as long as England did hers. And for fifty years after the " Independencia" of 1821, life and property were never again so safe in Mexico, nor scholarship so alert, nor development so normal, as they were under the worst viceroy of the sixty-two who had administered the colony for Spain through two hundred and eighty years.

The last of the really great viceroys-Revillagigedohad been gone for four years when the century opened. The Vireinato had entered upon its last chapter and anticlimax-the puttering ten viceroys who could have been spared, mostly mediocre men at best, and at best hobbled by the sudden powerlessness of Spain and by the sudden change of temper in the colony, where the virus of our Revolutionary example was already working, at first insensibly, but inevitably.

The century was already ten years wasted when the

"Grito" of independence was raised prematurely from the church-tower of an obscure mountain hamlet. It is

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significant that the Washington of Mexico" was a priest,—as was the next highest hero of the eleven years' war for freedom,-and, still more so, that the betrayed Hidalgo was turned over to the Inquisition to be executed. The Holy Office did not die in Mexico until the colonial system did.

And when, after more than a decade of struggle, brutal enough on both sides, Spain was defeated by a nation not of seventy-six, but of six millions of people, Mexico had not won good government nor really self-government. The regency slid easily into the pinchbeck empire of the turncoat Iturbide. In 1823, his yearling throne gave way to the provisional government of Bravo; and, in 1824, the federal republic was born - with nearly a quarter of the century gone, not one serious advancement in civilisation made, and scant visible hope of its making, by this peevish, cantankerous, and raquítico infant. The Church was still supreme, and now confirmed in its monopoly by the first Constitution. Foreign relations were non-existent. Domestic trade and relations were more than Chinese; and society was feudal as ever. As for politics, they were, for the first time in Mexican history, a wide-open scramble for the spoils.

More than half a century of usurpation, revolution, and chaos followed. The country averaged more than one new government a year. Counting regencies, emperors, presidents, triumvirates, dictators, and other rulers, the "republic" had as many administrations in sixty years as the colony had had viceroys in two hundred and eighty years; and more uprisings in one year than the colony had ever had. It is hardly worth while to analyse national progress during the pitiless obsession of pretenders. Some beneficent measures were enacted in lulls of the perennial storm; to be enforced, for the most part, a