of additional power to be given to wealth and population was met by enacting that in no case should the number of representatives exceed seven or be less than two; but, subject to this rule, that the number of members to be chosen for each Colony should depend upon the amount of its contribution to the general treasury. It is not very clear from a perusal of the plan what would have been the exact functions of the President-General and of the members of the Grand Council in the working out of the Constitution. But it must be remembered that colonial government, at any rate in New England, was, more and more, taking the form of government by means of Committees of the Assemblies, intruding upon the province of the Executive; so that a decorous reticence was necessary if the scheme was to have any chance of approval in England. Upon the whole, Franklin had good reason for his pride in his bantling. The different and contrary reasons of dislike to my plan', he wrote years afterwards, 'make me suspect that it was really the true medium; and I am still of opinion that it would have been happy for both sides if it had been adopted. The Colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves. There would then have been no need of troops from England. Of course, the consequent pretext for taxing America and the bloody contest it occasioned would have been avoided. But such mistakes are not new; history is full of the errors of states and princes. Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom but forced by the occasion.'

Be this as it may, the old English colonial system, which received its deathblow by the loss of the American Colonies, never learnt to read the riddle of the Sphinx of federation. It remained to see whether the new empire,

which arose on the ruins of the old, would have more luck or more wisdom. At first, indeed, it seemed as though the lesson which the British Government had learnt from the loss of the American Colonies was a kindly rendering of the maxim, divide et impera. The Colonies were to be treated indulgently like favoured children; but anything in the nature of independent political life was to be, as far as possible, discouraged. Here and there voices were raised in favour of some kind of union of the British North American Provinces. Thus, at the time of the Constitutional Act of 1791, Chief-Justice Smith, a loyalist from New York, whose father had been a leading member of the Albany Congress, put forward an interesting scheme of federal union, which is not inserted in this volume, because it has been already printed in Canadian Constitutional Development, by Egerton and Grant, pp. 104-10, as well as in Shortt and Doughty, Constitutional Documents, 1759–91, p. 687. But, as will appear from the following summary of the history of British North America, the general tendency was in favour of the creation of separate and divided governments.

THE BRITISH NORTH AMERICA ACT.

The Dominion of Canada, including all British North America with the exception of Newfoundland,1 was formed out of several separate Colonies, differing altogether in their origin and character. When, as in the case of Lower and Upper Canada, union had been in name effected, it had been of so questionable and superficial a character as to perpetuate fundamental distinctions. It may be said that to accomplish a real federal union between the two Canadas was a task of more difficulty than to weld into a single union the English communities in the east and in the west. The eldest of the British American Colonies was Nova Scotia. Under a shadowy claim, resting on paper charters, 1 If the Bermudas do not belong to the West Indies they still less form a part of British North America.

New Scotland dated from Stuart times; but, at any rate, from the Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, Nova Scotia was a recognized British possession, though even then the question, what was meant by Nova Scotia, was not finally settled, and the French put forward the pretension that it only included the peninsula, or a part of the peninsula, of what is now Nova Scotia, and that the future Province of New Brunswick was not included within its area. But, whatever were its nominal boundaries, the actual hold of Great Britain on Nova Scotia was slight indeed. The mother country looked to Massachusetts to organize effective occupation, and Massachusetts, at bay with the French and Indian perils, was unable to respond to the call, so that the new possession remained for the most part a waste country, and the French Acadian inhabitants were left to find their own answer to the puzzle: When is a British subject not a subject? Great Britain standing idly by, till, by the deportation of the people in 1755, it sought in a panic to make up for past neglect. The birth of Nova Scotia as a living British Colony dates from the foundation of Halifax in 1749, one of the rare occasions on which Great Britain has organized systematic colonization for imperial purposes. So carelessly and loosely was Nova Scotia governed that it was suddenly discovered in 1755 that the practice of enacting laws by its Governor and Council without the institution of an Assembly, was illegal, and therefore, in 1758, a representative Assembly was set on foot. After the Peace of Paris of 1763, Cape Breton Island was annexed to Nova Scotia; but, in accordance with the general policy of the time, it was constituted a separate government in 1784. In 1820, however, it was again reannexed to Nova Scotia.

New Brunswick owed its existence as a separate colony to the same cause which brought into being Upper Canada. Great numbers of American loyalists sought a new home in this portion of Nova Scotia, which was therefore constituted

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