The Canadians in London and their friends celebrated the "
majority " of the Dominion on Thursday, by a dinner at the Hotel Metropole. The Act of Federation came into operation twenty-one years ago. Ever since that date, the Act has proved a success, and the people of the Dominion have felt themselves more and more the citizens of a growing nation. Lord Lans- downe, who made the principal speech, bore emphatic testi- mony to this change, declaring that the Canadians, besides consolidating their provinces, and carrying railways right across the continent, were displaying an increased conscious- ness of strength and much more self-reliance. A wider patriotism was effacing their sectional prejudices. In other words, union has developed not only the natural resources of the country, but the civil virtues of its people, a fact which we recommend to the attention of English Home-rulers. It is the strangest of all political facts, that while English Colonists everywhere are striving to bind their Colonies more closely together, so increased a number of Englishmen at home should be in favour of a policy of disintegration.
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