countries is rare. For example, in my own experience, of those who have been convicted before me of murder but one was a Canadian; the others, a negro, a Bulgarian, an Italian, a Macedonian, an English-man. We have the thief and the perjurer, the thug and the burglar, like all other peoples; but I say, without fear of successful contradiction, that the percentage of such among our native Canadians is very low indeed.
When the Lord appeared to the Israelite shepherd, He said to him: "Amos, what seest thou?" and Amos answered: "A plumb line." Our people have seen a plumb line and adopted that as a symbol in their administration of the law. The plumb line of exact justice may, and does, waver to the one side or the other, moved by the breath of prejudice or sympathy, but it ever seeks the vertical, the upright. The absolute perpendicular we may not always attain, but the endeavour is always for it.
In the field of political and constitutional rights, those we now enjoy have not been attained without labour—in many cases even danger. It has not been given to Canadians to wrest their rights from an oppressor as the result of successful rebellion. Whether it be an advantage that rights should be obtained or national life begun by successful armed and violent resistance to constituted authority, I leave to the philosophic statesman to discuss—that has not been the way in which we have obtained our rights—rather by a gradual recognition of the fact that we Englishmen on this side of the Atlantic are entitled to all the rights and privi-
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