not the right and certainly not the desire to enter—whether justified or not, in matter or in manner, is for history, when all the facts are known, to say. I know that it has been strongly asserted that that message was written in the interest of peace alone, and that the great President, Grover Cleveland, believed that it was the most certain if not the only way to preserve peace between the two great English-speaking nations. But however that may be, it is certain that after that message and, I think, largely because of it, all sentiment for union with the United States ceased to exist, at least so far as any open expression is concerned.
There is no fear or hope (put it each one as he will) that Canada will ever form part of the American Union—there must be two, not one, great English-speaking nations upon this continent. I am assuming—as indeed the contrary is to me inconceivable—that the nation which showed the world an example of self-abnegation in the case of Cuba may be trusted never to grasp a territory occupied by those who will not freely and gladly receive it or force an unwilling people to unite their destinies with those of the Union.
Nor do I think that ever we will cease to belong to the British Empire.
Canada, unless all our history prove misleading and the future wholly belies the past, must continue a part of that nation upon whose flag the sun never sets. Daniel Webster nearly seventy years ago spoke of that Empire even then as “a power to which Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared—a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose
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