The Constitutional Development of Canada

Extract

I Have been asked to speak on the constitutional development of Canada, and there is perhaps a danger in a lecture on this subject being given by a Canadian. We are all inclined to think the history of our own country of special importance, to claim that all men should study the chronicles of our own land, where they may see different principles in conflict more clearly than they will in the story of other nations; where they may learn solutions for modern problems, which if they will only apply them, will send a more efficient and more peaceful world spinning on its way. Most of us, indeed, suffer from national egotism, which perverts our sense of history. You have only to read debates in Parliament in the eighteenth century to see how Englishmen overvalued English institutions. Trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, and representative assemblies were to Burke and Fox, and to many lesser men, panaceas for a world diseased.