Lastly, it has been made
clear that Home Rule cannot possibly assist, but can only obscure and
confuse, the movement for the establishment of a true Imperial Union.
Unionists and Imperialists can choose no better ground for their
resistance to Home Rule than the wide and varied field of Colonial
experience.
But Colonial experience can give us more than that. It can provide us
not only with an immense mass of arguments and instances against
disruption, but with invaluable instances of what can be done to
strengthen and build up the Union against all possible future danger of
disruptive tendencies. The confederation of Canada was accomplished in
the teeth of all the geographical and economic conditions of the time.
Canadian statesmanship thereupon set itself to transform geography, and
to divert the course of trade in order to make the Union a reality. The
Intercolonial Railway, the Canadian Pacific, the Grand Trunk Pacific,
the proposed Hudson Bay Railway, and the Georgian Bay Canal schemes, all
these have been deliberate instruments of policy, aiming, first of all,
at bridging the wilderness between practically isolated settlements
scattered across a continent, and creating a continuous Canada, east and
west; and, secondly, at giving that continuous strip depth as well as
extension.
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