Eighty years elapsed before any similar Federal Union was formed by Colonies within the British Empire.  As we have seen, all the various North American Colonies which received Constitutions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and all the Australasian Colonies similarly honoured in the nineteenth century, were placed in direct relation to the British Crown and in isolation from one another.  Upper Canada had no political ties with Lower Canada, Nova Scotia none with New Brunswick, Victoria none with Tasmania.  Several abortive schemes were proposed at one time or another for the Federation of the North American Colonies, but the first measure of amalgamation, namely, the union of the two Canadas in 1840, was a step in the wrong direction, and bore, as I have shown, a marked resemblance, particularly in the motives which dictated it, to the Union of Great Britain and Ireland.  It was a compulsory Union, imposed by the Mother Country, and founded on suspicion of the French.  So far from being Federal, it was a clumsy and unworkable Legislative Union of the two Provinces, which lasted as long as it did only because the principle of responsible government, established in 1847, covered a multitude of sins.  The somewhat similar attempt in Australia in 1843 to amalgamate the two settlements of Port Phillip, afterwards Victoria, and New South Wales, at a time when each had evolved a distinct individuality of its own, was defeated by the strenuous opposition of the Port Phillip colonists, and revoked in 1850.

Meanwhile, all aspirations after Federation in the outlying parts of the Empire were discouraged by the home authorities.  The most practical plan of all, Sir George Grey’s great scheme of South African Federation in 1859, was nipped in the bud.  Canada eventually led the way.  The failure of the Canadian Union brought about its dissolution in 1867 by the Provinces concerned, under the sanction of Great Britain (an example of really sensible “dismemberment"), and their voluntary Federation as Ontario and Quebec, together with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, under the collective title of the Dominion of Canada, and the subsequent inclusion in this Federation of all the North American Provinces with the exception of Newfoundland.

Note, at the outset, that this Federation differed from that of the United States in being founded on the recognition of an organic relation with an external suzerain authority—­an authority which the Americans had abjured in framing their independent Republic.  In the matter of constitutional relations with Great Britain, the Dominion of Canada now assumed, in its collective capacity, the position formerly held by each individual Province, and still held by Newfoundland.  Direct relations between the individual Provinces of the Federation and the Mother Country practically ceased, and were replaced by a Federal relation with the Dominion.  Provincial Lieutenant-Governors are appointed by the Dominion Government acting in