Thus, within a few years of the outbreak of rebellion in two provinces, full power had been entrusted to the rebels themselves.  It was a daring policy, only to be justified by a very confident belief in the virtues of self-government.  But it was completely and triumphantly successful.  Henceforward friction between the Canadian colonies and the mother-country ceased:  if there were grounds for complaint in the state of Canadian affairs, the Canadians must now blame their own ministers, and the remedy lay in their own hands.  And what was the outcome?  Twenty years later the various colonies, once as full of mutual jealousies as the American colonies had been before 1775, began to discuss the possibility of federation.  With the cordial approval and co-operation of the home government, they drew up a scheme for the formation of a united Dominion of Canada, including distant British Columbia and the coastal colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; and the adoption of this scheme, in 1867, turned Canada from a bundle of separate settlements into a great state.  To this state the home government later made over the control of all the vast and rich lands of the North-West, and so the destinies of half a continent passed under its direction.  It was a charge, the magnitude and challenge of which could not but bring forth all that there was of statesmanship among the Canadian people; and it has not failed to do so.

One feature of Canadian constitutional development remains to be noted.  It might have been expected that the Canadians would have been tempted to follow the political model of their great neighbour the United States; and if their development had been the outcome of friction with the mother-country, no doubt they would have done so.  But they preferred to follow the British model.  The keynote of the American system is division of power:  division between the federal government and the state governments, which form mutual checks upon one another; division between the executive and the legislature, which are independent of one another at once in the states and in the federal government, both being directly elected by popular vote.  The keynote of the British system is concentration of responsibility by the subordination of the executive to the legislature.  The Canadians adopted the British principle:  what had formerly been distinct colonies became, not ‘states’ but ‘provinces,’ definitely subordinated to the supreme central government; and whether in the federal or in the provincial system, the control of government by the representative body was finally established.  This concord with the British system is a fact of real import.  It means that the political usages of the home-country and the great Dominion are so closely assimilated that political co-operation between them is far easier than it otherwise might be; it increases the possibility of a future link more intimate than that of mere co-operation.