"Bombard New York!" said an old Canadian once to the writer; "I have three sons there." However, a bombardment of New York, if it ever was possible, is so no longer, since the Americans have set on foot a strong navy. The British people, it may safely be said, could not be induced to go to war with the United States for any trans-Atlantic object. Brougham gave utterance, in his brusque way, to the general sentiment when he said in the debate on the Ashburton Treaty that he cared not where the boundary was fixed so long as there was peace. The Americans may not in these disputes have conceded to Canada all that in strictness was her due, but in conceding anything they paid a tribute to international law and justice.

Great efforts are being made to impress on Canada the duty of contribution to the military and naval defence of the Empire. Can the Empire undertake the defence of Canada? Lord Lansdowne says that the only land frontier of the British Empire facing a great military Power is that of Northern India. The ex-Governor-General seems to have forgotten that Canada has a frontier of probably four thousand miles, allowing for the curves, for the most part open, facing a Power which, if it does not keep a great standing army on foot, has shown that it can on short notice put into the field half a million of men with all possible appliances of equipment and science. Is there any use in making a feeble show of doing that which cannot effectively be done? The effective defence of the Canadian frontier would probably take something like the whole population of military age. Meantime Canada is in no danger so long as she is not involved in European wars. In upwards of thirty years intercourse with Americans of all parties and classes the writer has never heard a single expression of a desire

to aggress upon Canadian independence. There is great apathy even upon the subject of continental union. Many American politicians fear it as a possible disturbance of the balance of parties, while American Protestantism is apt to feel a groundless dread of the Roman Catholicism of Quebec. The question whether, if Canada taxes herself for the defence of the Empire, the Empire could undertake the defence of Canada, ought to be plainly answered. Canada in reality needs no defence but peace. Of course, so long as she remains a dependency of Great Britain, she will be a recruiting-ground for British armies and navies. It has been seen that the martial and adventurous impulse is not wanting.

When the duty of contribution to Imperial armaments and participation in Imperial wars is pressed on Canada, note should be taken, not only of her military position, but of the miscellaneous character of her population, especially of the large French element. The French and the other non-British elements are contented under British institutions. But they do not share British sentiments; they are not fired with British ambition; nor do they wish to share the expense of British wars. They are here to make their bread. If there is to be a Canadian corps or contingent in the British Army, will there be a provision that it shall not be used in a war with France?

In common with the other colonies, Canada has asserted fiscal as well as political self-government, and lays import duties on British goods; a thing, it must be confessed, not manifestly consistent with the theoretic unity of the Empire. It is not likely that Canadian manufacturers will assent to the removal of those duties; in fact, they have pretty plainly intimated that they will not. Strong as sentimental attachment to the Empire may be, it is not strong enough to sweeten com

mercial competition. Canadian manufacturers did not exult in the reduction of duties on British goods by the preferential tariff of Sir Wilfred Laurier. They are now calling for an increase of protection. Their influence on Government is great. The Laurier Government came into power on the platform of Free Trade, or at least of tariff for revenue only, and the leading financier among them had been the Boanerges of that policy. Yet the Laurier Government soon formed amicable relations with the manufacturing interests, and instead of tariff for revenue only, declared for stability of tariff. Sir John Macdonald, so long master of the Government, cared little for any economical questions. But his personal leaning was probably to Free Trade. When he adopted Protection, under the alias of National Policy, it was for the purpose of winning an election. Taxed with his inconsistency on the subject, he jauntily replied that, Protection having done so much for him, he was bound to do something for Protection.

It is affirmed by some that the sentiment of Canadian nationality and of recoil from connection with the Americans has of late been on the increase. General sentiment is a thing difficult to gauge, and opinions about it are apt to be formed from a personal point of view; which personal point of view again is apt to be in cities, which are specially British centres, and not perfect representations of the whole country.

National sentiment in the proper sense of the term is out of the question, Canada not being a nation but a colonial dependency; unless, indeed, there is an anticipation of independence. Anti-American feeling is culvated, as was said before, in certain circles; but of actual shrinking from association with Americans, social, commercial, or industrial, there is no visible sign. Resentment of the treatment of Canada by the framers of

Dingley and McKinley tariffs there well may be. If it had been the set purpose of the tariff-makers at Washington to force into existence an antagonistic nationality on the northern border of the United States, they could not have adopted a better course. That Canadians, when they were excluded from the market of their own continent, must produce for a European market, and that their general interest and sentiments would take the course of their trade, was evident and could not be denied. But the argument made not the slightest impression on politicians who were mere delegates and agents of district and special interests. The French-Canadians, of course, have a little nationality of their own.

Nobody who has lived both in a nation and in a dependency can have failed to feel the difference in spirit between them. The colonial politician looks beyond the country for his highest rewards. The Imperial title is an honor above any which his own fellow citizens can confer. The social aspirations of the wealthy class generally point to the aristocratic and fashionable centre of the Imperial metropolis. Rarely does the wealthy colonist aspire, as not a few Americans do, to the character of a great citizen. The lot of a colonial dependency as a member of a mighty Empire may be higher than that of a nation of the second order, but its character cannot be the same.

Perhaps there is some feeling of this sort in the minds of those who pine to change the present status for that of Imperial federation.

The writer brought with him to Canada the opinion of her destiny and that of the other British Colonies generally accepted in those days, which was that they were in training to be free nations and encircle their common parent with offspring the images of herself in all that had made her happy, glorious, and useful to humanity. This surely was

not a mean idea, or one which at all partook of the sentiment of Lord Beaconsfield, who confidentially called the Colonies millstones round the neck of England, and continued to speak of them in the same strain in private, as his great friend Sir W. Gregory tells us, to the end of his life. A new-comer was naturally drawn to what was called the "Canada First" party, a party consisting chiefly of young men warmly patriotic and looking forward more or less definitely to independence. It seemed a good thing to have two experiments in democracy, the more so as flaws have been clearly revealed in the American Constitution. An independent Canada would, as has already been said, have been perfectly safe from molestation on the part of her powerful neighbor. If one or two "tail-twisters" in Congress have said violent things, probably to catch the Irish vote, their words have had no weight. But the “Canada First” party, at the crisis of its course, was deserted by its leaders. There followed the deaths of its two most active members, and the party melted away. Then came the Canadian Pacific Railway, extending the Dominion to the Pacific so as to interpose between its two ends a distance greater than the width of the Atlantic. Every vestige of unity, The Monthly Review.

such as seems requisite for the basis of nationality, geographical or commercial, was thus destroyed, while a connection was formed with territories in the North-West certain, as soon as Minnesota and Dakota overflowed, to be settled, as they are now being settled, by Americans.

There is, however, no danger of violent or precipitate changes unless Great Britain should be induced to declare war against the United States. What is wanted certainly, and without delay, by all but the monopolists on either side, is the renewal of commercial reciprocity, which involves no political change. For this a strong movement is now on foot, initiated, strange to say, by New England, the mother of Protection, but extending also to other and especially North-Western States. Any British statesman who may succeed by proclaiming commercial war against the United States is defeating this movement; and at the same time in depriving Canada, even for two or three years, of the bonding privilege, while he taxes her for Imperial armaments and wars, may chance to find that he has played over again the part of Mr. Charles Townshend as a consolidator of the Empire.

Goldwin Smith.

tions as a rule are not merely formal leaves and flowers, not conventional foliage, such as we frequently see in Roman or early English architectural work; they are often actually identifiable with this or that species or variety of plants, which was sometimes fa

miliar, sometimes historic, and sometimes positively sacred in the eyes of the ancient population of this city.

What is even more to the point in view, these beautiful objects are depicted with such vivid grace, and they betray, by form or coloring, such skilful observation on the part of the artist, that we may reasonably conclude the people for whom they were painted must at least have delighted in gardens and the things which grew in them; in fact, were a people who loved Nature as their mother, rather more deeply than other sides of their known character would lead us to conjecture.

When we go over an ancient house, whether in Rome or at Pompeii, we are tempted to criticize the narrowness of the windows and the restricted area of their sleeping-rooms, for to us they appear "poky," or quite impossible. But perhaps we ought to allow liberally for the fact that the owners passed much more of their lives out of doors than within them; in the sunny streets, in the airy porticoes, in the beautiful gardens; and, therefore, we should not translate these untoward evidences for proof of a dislike of fresh air. It seems more probable that when these artists are found, as at Livia's Villa, representing these realistic leaves, flowers, and trees, instead of other ornaments, they are following, as it were, a line of least resistance, and are expressing some of that constant delight in the open-air life which they led, and in the things of nature which they most loved to observe and have about them.

Again, if we clear for ourselves an imaginary path through the throng of imported divinities and cults (worshipped by the later Romans with so much sumptuosity, but so little sincerity), and go to the primitive deities adored by the early Latian peoples, we have no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that a large proportion of

their gods and goddesses may be referred to the "powers" of the Vegetable world, not, as we should perhaps expect, to the Military spirit. They were gods of the corn, the wine, the fruits and flowers; sylvani, or tree-spirits; Saturn, the sowing god; and Flora, goddess of the flower-world. And there, surely enough, we find (what at first may rather surprise us) Venus to be the garden-goddess (not the fatal temptress Aphrodite, of "a later dispensation") to whom the myrtle is sacred, and with it the Vallis Murcia-the site of the Circus Maximus. Moreover we find Mars, the early god of Vegetation, the lord of the wheatfields, and having his first temple among them in the Campus Martius, and to whom the first month of the Roman year-the budding month-is sacred. His priests, or dervishes, were called Salii, or leapers; and they had their meeting in chapterhouses on each of the hills of Rome. On the first of the new year they danced, singing their hymns, around the Palatine, and the height which they leaped was regarded as indicative as to the height to which Mars would allow the new grain to grow.

Venus, we find, had a temple dedicated to her in 293 B.C. and yet another in B.C. 265, upon the feast-day of the Vinalia Rustica. Moreover, April was considered to be her month, therefore very respectable authorities have considered that, besides being the goddess of gardens, vineyards also were regarded as being under her prolific surveillance and protection. But in any case she was the divinity to whom the owners of gardens and orchards paid their vows.

And this brings me to the consideration of the word "hortus." For in early days it seems to have signified an orchard or a garden indifferently. And perhaps no argument is needed to. persuade us, that, with an agricultural people such as the ancient Romans,

the garden was for a long period a purely practical adjunct to the resi dence; the necessary and increasingly important companion to the house which it supplied; and the refuse of which fed the dog and the pig. We may thus at the same time take for certain that this humble position was fulfilled by it long years before it became so matured as to give birth to the separate flower-garden. What flowers, sacred and others, were grown, probably grew as strips in what we should call a kitchen-garden.

The villa, of course, had no being as yet. Pliny states that he finds no mention of a villa in the XII. Tables, "nusquam nominatur villa," but only the word "hortus," signifying the "bina jugera," or two acres inheritable by the heir to the house.

In those early times of this city, the woodlands, with their dark ilex shadows and gnarled trunks, were not regarded as places of delight and attraction; they were not yet "vocales" or "venerabiles," so much as dangerous, black, and oracular, as were our own forests to the mediæval mind; they were looked upon with awe and fear, as "selve oscure," "caligantes nigra formidine." In them you would be likely to meet wild beasts, bandits, or apparitions. But, besides these, there were many strips of woodland, or at any rate preserved portions left over from clearings, which were consecrated to one or other divinity, which might neither be cut nor utilized for "mast" or fuel, by man or pig, without due and formal act of expiation. Such were the "nemus" and the "lucus"-a subject for separate treatment.

So, too, in the garden, there came to be cultivated plants which, besides being good for food, were raised for ritual uses, garlands, decorations, and sacrificial fuel, and also, no doubt, for salves and medicines.

H.N. lib. xix. cap. 19.

The semi-volcanic soil of Rome possesses innate genius for growing good vegetables. For variety of salads, no city in Europe should excel Rome; though it may be thought that the hotel-keepers might, rather oftener than they do, permit their guests to experience these pleasant possibilities. Yet it is certain that, in the early days to which I am referring, the number of fruits and vegetables was strictly limited, as compared with imperial and modern days, when importations from all parts of the then known world continually arrived to enrich both garden and cuisine of the Roman house or villa. It is perhaps impossible now to determine precisely all the strictly indigenous vegetables which the early Romans used-I mean in those days when the meat-meal occurred but once a day, and when libations were made, not yet with wine, but with milk or honey.

Referring to those days of simplicity, Varro says "avi et atavi nostri, cum allio ac cæpe eorum verba olerent, tamen optime animati erant": i. e., vigorous folks as they were, our forebears flavored their speech with onion and garlic; and if we turn for a moment to the origins of some of the most aristocratic names in Roman history-the Fabii, the Cæpiones, the Lentuli, and the Pisones-we shall find that they rather corroborate the suggested homeliness of the national beginnings.

It can scarcely be said that if one hears a person addressed as Mr. Bean the fact necessarily impresses us; yet, if in Cæsar's day a Roman had heard one of his neighbors addressed as "Fabius," he would have become aware that the person so addressed was a member of the most aristocratic of the clans; albeit in that period the harmless, necessary bean had come to be considered as food only fit for peasants and gladiators. In the Louvre or was it in the Hermitage?-I once

saw a