The Daily News. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1911. AMERICAN SPREADEAGLISM.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 336, 24 June 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1911. AMERICAN SPREADEAGLISM.

" Whatever we have taken from England lias been taken at the point of the bayonet. My only hope regarding the reciprocity agreement is that it may lead to the a.nnexation of Canada"—thus Senator Heybourn in the American Senate, reported in our cables yesterday. This plain-speaking gentleman subsequently explained that his remark about the bayonet's point referred only to Government acquisitions. Taken in conjunction I with statements of a similar character made the other day by a Mr. Champ Clark, they arc not without significance as indicating the feelings of at least a small proportion of the men guiding the destinies of the American nation. But there is the other side —the Canadian side. How do the Canadian citizens view the suggestion to become part and parcel of the land of the Stars and Stripes? They are the chief parties to consider in the consummation of any little arrangement of the kind suggested, not to speak of Britain and the rest of the Empire. Canadians are essentially a practical and logical people, and will not when they examine the subject be persuaded by their solicitous southern neighbors that two and two make five. Strange as it may seem, Canadians and all other members of Britain's colonial I Empire, enjoy infinitely more freedom I and privileges than the Yankees. We possess, in the monarchy, a reserve of executive power, which no republic has ever been entrusted with. Only recently an English journal showed that in freedom and power the American Congress is an inferior body to the British Parlia-! meat. The Legislature at Westminster is supreme, untrammelled in any degree; while the Legislature at Washington win exercise no more power than the separate States of the Union delegate to it. If the Federal Constitution requires amendment, the forty to fifty States have each to be consulted, and permission given; and only when two-thirds assent can the amendment take place. One amendment, the extinction of slavery, cost a million men and five hundred millions of money; whereas the British Parliament decreed abolition and paid the slave-holders twenty millions for their "property." Congress cannot act beyond the bounds of its delegated powers. Each State is sovereign; very jealous of State rights, as against the ' Congress, yet unable itself to act beyond the provisions of its written constitution! So that the American citizen is tied by his municipal charter, his State constitution, and the limitation of Congressional power. Those Americans who have crossed the border arc finding that no such restrictions prevail under the British flag, the British Constitution, unwritten and ever adaptable, being the exact contrary to that of the United States. His old allegiance was to a system wherein political power originated with the individual State, and worked upward, subject to predetermined chocks and conditions. His new allegiance is to a system wherein the Crown, operating through an executive dependent upon its majority in the Imperial Parliament, is the source of all authority; and tho democracies, drawing from that central source, operate in the freedom which characterises the Imperial Legislature, and differentiates it from all others. The Dominion Government exists by virtue of the "British North America Act" of the Parliament at AVestminstcr. and the several Provincial Legislatures of the Dominion derive their powers in sequence. No hard and fast limitations of written constitutions bind them. Thenpowers would be enlarged or modified in any way hv an Act of the superior Legislature: and, always in reserve, stands the Crown, which, in emergency, by Order-iii-Coiineil, can lake executive action through exercise or the royal prerogative. Any issue so great as that which cost the Americans all (lie horrors of civil war wouhl 'be effected for Canada at the bar of the British House of Com-mons-acting as a great arbiter of eoni dieting claims when one party demanded constitutional change. Tims it comes to pass that, in the exercise of perfect freedom to make the best business bargain for itself, Canada takes such independent action as no American State would be allowed to take. Once Canada had joined the States, all freedom to decide tfpon tariff would he lost. In the British system, there is perfect liberty to change, ami change again. The United States

of an untrammelled political life. Herein is only one instance of the superiority of the Empire's system.