There are names in English history—Pym and Cromwell, Walpole and Pitt, Cobbett and Gladstone—that sum up in themselves the supreme embodiment of the English character. Mr. Churchill belongs indisputably to that great company. He has symbolized in his person the characteristics that have become known as English since the Henrican Reformation. In a fantastically varied lifetime he has moved from one role to another with all the calm assurance of the aristocrat-politician for whom occupation has been not so much a necessary vocation as a high adventure to be sought out. In each of the roles he has displayed ability and genius sufficient to endow half a dozen reputable careers. If to his English ancestry he owes his natural aptitude for affairs and a grand style of entering upon them, to his American background he owes his flair for self-advertisement and his genius for the melodramatic. He has managed to personify the national hero-figure of John Bull in much the same way as Lincoln, with the aid of the able cartoonist Thomas Nast, came to embody the American symbol of Uncle Sam. He has personified homo anglicanus: a being with all kinds of crotchety prejudices, frequently wrong in his opinions, rarely mean in his battles, suspicious of general ideas, with admiration for the courage that stands up for what it believes in and with no pity for the weakness that cringes, possessed of a capacity to be curiously sentimental and passionately angry.

The construction of wooden vessels was an outstanding achievement of nineteenth-century Quebec. It spread along both shores, mainly on the north shore, from Sillery coves to the Isle of Orleans. It was the staple industry of Quebec city, for “half the men were engaged in shipbuilding and nearly all the rest in doing business with them.” At one time, twenty or more yards employed about five thousand workers, a good many of whom lived in what is now regarded as the parish, one and a half miles long and thirty feet wide. In the years of peak production, shipbuilding was closely associated with the lumber-export business. It supported a way of life characteristic of the nautical city which once hoped to become a great seaport in North America.

In the early fifties, indeed, Quebec-built ships commanded high prices in the British market; activity was brisk on the shores, tavern keepers did a good business, and some of them won the reputation of being effective crimps. Someone has said of this phase of prosperity that “the profiteers tried giving least and getting most,” and it was a byword that the “ordinary lumberjack and sailorman earnt like a horse and spent like an ass.” A feature of Quebec city and its vicinity at that time was the mingling of the French- and English-speaking people, as the proportion of the latter reached about 40 per cent of the total population. But this study need not elaborate ethnical folklore. Rather, it seeks to inquire briefly into the decline of the basic industry of Quebec city.

During the debates in the Australian federation conventions of 1891 and 1897–8, Canadian experience was usually cited to indicate practices to be avoided rather than emulated. J. W. Hackett, addressing the 1891 convention as a representative of Western Australia, which was then the least populous of the Australian colonies, stressed the need of a strong senate whose function it would be to convert the popular will into the federal will. From the viewpoint of a defender of the interest of the smaller colonies, the weakening of the prestige of the senate, through the cabinet's being responsible in practice to the lower house, made responsible government a threat which Hackett was ready to attack. He questioned whether responsible government could be successful under any conditions. The experiment of the Canadian Dominion was hardly a success. “It was begun … in bribery and is continued by subsidies.” Pointing to the agitation for home rule in Ireland, he suggested that responsible government was a failure in Britain itself. “If that is the responsible government which they wish to graft into our federation,” he asserted, “there will be one of two alternatives—either responsible government will kill federation, or federation, in the form in which we shall, I hope, be prepared to accept it, will kill responsible government.” Responsible government has, in fact, proved rather deadly to Hackett's idea of federalism. Nevertheless, in Australia, as in Canada, the cabinet itself has been federalized, although the process in Australia has not been recognized by the quantity of academic and popular commentary which has marked its Canadian counterpart.

Wee hope to plant a nation, where none before hath stood.—Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, 1613.

Anthropological studies have shown that the myth of destiny, along with the myth of origin, has exerted a tremendous influence in shaping tribal mentality and sustaining tribal solidarity. In the history of many modern nations the influence of the myth of destiny can also be perceived. Thus, the belief in a peculiar destiny which had already been formulated among the separate colonies throughout the early period of American history was of special import in the growth of a consciousness of national identity among American colonists during the years of their struggle for independence.

This study aims at scrutinizing the changes in the formulation and meaning, during the revolutionary era, of the myth of a peculiar destiny and the impact of the doctrine of natural law in bringing about these changes. The main theses are, first, that the American colonists met the need felt during the revolutionary era for new evidence of and support for an American “destiny” by appealing to the seemingly secure tenets of the doctrine of natural law; and, second, that, as a consequence of this intermingling of “destiny” and “natural law,” the assertion of an American destiny was transformed from a “faith” to a “certainty,” or, more accurately, from a dream to an appointment “manifest.”