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Yet if it was not large, the provincial stage witnessed its full share of the dramatic motives and movements of political life. Here experiments were worked out in the organization of government and of parties, in the relation of race with race, in the connection between Church and State, and in the linking of colony and empire, which deeply influenced the development of the future Dominion and were not without interest to the world beyond.

In the words of Mr. Laurier, in an unpublished fragment of a work he long planned to write, had fate given him leisure,—the political history of Canada under the Union,—

A new era began with the Union. In this new era there was found nothing of that which had given the past its attraction, neither the great feats of arms to save the native soil from invasion, nor the intrepid journeys of the explorers led on and on by an unquenchable thirst for the unknown, nor the journeys, more intrepid still, of the missionaries everywhere marking with their blood the path for the explorers. The very parliamentary battles on which henceforth the attention of the nation was to be concentrated no longer bore the striking impress which had been stamped on the parliamentary struggles after the Conquest by the prestige of those who took part in them, the greatness of the cause which was defended, and the bloody catastrophe which was their outcome.