Not only was separation the desire of certain of the younger groups, but it was to some extent the desire and foregone conclusion of one group from which separation might take place. The attitude of the British public concerning those portions of the British world where English-speaking white men were claiming increasingly the right to govern themselves was in itself more than an invitation to these "colonies" to separate themselves from the Mother Country. Comparison was made to a tree whose ripened fruit in due season detaches itself from the parent stem. The loss of the richest area in whose conquest the British government ever shared had so impressed statesmen that such men as Gladstone could desire the separation from the British Isles of various Pan-Angle nations.
"During the years which preceded the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 there was in this country [British Isles] a general indifference to the colonial question which did not cease till long afterwards. . . . After the Cobden era came that of Mr. Gladstone, who was in his zenith in the sixties and as purely insular and deficient in the power of Imperial thought as Cobden had been in the forties."[163-1] "A governor, leaving to take charge of an Australian colony, was told even from the Colonial Office that he would probably be the last representative of the Crown sent out from Britain. This tendency of official thought found its culmination when, in 1866, a great journal frankly warned Canada, the { 164} greatest of all the colonies, that it was time to prepare for the separation from the mother-land that must needs come."[164-1] "Mr. Goldwin Smith . . . in his . . . _Canada and the Canadian Question_, which may fairly be supposed to condense all that can be said in favor of the separation of Canada from the Empire, and generally in support of that form of national disintegration which is involved in the great colonies becoming separate states or annexing themselves to other nations . . . is almost the last conspicuous representative of a school of thinkers which twenty-five or thirty years ago appeared likely to dominate English opinion on colonial affairs."[164-2] Only slowly were learned the lessons of the American Revolution, which a British historian in 1883 could truthfully say, "We have tacitly agreed to mention as seldom as we can."[164-3]