650 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [PART LV
as the Crown had parted with the valuable public lands.
Finally financial pressure was effective, and the resolution
arrived at was that the province should be advanced the
money to buy back the lands up to an amount not exceeding
$800,000, and that the interest on this sum at a rate
of 5 per cent. should be deducted annually from a sum of
$45,000 paid by the Dominion to the province in view
of its absence of Crown lands. On these terms being arranged
the necessary addresses required under s. 146 of the British
North America Act were passed, and by an Order in Council
of June 26 the new province became part of the Dominion,
with all the full rights of an original province, on July 1,
1873. The final addition was made to the territories of
Canada in 1880, when, in deference to the wishes of the
Canadian Parliament as expressed in 1878, the Imperial
Government procured the passing of an Order in Council
of July 31, 1880, adding all the territories in North America
other than Newfoundland and its dependencies to the
Dominion of Canada, an Order in Council which, if not ex
inatio valid, was ratified ex post facto by the Imperial Colonial
Boundaries Act, 1895, passed to set at rest the long and
fruitless discussions as to the power of the Crown to alter
the boundary of a Colony by the prerogative alone, a power
which had at any rate been as freely exercised as it was
doubtfully valid. Newfoundland, which was represented at
the conference of 1864, has never joined the Dominion, though
there was discussion of union in 1895 during the financial
crisis following the failure of the banks. The present state
of feeling in the people of the Colony is dead against union,
while the politicians on either side at each general election
find no more damaging attack to make upon the opposite
side than that they are secretly favouring confederation, and
the movements of a prominent politician at that time are
watched with the most rigorous scrutinv 2
t Cf. Canada House of Commons Debates, 1878, p. 2386. There were
doubts as to the north and north-east boundaries of the Hudson’s Bay
territories and Rupert’s Land.
¢ Cf. Canadian Annual Review, 1909, pp. 36-9, for the counter-accusations