But it is no new lesson to learn, that an inert and unprogressive race, with pride clinging to decay, and customs withering to enterprise, cannot harmonise, in legislative provisions, with men who want laws to assist the steps of advancing civilisation, rather than ways and means of keeping up old ruins; who prefer to gather the fruits of a thousand trees, for the planting of which enterprise has explored, and industry has employed, new and rich domains, to tying up the decaying branches of a few old ones, to which possibly memory may love to cling, but under which plain human nature might starve. To expect, in fact, that men with such opposite characteristics, apart even from their other elements of discord, should harmonise, when the party weaker in legislation was the stronger in civilisation, when the party that stood still had the power of making the other stand still also, was to expect an impossibility. And this was exactly the nature of the contest so long carried on in Lower Canada. An ox and a race-horse had been yoked together in the same legislative harness. But the misfortune was increased by the race-horse's being subject--however much he might struggle, and rear, and foam--to the motions of his dogged companion, and to the necessity of not moving at all, whenever it pleased his venerable mate to stand still. It is clear, therefore, that any legislative provision, after the rebellion, which would restore to the French this ascendency, would be but causing confusion worse confused--would be but entailing upon both parties constant contentions, with the probability, if not the certainty, of a final appeal to arms; in which case England would be left without a friend in either party--the one looking upon her as their natural enemy--the other as a power which had always sacrificed its friends when it had the means of benefiting them--had perpetually raised its defenders very high, to see how very far it could let them fall.