Now this city of Montreal was little, if at all, capable of military defence. It was so constructed as to have been peculiarly liable to destruction by fire; and, at the time that the spectacle we have faintly sketched might have been witnessed, the chances of war were at least two to one against its determined British inhabitants. Nor should it be forgotten, that nearly the whole of the property in this city was owned by these British inhabitants; was the fruits of many years of their honest toil; and as it is well known that policies of insurance do not cover losses occasioned by the Queen’s enemies, the loss to them might have been total had it been burned. These British inhabitants of Montreal, therefore, without a moment’s hesitation, in an indefensible city, and with the chances of war as two to one against them, willingly and even cheerfully perilled their lives, their families, their hearths, their property, their all, to uphold the flag of England. In the month of October last, upwards of twelve hundred persons, in the space of a few days—one half of whom were the very men who acted in 1838 as we have described—openly and deliberately called upon their fellow colonists to haul down the flag of Britain upon the continent of America; and coupled that request with another, that the flag of a rival power should be put up in its stead. Now what are the causes of this most extraordinary change? What is it which has exerted so powerful an influence, as to have caused men capable of making the noblest sacrifices to uphold the institutions of their forefathers at one time, capable of making such attempts to destroy them at another? We answer, emphatically, it was free trade and its attendant philosophy. It was the injuries it inflicted upon the colonies—not in the spirit of national compromise or mutual sacrifices, but in the spirit of the giant using the giant’s power. It was the lessons, too, that accompanied the injuries. It was the obliterating the love of country in the pursuits of avarice. It was the ruinous latitude that free-trade philosophy had to allow to others, in claiming the same for its own disciples.