Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
History
Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1
Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
Canada -- Description and travel; Ontario -- Description and travel
Man is now a locomotive animal, both as regards the faculties of mind
and of motion; unless in the schools, in the cabinet, or in amusing
fictions founded on fact, he rarely finds leisure to think about a
forgotten people.
Canada and Canadian affairs have, however, succeeded in interesting the
public of America and the public of Europe--the "go-ahead" English
reader in the New World--because Canada would be a very desirable
addition to the already overgrown Republic founded by the Pilgrim
Fathers and Europeans; because French interest looks with a somewhat
wistful eye to the race which at one time peopled and governed so large
a portion of the Columbian continent. Regrets, mingling with desires,
are powerful stimulants. An unconquerable and natural jealousy exists in
France that England should have succeeded in laying the foundations of
an empire, which bids fair to perpetuate the glories of the Anglo-Saxon
race in its Transatlantic dominion; whilst the true Briton, on the other
hand, regards Canada as the apple of his eye, and sees with pleasure and
with pride that his beloved country, forewarned by the grand error
committed at Boston, and so prophetically denounced by Chatham, has
obtained a fairer and more fertile field for British legitimate
ambition.
Tocqueville, a sensible and somewhat impartial writer, is the only
political foreign reasoner who has done justice to Canada; but it is
_par parenthese_ only; and even his powers of mind and of reasoning,
nurtured as they have been in republicanism, fail to convince fearless
hearts that democracy is a human necessity.
That the American nation will endeavour to put a wet blanket over the
nascent fires of Spanish ambition in the miserable new States of the
Northern Continent, and to absorb them in the stars of Columbia, there
can be no doubt. California, the most distant of the old American
settlements of Spain, has felt already the bald eagle's claw; Texas is
annexed; and unless European interests prevent it, which they must do,
Mexico, Guatemala, Yucatan, and all the petty priest-ridden republics of
the Isthmus, must follow, and that too very soon.
But what do the people of the United States, (for the government is not
a particeps, save by force,) pretend to effect by their enormous
sovereignty? The control probably of the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards
is the grand object, and, to effect this, Canada and Nova Scotia stand
in the way, and Canada and Nova Scotia are therefore marked down as
other Stars in the American galaxy.
The Russian empire is cited, as a case in point, for immense extension
being no obstacle to central coercion, or government, if the term be
more pleasing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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