“When the independence of the United States was established in 1783, they were left with one half of the continent, and you with the other. You had much accumulated wealth and an overflowing population. They were three millions of people, poor, in debt, with their country ravaged and their commerce disorganised. By the slightest effort of statesmanship you could have planted your surplus population in your own provinces, and, in five years, the stream of emigration would have been flowing the right way. In twenty years the British and Republican forces would have been equalised. But you did nothing, or often worse than nothing. From 1784 to 1841, we were ruled by little paternal despotisms established in this country. We could not change an officer, reduce a salary, or impose a duty, without the permission of Downing Street. For all that dreary period of sixty years, the Republicans governed themselves, and you governed us. They had uniform duties and free trade with each other. We always had separate tariffs, and have them to this day. They controlled their foreign relations--you controlled ours. They had their ministers and consuls all over the world, to open new markets, and secure commercial advantages. Your ministers and consuls knew little of British America, and rarely consulted its interests. Till the advent of Huskisson, our commerce was cramped by all the vices of the old colonial system. The Republicans could open mines in any part of their country. Our mines were locked up, until seven years ago, by a close monopoly held in this country by the creditors of the Duke of York. How few of the hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, who gazed at Nova Scotia’s marvellous column of coal in the Exhibition, this summer, but would have blushed had they known that for half a century the Nova Scotians could not dig a ton of their own coal without asking permission of half a dozen English capitalists in the city of London. How few Englishmen now reflect, when riding over the rich and populous states of Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Arkansas, that had they not locked up their great west, and turned it into a hunting ground, which it is now, we might have had behind Canada, three or four magnificent provinces, enlivened by the industry of millions of British subjects, toasting the Queen’s health on their holidays, and making the vexed question of the defence of our frontiers one of very easy solution. “When the Trent affair aroused the indignant feeling of the empire last autumn, we were--as we were in 1812--utterly unprepared. The war again was none of our seeking.