Brown argued, as he had done in 1852, that Canada could not be indifferent to the question, whether the dominant power of the North American continent should be slave or free. Holding that liberty had better securities under the British than under the American system, he yet believed that the failure of the American experiment would be a calamity and a blow to free institutions all over the world. For years the United States had been the refuge of the oppressed in every land; millions had fled from poverty in Europe to find happiness and prosperity there. From these had been wafted back to Europe new ideas of the rights of the people. With the fall of the United States this impetus to freedom, world-wide in its influence, would cease. Demands for popular rights and free constitutions would be met by the despotic rulers of Europe with the taunt that in the United States free constitutions and popular rights had ended in disruption and anarchy. "Let us not forget that there have been, and still are, very different monarchies in the world from that of our own beloved queen; and assuredly there are not so many free governments on earth that we should hesitate to devise earnestly the success of that one nearest to our own, modelled from our own, and founded by men of our own race. I do most heartily rejoice, for the cause of liberty, that Mr. Lincoln did not patiently acquiesce in the dismemberment of the republic." The Civil War in the United States raised the most important question of foreign policy with which the public men of Canada were called upon to deal in Brown's career. The dismemberment of the British empire would hardly have exercised a more profound influence on the human race and on world-wide aspirations for freedom, than the dismemberment of the United States and the establishment on this continent of a mighty slave empire. Canada could not be indifferent to the issue. How long would the slave-holding power, which coerced the North into consenting to the Fugitive Slave Law, have tolerated the existence of a free refuge for slaves across the lakes? Either Canada would have been forced to submit to the humiliation of joining in the hunt for men, or the British empire would have been obliged to fight the battle that the North fought under the leadership of Lincoln. In the face of this danger confronting Canada and the empire and freedom, it was a time to forget smaller international animosities. Brown was one of the few Canadian statesmen who saw the situation clearly and rose to the occasion. For twenty years by his public speeches, and still more through the generous devotion of the _Globe_ to the cause, he aided the cause of freedom and of the union of the lovers of freedom. CHAPTER XII BROWN AND THE ROMAN CATHOLICS