of English birth is better off, lives better and has broader and more expensive tastes. But it is one thing to have tastes and quite a different thing to have the means to gratify them. The means would not be any greater if those people were citizens of the United States than they are now. One thing we would receive in bountiful measure from Canada were we to annex her, and that is debt. She is loaded with debt in proportion to the assessed value of everything within her borders about five times as heavily as the United States, and let no one imagine that the Canadian is going to be fool enough to become part of our country and pay a proportion of our debts without having her own debts paid by us. The Canadian debt and ours would have to be amalgamated, with the result that each individual taxpayer of the United States would have to take a share in paying, literally paying, for Canada. I know that a great deal is said about the vexatious questions that would be entirely disposed of were Canada to become part of this Union. But would we really get rid of them? All of the territory to the north of us is not strictly Canadian. Some of it still belongs to England, and even if England were quite willing to be entirely rid of the Dominion, she would keep a foothold here if only for the purpose of having a source of food supply from the fisheries. Nearly two hundred years ago, when the British islands were nowhere near as populous as at present, and the sea yielded a bountiful harvest all along the British coast, England fought France savagely on the fisheries question, and America so fully sympathized with her as to assist her to the best of her ability. So, as long as England is anywhere on our border, it would be useless to imagine ourselves rid of her as a possible enemy. She could concentrate troops and munitions of war quite as easily upon any large island or point of the upper half of North America as she can in Canada. She might not be quite so near our border or have so many opportunities for crossing, but she would be far enough away for us not to be able to watch her so closely. The only purposes of annexation, now that men are no longer stolen and killed for the nominal reason that we wish to make Christians of them, are to get something worth having for its own sake or to find a place of overflow for surplus population. None of our neighbors are rich except in debt. They have nothing we want which we cannot get cheaper by purchase than at the expense of time, money and patience that even peaceable annexation would require.