Yet more. It would not be hard to show, I think, that the tenant-right and agrarian agitations of the present day are due to Free Trade; that the cry, "the land belongs to the labourer," is the direct offspring of the Cobden teaching; and that the issue will but too probably be, a disastrous revulsion of labour against capital, and poverty against wealth. They who sow the wind, must reap the whirlwind! God send that it may not happen in our day! CHAPTER LXVI. THE FUTURE OF CANADA. I may venture, I hope, to put down here some of the conclusions to which my fifty years' experience in Canada, and my observation of what has been going on during the same term in the United States, have led me. It is a favourite boast with our neighbours, that all North America must ultimately be brought under one government, and that the manifest destiny of Canada will irresistibly lead her on to annexation. And we have had, and still have amongst us, those who welcome the idea, and some who have lately grown audacious enough to stigmatize as traitors those who, like myself, claim to be citizens, not of the Dominion only, but of the Empire. To say nothing of the semi-barbarous population of Mexico, who would have to be consulted, there is a section of the Southern States which may yet demand autonomy for the Negro race, and which will in all probability seize the first opportunity for so doing. Then in Canada, we have a million of French Canadians, who make no secret of their preference for French over British alliance; and who will surely claim their right to act upon their convictions the moment British authority shall have become relaxed. Nor can they be blamed for this, however we may doubt the soundness of their conclusions. Then we have the Acadians of Nova Scotia, who would probably follow French Canada wheresoever she might lead; nor could the few British people of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island--unaided by England--escape the same fate. Even Eastern Ontario might have to fight hard to escape a French Republican régime. There remain Middle and Western Ontario, and the North-West--two naturally isolated territories, neither of which could be expected to incur the horrors of war for the sake of the other. It is not, I think, difficult to foresee, that, given independence, Ontario must inevitably cast her lot in with the United States. But with the North-West, the case is entirely different.