Fifty years later by way of Hudson Bay came Lord Selkirk's Settlers--Orkneymen and Highlanders, hardy, keen and dauntless as their native rock-bound isles. These four classes were the primary first ingredients that went into the making of Canada's national consciousness and each of the four classes was the very personification of strength, purpose, courage, freedom. III But Destiny plays us strange tricks. When Quebec fell in 1759, New France passed under the rule of that English and Protestant race which she had been fighting for two centuries; and when the American colonies won their independence twenty years later and the ultra-English Loyalists trekked in thousands across the boundary to what are now Montreal and Toronto and Cobourg, there came under one government two races that had fought each other in raid and counter-raid for two centuries--alien and antagonistic in religion and speech. It is only in recent years under the guiding hand of Sir Wilfred Laurier that the ancient antagonism has been pushed off the boards. The War of 1812 probably helped Canada's national spirit more than it hurt it. It tested the French Canadian and found him loyal to the core; loyal, to be sure, not because he loved England more but rather because he loved the Americans less. He felt surer of religious freedom under English rule, which guaranteed it to him, than under the rule of the new republic, which he had harried and which had harried him in border raid for two centuries. The War of 1812 left Canada crippled financially but stronger in national spirit because she had tested her strength and repelled invasion. If mountain pines strike strong roots into the eternal rocks because they are tempest-tossed by the wildest winds of heaven, then the next twenty years were destined to test the very fiber of Canada's national spirit. All that was weak snapped and went down. The dry rot of political theory was flung to dust. Special interests, pampered privileges, the claims of the few to exploit the many, the claims of the many to rule wisely as the few--the shibboleth of theorists, the fine spun cobwebs of the doctrinaires, governmental ideals of brotherhood that were mostly sawdust and governmental practices that were mostly theft under privilege--all went down in the smash of the next twenty years' tempest. All that was left was what was real; what would hold water and work out in fact.