The English
Government Did Not, I Presume, Take This Step With Reference To Any
Possible Invasion Of Canada By The Government Of The States.
We
are fortifying Portsmouth, and Portland, and Plymouth, because we
would fain be safe against the French army acting under a French
Emperor.
But we sent 2000 troops to Canada, if I understand the
matter rightly, to guard our provinces against the filibustering
energies of a mass of unemployed American soldiers, when those
soldiers should come to be disbanded. When this war shall be over -
a war during which not much, if any, under a million of American
citizens will have been under arms - it will not be easy for all who
survive to return to their old homes and old occupations. Nor does
a disbanded soldier always make a good husbandman, notwithstanding
the great examples of Cincinnatus and Bird-o'-freedom Sawin. It
may be that a considerable amount of filibustering energy will be
afloat, and that the then government of those who neighbor us in
Canada will have other matters in hand more important to them than
the controlling of these unruly spirits. That, as I take it, was
the evil against which we of Great Britain and of Canada desired to
guard ourselves.
But I doubt whether 2000 or 10,000 British soldiers would be any
effective guard against such inroads, and I doubt more strongly
whether any such external guarding will be necessary. If the
Canadians were prepared to fraternize with filibusters from the
States, neither three nor ten thousand soldiers would avail against
such a feeling over a frontier stretching from the State of Maine
to the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Erie. If such a feeling did
exist - if the Canadians wished the change - in God's name let them
go. It is for their sakes, and not for our own, that we would have
them bound to us. But the Canadians are averse to such a change
with a degree of feeling that amounts to national intensity. Their
sympathies are with the Southern States, not because they care for
cotton, not because they are anti-abolitionists, not because they
admire the hearty pluck of those who are endeavoring to work out
for themselves a new revolution. They sympathize with the South
from strong dislike to the aggression, the braggadocio, and the
insolence they have felt upon their own borders. They dislike Mr.
Seward's weak and vulgar joke with the Duke of Newcastle. They
dislike Mr. Everett's flattering hints to his countrymen as to the
one nation that is to occupy the whole continent. They dislike the
Monroe doctrine. They wonder at the meekness with which England
has endured the vauntings of the Northern States, and are endued
with no such meekness of their own. They would, I believe, be well
prepared to meet and give an account of any filibusters who might
visit them; and I am not sure that it is wisely done on our part to
show any intention of taking the work out of their hands.
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