"Since The Royal Speech, Governments Have Done Something, And Events
Have Done More, To Ripen Public Opinion Into Action.
The Governments at
home and in Canada have organized and explored.
The more perfect
discoveries of our new gold fields on the Pacific, the Indian Mutiny,
the completion of great works in Canada, the treaties with Japan and
with China, the visit of the Prince of Wales to the American Continent,
and, at the moment, the sad dissensions in the United States, combine
to interest us in the question, and to make us ask, 'How is this hope
to be realized; not a century hence, but in our time?'
"Our augmenting interests in the East, demand, for reasons both of
Empire and of trade, access to Asia less dangerous than by Cape Horn,
less circuitous even than by Panama, less dependent than by Suez and
the Red Sea. Our emigration, imperilled by the dissensions of the
United States, must fall back upon colonization. And, commercially, the
countries of the East must supply the raw materials and provide the
markets, which probable contests between the free man and the slave may
diminish, or may close, elsewhere. Again, a great nation like ours
cannot stand still. It must either march on triumphantly in the van, or
fall hopelessly into the rear. The measure of its accomplishment must,
century by century, rise higher and higher in the competition of
nations. Its great works in this generation can alone perpetuate its
greatness in the next.
"Let us look at the map: there we see, coloured as 'British America,' a
tract washed by the great Atlantic on the East, and by the Pacific
Ocean on the West, and containing 4,000,000 square miles, or one-ninth
of the whole terrestrial surface of the globe. Part of this vast
domain, upon the East, is Upper and Lower Canada; part, upon the West,
is the new Colony of British Columbia, with Vancouver's Island (the
Madeira of the Pacific); while the largest portion is held, as one
great preserve, by the fur-trading Hudson's Bay Company, who, in right
of a charter given by Charles II., in 1670, kill vermin for skins, and
monopolise the trade with the Native Indians over a surface many times
as big again as Great Britain and Ireland. Still, all this land is
ours, for it owes allegiance to the sceptre of Victoria. Between the
magnificent harbour of Halifax, on the Atlantic, open throughout the
year for ships of the largest class, to the Straits of Fuca, opposite
Vancouver's Island, with its noble Esquimault inlet, intervene some
3,200 miles of road line. For 1,400 or 1,500 miles of this distance,
the Nova Scotian, the Habitan, and the Upper Canadian have spread, more
or less in lines and patches over the ground, until the population of
60,000 of 1759 amounts to 2,500,000 in 1860. The remainder is peopled
only by the Indian and the hunter, save that at the southern end of
Lake Winnipeg there still exists the hardy and struggling Red River
Settlement, now called 'Fort Garry:' and dotted all over the Continent,
as lights of progress, are trading posts of the Hudson's Bay Company.
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