How profoundly this great Loyalist tradition, reinforced as it has been by many other considerations and circumstances, has affected Canadian life, can be gauged only by the actual state of Canadian feeling. Mr. Goldwin Smith has spared no endeavour to prove that the assimilation of Canadian and American sentiment is well-nigh complete. Let us, instead of consulting his imaginative statements, study the actual and quite recent expressions of representative public men and bodies.

Commencing in Eastern Canada, we find Attorney-General Longley, of Nova Scotia, a pronounced {130} opponent of the present Dominion Government, who in past times has seemed to approach very nearly to the advocacy of annexation, now writing in the Fortnightly for March, 1891: 'There is still a deep-seated objection in the minds of a large majority of the people of Canada to union with the United States. It may be unphilosophical, it may be irrational, but it exists. … It is not very easy to blot out a century of history in a day, and the record of the past hundred years has had a constant tendency to confirm British Americans in their devotion to British as against American interests. … It is simply not a practical solution of the future of Canada to suggest political union with the United States, because the preponderating majority of the people will not hear of it. Time is the great miracle worker and may change all this; but we must speak of things as they are. No material considerations will induce the Canadian people at present to accept political union with the United States.'

Archbishop O'Brien, also a Nova Scotian, and the most representative and influential Roman Catholic of Eastern Canada, has in many public utterances expressed his conviction that annexation to the United States would involve for Canada moral damage and political degradation.

New Brunswick, out of its sixteen Parliamentary representatives, had in the last Parliament one whose attitude was ambiguous, since as an editor he seemed to advocate, as a politician he abjured, the idea of {131} annexation. Journalistic ability of a high order and the fact that he represented a commercial constituency having closer trade connection with the New England ports than any other Canadian town made tenable for a time this anomalous position. A decisive vote in the last election left him out of public life, and thus deprived Mr. Goldwin Smith of perhaps the only illustration of his claim that the advocacy of annexation does not exclude from the Dominion Parliament.

Passing on to Quebec we find Mr. Mercier, till lately the local French Canadian leader, hastening to supplement, as he not long since did in Paris to a Times correspondent, an expression of opposition to Imperial Federation by the statement that there is 'no party in Canada … in favour of annexation to the United States.' In Ontario we find Mr. Blake, the strongest man of the Liberal party, withdrawing from public life because he thought he discovered, in the policy of his political friends, a tendency towards annexation. This, at least, is the interpretation which suggests itself to the ordinary reader of his published explanation. The repudiation of any desire for annexation was general, vehement, and doubtless sincere, on the part of the more conspicuous Liberal leaders against whom it had been charged.

Mr. Mowat, the Liberal Premier of Ontario, has lately written a letter for publication, in which he says: 'There are in most counties a few annexationists, {132} in some counties more than in others; but the aggregate in the Dominion, I am sure, is small when compared with the aggregate population. The great majority of our people, I believe and trust, are not prepared to hand over this great Dominion to a foreign nation for any present commercial consideration which may be proposed. We love our Sovereign and are proud of our status as British subjects. The Imperial authorities have refused nothing in the way of self-government which our representatives have asked for. … To the United States and its people we are all most friendly. We recognize the advantages which would go to both them and us from extended trade relations, and we are willing to go as far in that direction as shall not involve, now or in the future, political union; but there Canadians of every party have hitherto drawn the line. … North America is amply large enough for two independent nations, and two friendly nations would be better for both populations than one nation embracing the whole continent.' In another formal statement of the policy of the Liberal party in Canada, Mr. Mowat has said: 'We are as much attached to our nation as the people of the United States are to theirs. The attachment to their nation does our neighbours honour, and intelligent men amongst them cannot regard otherwise our attachment to our nation. As no commercial, or other material advantage, real or supposed, would induce the people of the United States to change their allegiance, so neither, I hope, {133} will the prospect of some material advantage induce Canadians to change their allegiance to the Empire. … For the Liberal party or any important section of it to favour political union with the United States would be death to all hope of Liberal ascendancy in the Councils of the Dominion.'

Going still further West to the prairie regions and British Columbia, hitherto relied upon by Mr. Goldwin Smith for producing a population free from the political traditions and prejudices of the East, we find a compact vote recorded for a Government which makes the maintenance of British connection the corner-stone of its policy, and a chief ground of appeal to the constituencies.

Lastly, we come back to the Dominion Parliament itself. There, in 1890, Liberal and Conservative, Frenchman and Englishman alike, by an absolutely unanimous vote, given with the avowed object of silencing discussion upon the point, united in declaring their unwavering faith in the advantage for Canada of its existing national connection. Mr. Smith claims that geography is too strong for national sentiment, but these are the hard facts which he has to confront in Canada at the end of more than a century of her separate existence. Evidence could scarcely be more conclusive that the main facts are those to which he resolutely shuts his eyes.

The expressions which I have given are those of moderate and distinctly representative men, but there is a deeper passion which must be taken into account.

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