England and Canada / A Summer Tour Between Old and New Westminster, with Historical Notes

by Sandford Fleming

All nations are influenced by the events which they experience, and no people were more moulded into a new development than the Anglo-Saxon race in the Eleventh century, when the Norman crossed the channel and wrung the sovereignty of the country from the reigning monarch. Traces of customs, of laws, of thought, of language, of feeling, of the character of those earlier centuries still remain. But in a few generations the descendants of those who fought in the battle near Hastings had no sentiment but for English soil. They had ceased to be Norman, and it was by the children of the conquering race that the liberties of the country were affirmed in the Great Charter.

In the Province of Quebec there yet remains the unmistakeable impress of its early settlement: of those Normans and Bretons who settled on the shores of the St. Lawrence and in Acadia, and of those who claim ancestry with the noble race which, south and east of the Loire, extending to Rochelle, so constantly battled for freedom of thought. One hundred and twenty years have passed since the last remnant of the power of France disappeared from the northern part of the continent. Great changes have taken place within this period. It was only step by step, in confusion and difficulty, that the present system of self-government became established: a truth evolved out of much complication and from want of the comprehension of Imperial and Colonial relations. The effect has been of imperfect accomplishment in much. This positive good has, however, been achieved, even if in other respects the consummation has been incomplete. The whole of the inhabitants of the several Provinces are united by the one feeling of advancing the common prosperity, and the French Canadian is found in the advanced ranks when the progress of the whole Dominion is in any way concerned.

Of the five great colonial empires which arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Great Britain, the British Empire is the only one which survives. The remaining powers possess but a few remnants of their once outstanding colonies. No one of them retains the character of its former strength. The loss of the thirteen colonies of North America a century back by Great Britain was a wound to the national greatness which it was feared by many would never be healed. It was a serious and painful separation which prudence and good government might have averted.

It is often no little of a benefit to each of us to pass through tribulation. Equally so with communities. The Mother Country in this struggle had much to unlearn before her possessions were wisely governed. It took nearly seventy years before the lesson bore fruit. But thoughtful men, step by step, won adherence to their sound policy. We have its result in the present prosperous condition of the Outer Empire, which now, apart from India, contains ten millions of the European race, little less than the population of the British Isles at the period of the American war.

In the last century powerful antagonistic forces were in operation: religious disabilities, commercial restrictions, a narrow franchise, an imperfect parliamentary representation, unwise trade regulations. Discontent followed. It was the interference with the commerce of Massachusetts with the West Indies which was one of the first causes of the severance of good feeling, so soon to be transformed into bitterness and hate. That these grievances no longer exist and that the several British Provinces enjoy free institutions, which it is to be hoped they will learn wisely to work; all this dates from that terrible struggle. Probably the lesson was only the better remembered that it was taught in blood and suffering.

No such repelling forces now exist. The causes of dissension have passed into oblivion. Commerce, science and increased intelligence have relieved the problem from the features which disfigured it. The Atlantic has ceased to be a cause of separation. It is a pertinent query, had these new conditions prevailed a century back, whether the Declaration of Independence would ever have been written.

The American revolution divided the history of the English speaking race into two streams. What will be their future course? They cannot flow in opposite directions. Are there any influences which will lead them insensibly to gravitate one to the other, until in process of years the waters will blend?

We may assert thus far, that however we may be unable to forecast the future, we can trace at this date an assimilation of thought in much, which a few years back could meet on no common ground. Such a result is visible on many occasions and in a thousand ways. In the words of Commodore Tattnall, who went to our rescue at the Pei-ho forts, “Blood is thicker than water.” On all sides the movement is convergent.

The diffusion of the English race and the English language over the face of the globe is a result without a parallel. When Columbus and Cabot crossed the Atlantic the number of the English people equalled proximately half the present population of Canada. When Elizabeth ascended the throne it was about five millions. At the time of the American revolution the English population in the British Isles and in North America together numbered fifteen millions. The English-speaking population in all parts of the globe has now increased to a hundred millions, nearly equally divided between England, her Colonies and the United States.

The progress and well-being of the world is largely dependent on the prosperity and harmony of this rapidly increasing branch of the human family. That any of its elements should disintegrate, or that antagonism should take the form of hostility, is painful even to contemplate. There are no signs of any such tendency. There is a natural affinity existing between the children of the one parentage, with substantially the same theories of human duty, with the like interests in the progress of art and science, by which our comforts are multiplied and human happiness increased. They enjoy equally free institutions, speak one language, with one literature, with common traditions, with a history one and the same for nearly the whole of the nineteen Christian centuries. The aims of the two great sections of the race are identical, and whatever political institutions in either case may prevail, it is an object worthy of the highest ambition of the most enlightened statesmen to bind these peoples in a perpetual alliance of union and friendship and common interest.