In population, wealth, industries, and resources Ontario is the Dominion’s gem; yet in a decade she could attract and hold but fifty-odd thousand persons,—­not quite all the children born within her borders.

All political divisions aside, there is no reason in the world why population should be dense on the west bank of the Detroit River and sparse on the east; why people should teem to suffocation to the south of the St. Lawrence and not to the north.

These conditions are not normal, and sooner or later must change.  It is not in the nature of things that this North American continent should be arbitrarily divided in its most fertile midst by political lines, and by and by it will be impossible to keep the multiplying millions south of the imaginary line from surging across into the rich vacant territory to the north.  The outcome is inevitable; neither diplomacy nor statecraft can prevent it.

When the population of this country is a hundred or a hundred and fifty millions the line will have disappeared.  There may be a struggle of some kind over some real or fancied grievance, but, struggle or no struggle, it is not for man to oppose for long inevitable tendencies.  In the long run, population, like water, seeks its level; in adjacent territories, the natural advantages and attractions of which are alike, the population tends strongly to become equally dense; political conditions and differences in race and language may for a time hold this tendency in check, but where race and language are the same, political barriers must soon give way.

All that has preserved Canada from absorption up to this time is the existence of those mighty natural barriers, the St. Lawrence and the great lakes.  As population increases in the Northwest, where the dividing line is known only to surveyors, the situation will become critical.  Already the rush to the Klondike has produced trouble in Alaska.  The aggressive miners from this side, who constitute almost the entire population, submit with ill-grace to Canadian authority.  They do not like it, and Dawson or some near point may yet become a second Johannesburg.

In all controversies so far, Canada has been as belligerent as England has been conciliatory.  With rare tact and diplomacy England has avoided all serious differences with this country over Canadian matters without at the same time offending the pride of the Dominion; just how long this can be kept up no man can tell; but not for more than a generation to come, if so long.

So far as the people of Canada are concerned, practically all would be opposed to any form of annexation.  The great majority of the people are Englishmen at heart and very English in thought, habit, speech, and accent; they are much more closely allied to the mother country than to this; and they are exceedingly patriotic.

They do not like us because they rather fear us,—­not physically, not as man against man,—­but overwhelming size and increasing importance, fear for the future, fear what down deep in their hearts many of them know must come.  Their own increasing independence has taught them the sentimental and unsubstantial character of the ties binding them to England, and yet they know full well that with those ties severed their independence would soon disappear.