Lord Elgin knew perfectly well that, while this discontent existed, the party which favoured annexation would not fail to find sympathy and encouragement in the neighbouring republic.  He recalled the fact that both Papineau and Mackenzie, after the outbreak of their abortive rebellion, had many abettors across the border, as the infamous raids into Canada clearly proved.  Many people in the United States, no doubt, saw some analogy between the grievances of Canadians and those which had led to the American revolution.  “The mass of the American people,” said Lord Durham, “had judged of the quarrel from a distance; they had been obliged to form their judgment on the apparent grounds of the controversy; and were thus deceived, as all those are apt to be who judge under such circumstances, and on such grounds.  The contest bore some resemblance to that great struggle of their own forefathers, which they regard with the highest pride.  Like that, they believed it to be the contest of a colony against the empire, whose misconduct alienated their own country; they considered it to be a contest undertaken by a people professing to seek independence of distant control, and extension of popular privileges.”  More than that, the striking contrast which was presented between Canada and the United States “in respect to every sign of productive industry, increasing wealth, and progressive civilization” was considered by the people of the latter country to be among the results of the absence of a political system which would give expansion to the energies of the colonists and make them self-reliant in every sense.  Lord Durham’s picture of the condition of things in 1838-9 was very painful to Canadians, although it was truthful in every particular.  “On the British side of the line,” he wrote, “with the exception of a few favoured spots, where some approach to American prosperity is apparent, all seems waste and desolate.”  But it was not only “in the difference between the larger towns on the two sides” that we could see “the best evidence of our own inferiority.”  That “painful and undeniable truth was most manifest in the country districts through which the line of national separation passes for one thousand miles.”  Mrs. Jameson in her “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles,” written only a year or two before Lord Durham’s report, gives an equally unfavourable comparison between the Canadian and United States sides of the western country.  As she floated on the Detroit river in a little canoe made of a hollow tree, and saw on one side “a city with its towers, and spires, and animated population,” and on the other “a little straggling hamlet with all the symptoms of apathy, indolence, mistrust, hopelessness,” she could not help wondering at this “incredible difference between the two shores,” and hoping that some of the colonial officials across the Atlantic would be soon sent “to behold and solve the difficulty.”