There is a very true saying, that necessity is the mother of invention, and in no country is it better exemplified than in Canada.  The emigrant has there, especially when distant from a town or settlement, to make a hundred shifts, substituting wood for iron, in the construction of various articles, such as hinges for barn-door gates, stable and barn-shovels, and a variety of other contrivances whereby both money and time are saved.

I have often heard young men say, they “could not” do this or do that.  “Did you ever try?” is a fair question to such people.  I believe that many persons, with average capacities, can effect much more than they give themselves credit for.  I had no more been bred a carpenter than a civil engineer, in which last capacity I was holding office satisfactorily.  My education had consisted of Latin, Greek, and French, and the mathematics.  My time had been spent in my own country; riding, shooting, boating, filled up with a little amateur gardening.

Want of energy is not the fault of the Americans; they will dash at everything, and generally succeed.  I had known them contract to do difficult jobs that required the skill of the engineer or regular architect, and accomplish them cleverly too, although they had never attempted anything of the kind before; and they generally completed their task to the satisfaction of the parties furnishing the contract.  “I cannot do it” is a phrase not to be found in the Yankee vocabulary, I guess.

It is astonishing how a few years’ residence in Canada or the United States brightens the intellects of the labouring classes.  The reason is quite obvious.  The agricultural population of England are born and die in their own parishes, seldom or never looking out into a world of which they know nothing.  Thus, they become too local in their ideas, are awake to nought but the one business they have been brought up to follow; they have indeed no motive to improve their general knowledge.

But place the honest and industrious peasant in Canada, and, no matter how ignorant he may be, when he sees that by his perseverance and industry he will in a short time better his situation in life, and most likely become the possessor of a freehold, this motive for exertion will call forth the best energies of his mind, which had hitherto, for want of a proper stimulus, lain dormant.  Having to act and think for himself, and being better acquainted with the world, he soon becomes a theoretical as well as a practical man, and consequently a cleverer and more enlightened person, than he was before in his hopeless servitude in the mother-country.