through the particular whig, or tory spectacles of his party, subject to violent and radical alterations of policy because of some party vote in a Legislative Assembly 3000 miles from your nearest coast-line, your own politicians, for years, too timid to grasp the limits of your possible future, parties every where in your provinces, and of every kind, except a national party; no breadth, no depth, no earnest striving to make you great amongst the nations, each one for himself and no-one for the country; men fighting for a sect, for a province, for a nationality, but no one for the nation; and all this while, close alongside, your great rival grew with giant’s growth, looking far into the future before him, cutting his cloth with perspective ideas of what his limbs would attain to in after-time,’ digging his canals and grading, his railroads, with one eye on the Atlantic and the other on the Pacific, spreading himself, monopolizing, annexing, outmanoeuvring and flanking those colonial bodies who sat in solemn state in Downing Street and wrote windy proclamations and despatches anent boundary-lines, of which they knew next to nothing.  Macaulay laughs at poor Newcastle for his childish delight in finding out that Cape Breton was an island, but I strongly suspect there were other and later Newcastles whose geographical knowledge of matters American were not a whit superior.  Poor Canada! they muddled you out of Maine, and the open harbour of Portland, out of Rouse’s Point, and the command of Lake Champlain, out of many a fair mile far away by the Rocky Mountains.  It little matters whether it was the treaty of 1783, or 1818, or ’21, or ’48, or ’71, the worst of every bargain, at all times, fell to you.

I have said that the possession of the canal at the Sault St. Marie enabled the Americans to delay the progress of the Red River Expedition.  The embargo put upon the Canadian vessels originated, however, in the State, and not the Federal, authorities; that is to say, the State of Michigan issued the prohibition against the passage of the steam boat, and not the Cabinet of Washington.  Finally, Washington overruled the decision of Michigan-a feat far more feasible now than it would have been prior to the Southern war-and the steamers were permitted to pass through into the waters of Lake Superior.  From thence to Thunder Bay was only the steaming of four-and-twenty hours through a lake whose vast bosom is the favourite playmate of the wild storm-king of the North.  But although full half the total distance from Toronto to the Red River had been traversed when the Expedition reached Thunder Bay, not a twentieth of the time nor one hundredth part of the labour and fatigue had been accomplished.  For a distance of 600 miles there stretched away to the northwest a vast tract of rock-fringed lake, swamp, and forest; lying spread in primeval savagery, an untravelled wilderness; the home of the Ojibbeway, who here, entrenched amongst Nature’s fastnesses, has long called this land his own.