He writes gratefully, in 1799, to a friend in Quebec, who had sent newspapers and sermons, both of which remotely different classes of literature had furnished “great entertainment.”  From Europe he is receiving the volumes of the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, still on the shelves at Murray Bay, and is thankful that they were not captured by the French.  “The older I grow the fonder I am of reading and that book is a great resource.”  Our degenerate age gets little “entertainment” out of sermons and usually keeps an encyclopaedia strictly for “reference”; obviously Nairne read it.

The old soldier watched and commented upon developments which were the fruit of seed he himself had helped to sow.  He had fought to win Canada for Britain; he had fought to crush the American Revolution.  By 1800 he sees how great Canada may become and is convinced that yielding independence to the United States has not proved very injurious to Great Britain.  Though, in a short time, the United States was to secure the great West by purchasing Louisiana from France, when Nairne died it had not done so and in 1800 he could say that the United States “are small in comparison of the whole of North America.  They are bounded upon all sides and will be filled up with people in no very great number of years.  Our share of North America is yet unknown in its extent.  Enterprising people in quest of furs travel for years towards the north and towards the west through vast countries of good soil uninhabited as yet ... [except] for hunting, and watered with innumerable lakes and rivers, stored with fish, besides every other convenience for the use of man, and certainly destined to be filled with people in some future time.  We have only [now] heard of one named Mackenzie[17] who is reported to have been as far as the Southern Ocean (from Canada) across this continent to the West.”  Long before Canada stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Nairne was thus dreaming of what we now see.

Of war, then raging, Nairne took a philosophic view.  “War may be necessary,” he writes in 1798, “for some very Populous countrys as any crop when too thick is the better of being thinned.”  But it occurred to him that the problem of over-population in Europe might have been solved in a less crude manner.  “It is strange,” he says, “that there should be so much of the best part of the globe still unoccupied, where the foot of man never trod, and in Europe such destruction of people.  It is however for some purpose we do not, as yet, comprehend.”  Those were the days when Napoleon Bonaparte’s star was rising and when, in defiance of England, led by Pitt, he smote state after state which stood in the path of his ambition.  Nairne’s friend and business agent James Ker, an Edinburgh banker, was obviously no admirer of Pitt, for he writes on July 20th, 1797, of the struggle with revolutionary France which, though it was to endure for more than twenty years, had already, he thought, lasted too long: