ted long, to lean upon the mother
country. The Maine wilderness made intercourse between Nova Scotia and
New England difficult by land, and the British fleet was in control
of the sea until near the close of the war. Nova Scotia stood by Great
Britain, and was reserved to become part of a northern nation still in
the making.

That nation was to owe its separate existence to the success of the
American Revolution. But for that event, coming when it did, the
struggling colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia would in time have become
merged with the colonies to the youth and would have followed them,
whether they remained within the British Empire or not. Thus it was due
to the quarrel between the thirteen colonies and the motherland that
Canada did not become merely a fourteenth colony or state. Nor was this
the only bearing of the Revolution on Canada's destiny. Thanks to the
coming of the Loyalists, those exiles of the Revolution who settled in
Canada in large numbers, Canada was after all to be dominantly a land of
English speech and of English sympathies. By one of the many paradoxes
which mark the history of Canada, the very success of the plan which
aimed to save British power by confirming French-Canadian nationality
and the loyalty of the French led in the end to making a large part of
Canada English. The Revolution meant also that for many a year those in
authority in England and in Canada itself were to stand in fear of the
principles and institutions which had led the old colonies to rebellion
and separation, and were to try to build up in Canada buttresses against
the advance of democracy.

The British statesmen who helped to frame the Peace of 1783 were men
with broad and generous views as to the future of the seceding colonies
and their relations with the mother country. It was perhaps inevitable
that they should have given less thought to the future of the colonies
in America which remained under the British flag. Few men could realize
at the moment that out of these scattered fragments a new nation and a
second empire would arise. Not only were the seceding colonies given a
share in the fishing grounds of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which was
unfortunately to prove a constant source of friction, but the
boundary line was drawn with no thought of the need of broad and easy
communication between Nova Scotia and Canada, much less between Canada
and the far West. Vague definitions of the boundaries, naturally