ot lost their native simpleness and
kindliness; the Irishmen who drove the public carriages were as civil as
our own Boston hackmen, and behaved as respectfully under the shadow of
England here, as they world have done under it in Ireland. The problem
which vexes us seems to have been solved pleasantly enough in Canada.
Is it because the Celt cannot brook equality; and where he has not an
established and recognized caste above him, longs to trample on those
about him; and if he cannot be lowest, will at least be highest?

However, our friends did not suffer this or any other advantage of
the colonial relation to divert them from the opinion to which their
observation was gradually bringing them,--that its overweening loyalty
placed a great country like Canada in s very silly attitude, the
attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy, clinging to the maternal skirts,
and though spoilt and willful, without any character of his own. The
constant reference of local hopes to that remote centre beyond seas,
the test of success by the criterions of a necessarily different
civilization, the social and intellectual dependence implied by traits
that meet the most hurried glance in the Dominion, give an effect of
meanness to the whole fabric. Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of
peace, of irresponsibility they live there, but it lacks the grandeur
which no sum of material prosperity can give; it is ignoble, like all
voluntarily subordinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no basis
in the New World, and that till it is shaken loose from England it
cannot have.

It would be a pity, however, if it should be parted from the parent
country merely to be joined to an unsympathetic half-brother like
ourselves and nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from the
Canadian mind. There are some experiments no longer possible to us which
could still be tried there to the advantage of civilization, and we
were better two great nations side by side than a union of discordant
traditions and ideas. But none the less does the American traveller,
swelling with forgetfulness of the shabby despots who govern New York,
and the swindling railroad kings whose word is law to the whole land,
feel like saying to the hulling young giant beyond St. Lawrence and the
Lakes, "Sever the apron-strings of allegiance, and try to be yourself
whatever you are."

Something of this sort Basil said, though of course not in apostrophic
phrase, nor with Isabel's entir