y believed it was 'manifest
destiny' that some day the Stars and Stripes should float from Panama
to the Pole. At times Canadians here and there {107} had echoed this
belief. It seemed to them better to be annexed at one stroke than to
be annexed piecemeal by exodus, at the rate of fifty or a hundred
thousand Canadians a year. In St John and Halifax, in Montreal and
Toronto, and on the Detroit border, a few voices now called for this
remedy, which promised to give commercial prosperity and political
security instead of commercial depression and sectional, racial, and
religious strife. Yet they remained voices crying in the wilderness.
As in 1849, when men of high rank in the Conservative party--notably
three,[1] who are known in history as colleagues of Sir John Macdonald
and one of them as prime minister of Canada--had joined with Quebec
_Rouges_ in prescribing the same remedy for Canada's ills, so now, in
the late eighties, the deep instinct of the overwhelming mass of the
people revolted from a step which meant renouncing the memories of the
past and the hopes of the future. Imperial and national sentiment both
fought against it. It was in vain that Goldwin Smith gave his life to
the cause, preaching the example of the union between Scotland and
England. It {108} was in vain that British statesmen had shown
themselves not averse to the idea. In 1869, when Senator Sumner
proposed the cession of Canada in settlement of the _Alabama_ claims,
and Hamilton Fish, the American secretary of state, declared to the
British ambassador that 'our claims were too large to be settled
pecuniarily and sounded him about Canada,' the ambassador had replied
that 'England did not wish to keep Canada, but could not part with it
without the consent of the population.'[2] Wanted or not, the people
of Canada had determined to stay in the Empire; and did stay until
different counsels reigned in London. Even in cold-blooded and
objective logic, Canada's refusal to merge her destinies with the
Republic could be justified as best for the world, in that it made
possible in North America two experiments in democracy; possible, too,
the transformation of the British Empire into the most remarkable and
hopeful of political combinations. But it was not such reasoned logic
that prompted Canadians. They were moved by deeper instincts,
prejudices, passions, hopes, loyalties. And in face of their
practically solid opposition the solution of t