ian, a good-natured, indolent man, who is
never active but in his canoe singing, or _a la chasse_, a true
_voyageur_, of which type of human society the marks are wearing out
fast, and the imprint will ere long be illegible. It makes me serious,
indeed, to contemplate the Canadian of the old dominant race, and I
shall enter a little into his history.

_Res ardua vetustis novitatem dare_; and never could an author impose
upon himself a greater task than that of endeavouring succinctly to
trace such a history, in this age of railroads and steam-vessels, or to
bring before the mind's eye events which have long slumbered in
oblivion, but which it behoves thinking minds not to lose sight of.

Man is now a locomotive animal, both as regards the faculties of mind
and of motion; unless in the schools, in the cabinet, or in amusing
fictions founded on fact, he rarely finds leisure to think about a
forgotten people.

Canada and Canadian affairs have, however, succeeded in interesting the
public of America and the public of Europe--the "go-ahead" English
reader in the New World--because Canada would be a very desirable
addition to the already overgrown Republic founded by the Pilgrim
Fathers and Europeans; because French interest looks with a somewhat
wistful eye to the race which at one time peopled and governed so large
a portion of the Columbian continent. Regrets, mingling with desires,
are powerful stimulants. An unconquerable and natural jealousy exists in
France that England should have succeeded in laying the foundations of
an empire, which bids fair to perpetuate the glories of the Anglo-Saxon
race in its Transatlantic dominion; whilst the true Briton, on the other
hand, regards Canada as the apple of his eye, and sees with pleasure and
with pride that his beloved country, forewarned by the grand error
committed at Boston, and so prophetically denounced by Chatham, has
obtained a fairer and more fertile field for British legitimate
ambition.

Tocqueville, a sensible and somewhat impartial writer, is the only
political foreign reasoner who has done justice to Canada; but it is
_par parenthese_ only; and even his powers of mind and of reasoning,
nurtured as they have been in republicanism, fail to convince fearless
hearts that democracy is a human necessity.

That the American nation will endeavour to put a wet blanket over the
nascent fires of Spanish ambition in the miserable new States of the
Northern Continent, an