eat Republic in their
neighbourhood will swamp their nationality more effectively than the red
or the blue coats of England can ever do, will desecrate their altars,
will portion out their lands, will nullify their present importance, and
render them an isolated race, forgotten and unsought for, as the
Iroquois of the last century, who, from being the children and owners of
the land, the true _enfans du sol_, are now--where? The soil, had it
voice, could alone reply, for on its surface they are not.

We must never in England form a false estimate of the French Canadian,
because a few briefless lawyers or saddle-bag medical men urged them
into rebellion. Their feelings and spirit are not of the same _genre_ as
the feelings and spirit which animated the hideous soul of the
_poissardes_ and _canaille_ of Paris in 1792. There is very little or no
poverty in Lower Canada; every man who will work there, can work; and it
is a nation rather of small farmers than of classes, with the ideas of
independence which property, however small, invariably generates in the
human breast; but with that other idea also which urges it to preserve
ancient landmarks.

It is chiefly in the large towns and in their neighbourhood that the
desire for exclusive nationality still exists, fostered by a rabid
appetite for distinction in some ardent and reckless adventurers from
the British ranks, who care little what is undermost so long as they are
uppermost.

The hostility of the British settlers to the French is by no means so
great as is so carefully and constantly described, and would altogether
cease, if not kept continually alive by Upper Canadian demonstration,
and that desire to rule exclusively which has so long been the bane of
this fine colony.

It reminds one always of the morbid hatred of France, which existed
thirty years ago in England, when Napoleon was believed, by the lower
classes--ay, and by some of the higher too--to be Apollyon in earnest.

I remember an old lord of the old school, whose family honours were not
of a hundred years, and whose ancestors had been respectable traders,
saying to me, a short time before he died, that Republican notions had
spread so much from our peace with infidel France, that he should yet
live to see those who possessed talent or energy enough among the middle
class, take those honours which he was so proud of, and with the titles
also, the estates.

Look, said he, at the absurd decoration sho