"with the exception of a few
favoured spots, where some approach to American prosperity is
apparent, all seems waste and desolate." But it was not only "in the
difference between the larger towns on the two sides" that we could
see "the best evidence of our own inferiority." That "painful and
undeniable truth was most manifest in the country districts through
which the line of national separation passes for one thousand miles."
Mrs. Jameson in her "Winter Studies and Summer Rambles," written only
a year or two before Lord Durham's report, gives an equally
unfavourable comparison between the Canadian and United States sides
of the western country. As she floated on the Detroit river in a
little canoe made of a hollow tree, and saw on one side "a city with
its towers, and spires, and animated population," and on the other "a
little straggling hamlet with all the symptoms of apathy, indolence,
mistrust, hopelessness," she could not help wondering at this
"incredible difference between the two shores," and hoping that some
of the colonial officials across the Atlantic would be soon sent "to
behold and solve the difficulty."

But while Lord Durham was bound to emphasize this unsatisfactory state
of things he had not lost his confidence in the loyalty of the mass of
the Canadian people, notwithstanding the severe strain to which they
had been subject on account of the supineness of the British
government to deal vigorously and promptly with grievances of which
they had so long complained as seriously affecting their connection
with the parent state and the development of their material resources.
It was only necessary, he felt, to remove the causes of discontent to
bring out to the fullest extent the latent affection which the mass of
French and English Canadians had been feeling for British connection
ever since the days when the former obtained guarantees for the
protection of their dearest institutions and the Loyalists of the
American Revolution crossed the frontier for the sake of Crown and
empire. "We must not take every rash expression of disappointment,"
wrote Lord Durham, "as an indication of a settled aversion to the
existing constitution; and my own observation convinces me that the
predominant feeling of all the British population of the North
American colonies is that of devoted attachment to the mother country.
I believe that neither the interests nor the feelings of the people
are incompatible with a colonial