to advance you such labour and machinery as may be required; and we will
also proceed to appoint other friends, who shall take into
consideration, in the first place, the expense incurred from your birth
to a state of manhood, and the annual income that is derived from your
business and your property; and leaving you sufficient to maintain
yourself as a gentleman, we shall appropriate to ourselves whatever may
remain, as a reward for our exertions and the risk to be incurred, and
as a security for the interest of the money expended upon your account.
The brothers having thus agreed in a general way, proceed immediately to
appoint friends and to call upon their good old mother, Great Britain,
to advance the money required, and their North American relations, Nova
Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada, and Hudson's Bay, to come forward and
make a general family treaty for the security and payment of such
advances. The brothers were then congratulating themselves on what they
considered the success of their project, when it was whispered to them
that something of a similar plan had been proposed for their relation
Ireland, by one "whose loss is too great to be slighted, and too recent
not to be felt;" and it had been suggested that for every L100 expended
on Railways in that country, L200 should be lent by Government; upon
which occasion it had been observed by one who has greatly influenced,
whether for good or evil, will be hereafter known, the destinies of the
British Empire, that "the public credit of the State is one of the
elements of our financial strength, and that it was not possible to
appropriate a great portion of that public credit to the encouragement
of commercial enterprises, without, to the same extent, foregoing the
power to apply that public credit in another direction, in the event of
the national exigencies requiring you to do so." The brothers replied,
this is certainly true; but the proposed undertaking is not a commercial
enterprise, although no doubt it would produce great commercial and
colonizing results; but it is a grand national work,--a desideratum that
has been wished for, looked for, and cared for, ever since the new world
was discovered--that has repeatedly called forth great expenditure of
money, great suffering, and loss of life in searching for it, to the
north. It is, in short, the great high road between the Atlantic and
Pacific--the expense of making which you are called upon to consider.