Lower Canada. It was realized
that French national sentiment was perfectly consistent with racial
harmony under the British flag. Upper Canada became Ontario, Lower
Canada Quebec. Each Province reserved a local autonomy for itself, and
each at the same moment voluntarily surrendered certain high powers to a
supreme centralized Government, in which both had confidence. Such a
political system is capable of indefinite expansion. Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick joined the Federation at the outset, Prince Edward Island and
British Columbia a little later, and were followed in turn by the
successively developed Provinces which now form the united and powerful
Dominion of Canada.

Turn back to Ireland and weigh well the analogy. _Mutatis mutandis_,
almost every paragraph of the Durham Report applied with greater force
to the Ireland of his day. The ascendancy of a caste and creed minority
in Upper Canada; of a race minority in Lower Canada; "the conflict of
races, not of principles"; the consequent obliteration of natural
political divisions, and the substitution of unnatural and vindictive
antagonisms demoralizing both sides to every quarrel; the universal
disgust with and distrust of the British Government, though for reasons
diametrically opposite; the hopelessness of true reforms; the
perpetuation of abuses; the stagnation of trade and agriculture; the
re-emigration to America, and the abuses of a Church Establishment with
endowments from sources by right public--all these phenomena and many
others had their counterpart in Ireland. Some have disappeared. The
Church is disestablished. The land question is on the way to settlement.
The old ascendancy is mitigated. But many of the political, and all the
psychological, features of the situation which Durham described do,
alas! exist to-day in Ireland. Ireland, like the Canada of 1838, is a
land of bewildering paradox. There is a similarly unwholesome arrest of
free political life, the same unnatural division of parties, the same
suppression of moderate opinion, and the same inevitable maintenance of
a Home Rule agitation, harmful in itself, because it retards the country
and accentuates for the time being the very divisions it seeks to cure,
but absolutely necessary for the final salvation of Ireland. Durham, in
the case of Canada, saw the truth, and swept into the limbo of
discredited bogies the old figments of the coercionists. In a singularly
noble and profound passage (p. 2