r
example, you must remember that Italy has no Canada. I hope Canada will
soon cease to be a cause of mistrust between us. The political dominion
of England over it, since it has had a free constitution of its own, has
dwindled to a mere thread. It is as ripe to be a nation as these
Colonies were on the eve of the American Revolution. As a dependency, it
is of no solid value to England since she has ceased to engross the
Colonial trade. It distracts her forces, and prevents her from acting
with her full weight in the affairs of her own quarter of the world. It
belongs in every sense to America, not to Europe; and its peculiar
institutions--its extended suffrage, its freedom from the hereditary
principle, its voluntary system in religion, its common schools--are
opposed to those of England, and identical with those of the neighboring
States. All this the English nation is beginning to feel; and it has
tried in the case of the Ionian Islands the policy of moderation, and
found that it raises, instead of lowering, our solid reputation and our
real power. The confederation which is now in course of formation
between the North-American Colonies tends manifestly to a further
change; it tends to a further change all the more manifestly because
such a tendency is anxiously disclaimed. Yes, Canada will soon cease to
trouble and divide us. But while it is England's, it is England's; and
to threaten her with an attack on it is to threaten a proud nation with
outrage and an assault upon its honor.

Finally, if our people have misconstrued your acts, let me conjure you
to make due allowance for our ignorance,--an ignorance which, in many
cases, is as dark as night, but which the progress of events here begins
gloriously to dispel. We are not such a nation of travellers as you are,
and scarcely one Englishman has seen America for a hundred Americans
that have seen England. "Why does not Beauregard fly to the assistance
of Lee?" said a highly educated Englishman to an American in England.
"Because," was the reply, "the distance is as great as it is from Rome
to Paris." If these three thousand miles of ocean that lie between us
could be removed for a few days, and the two great branches of the
Anglo-Saxon race could look each other in the face, and speak their
minds to each other, there would be an end, I believe, of all these
fears. When an Englishman and an American meet, in this country or in
England, they are friends, notwithstandi