f a sentinel to keep it from escaping: but it is fatal to
mental robustness and moral courage; and if French Canada would fulfil
its aspirations it must cease to be one of the most priest-ridden
communities of the modern world.

Scarcely were they free from the incubus of France when
the British provinces showed symptoms of revolt. The measures
on the part of the mother-country which roused their resentment,
far from being oppressive, were less burdensome than the navigation
laws to which they had long submitted; and they resisted taxation by
Parliament simply because it was in principle opposed to their rights
as freemen. They did not, like the American provinces of Spain at a
later day, sunder themselves from a parent fallen into decrepitude; but
with astonishing audacity they affronted the wrath of England
in the hour of her triumph, forgot their jealousies and quarrels,
joined hands in the common cause, fought, endured, and won. The disunited
colonies became the United States. The string of discordant communities
along the Atlantic coast has grown to a mighty people, joined in a union
which the earthquake of civil war served only to compact and consolidate.
Those who in the weakness of their dissensions needed help
from England against the savage on their borders have become
a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous
of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will
shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her
great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more
against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the
demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her
powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity
to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity rests,
and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to
other objects than material progress and the game of party
politics. She has tamed the savage continent, peopled the
solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable;
and now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the
masses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that
democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant,
ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and
strong, as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.

Appendix A

Chapter 3. Conflict for the West

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