nited States this
impetus to freedom, world-wide in its influence, would cease. Demands
for popular rights and free constitutions would be met by the despotic
rulers of Europe with the taunt that in the United States free
constitutions and popular rights had ended in disruption and anarchy.
"Let us not forget that there have been, and still are, very different
monarchies in the world from that of our own beloved queen; and
assuredly there are not so many free governments on earth that we
should hesitate to devise earnestly the success of that one nearest to
our own, modelled from our own, and founded by men of our own race. I
do most heartily rejoice, for the cause of liberty, that Mr. Lincoln
did not patiently acquiesce in the dismemberment of the republic."

The Civil War in the United States raised the most important question
of foreign policy with which the public men of Canada were called upon
to deal in Brown's career. The dismemberment of the British empire
would hardly have exercised a more profound influence on the human
race and on world-wide aspirations for freedom, than the dismemberment
of the United States and the establishment on this continent of a
mighty slave empire. Canada could not be indifferent to the issue. How
long would the slave-holding power, which coerced the North into
consenting to the Fugitive Slave Law, have tolerated the existence of
a free refuge for slaves across the lakes? Either Canada would have
been forced to submit to the humiliation of joining in the hunt for
men, or the British empire would have been obliged to fight the battle
that the North fought under the leadership of Lincoln. In the face of
this danger confronting Canada and the empire and freedom, it was a
time to forget smaller international animosities. Brown was one of the
few Canadian statesmen who saw the situation clearly and rose to the
occasion. For twenty years by his public speeches, and still more
through the generous devotion of the _Globe_ to the cause, he aided
the cause of freedom and of the union of the lovers of freedom.

CHAPTER XII

BROWN AND THE ROMAN CATHOLICS

That the _Globe_ and Mr. Brown, as related in a previous chapter,
became associated with Lord John Russell's bill and the "no popery"
agitation in England, may be regarded as a mere accident. The
excitement would have died out here as it died out in England, if
there had not been in Canada such a mass of inflammable material--so
ma