its nationality has been fostered under the British flag, and in that respect the work of conquest has been undone. It is difficult indeed, if Canada remains separate from the United States, to see what the limits of French extension will be.

French Canada (now the province of Quebec) is a curious remnant of the France before the Revolution. The peasantry retain with their patois the pre-revolutionary character, though, of the allegiance once shared between the king, the seigneur, and the priest, almost the whole is now paid to the priest. There were seigneuries with vexatious feudal incidents; but these have been abolished, not by legislative robbery, in which the rude Canadian is inexpert, but by honest commutation. The people are a simple, kindly, and courteous race, happy on little, clad in homespun, illiterate, unprogressive, pious, priest-ridden, and, whether from fatalism or from superstition, averse to vaccination, whereby they brought upon themselves and their neighbours the other day a fearful visitation of small-pox. They are all small, very small farmers; and, looking down from the citadel of Quebec upon the narrow slips of land with their river fronts on the St. Lawrence, you see that here, as in old France, subdivision has been carried to an extreme.

It has been said that the Spaniards colonised for gold, the English for freedom, the French for religion. New France, at all events, was religious, and it has kept the character which the Jesuit missionary impressed on it. The Church is very strong and very rich. Virtually it is established, since to escape tithe you must avow yourself a Protestant. Clerical influence is tremendously powerful. A French Liberal at Montreal told me that as an advocate he had received a retainer from a bitter personal enemy in a suit brought to break a will for undue priestly influence, other advocates not daring to appear. It is due to the clergy to say that they seem to make the people moral, though in ecclesiastical fashion. What they deem immorality they put down with a high hand; they restrain dancing and thunder against opéra bouffe. The Church has a strong hold on the peasant's heart through its ceremonial, which is the only pageantry or poetry of peasant life. Till lately the Church of French Canada was Gallican, and lived, like the old national Church of France, on perfectly good terms with the State. But now comes the Jesuit, with the Encyclical and the declaration of Papal Infallibility in his hand. There is a struggle between Jesuitism and Gallicanism under the walls of the citadel of Gallicanism, the great Sulpician Seminary at Montreal. The Jesuit, having all the influences of the day upon his side, prevails. A new chapter of history is opened and troubles begin between Church and State. My readers may perchance have heard of the Guibord Guibord was a member of the Institut Canadien, which had been excommunicated as a society for taking literature prohibited by the Index. He died, and was about to be buried in his family

case.

lot in the Roman Catholic cemetery, when the Church interposed on the ground that he was excommunicate. There was an appeal to the Privy Council, which, dealing with the case as a religious case might have been dealt with by a Roman proconsul, decided that excommunication was personal, that a society could not be excommunicated, and that Guibord consequently was entitled to burial in the consecrated ground. The Church seemed determined to resist; a crisis was impending; the militia were under orders; a huge block of granite was prepared to secure the body against exhumation; when suddenly the Bishop of Montreal found a way of escape. He solemnly unconsecrated the particular spot in which Guibord was to be laid, leaving the rest of the cemetery consecrated as before, so that the faithful might rest in peace. The operation was delicate, since Madame Guibord had already been buried in the odour of orthodoxy, in the same lot.

The conqueror might have suppressed French nationality. Instead of this, he preserved and protected it. He gave the conquered a measure of his own liberty, and perhaps as large a measure as at that time they who had known nothing but absolute government could bear. He gave them a representative assembly, trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, an administration generally pure in place of one which was scandalously corrupt, deliverance from oppressive imposts, and an appeal in case of misgovernment to Parliament instead of Pompadour. He gave them liberty of opinion and introduced among them the printing press. The one successful colony of France owes its success to British tutelage. French writers are fain to acknowledge this, and if some of them complain because the half-measure of liberty was not a whole measure, and the conquering race kept power in its own hands, the answer is that conquest is conquest, and that the monarchy of Louis the Fourteenth was neither unaggressive nor invariably liberal to the vanquished. It is rather the fashion now to traduce as well as to desert the country; and we are told, as an argument in favour of the dissolution of the Union, that Englishmen, owing to their pride and want of sympathy, can never get on well with any subject race. To get on well with a subject race is not easy; but, if the Englishman has not succeeded in doing it, who has? Has the Spaniard succeeded in doing it in South America, or the Frenchman in Algeria? The Roman, we are told, was popular with the vanquished. The Roman took the straight road to popularity with the vanquished. Cæsar began by putting a million of Gauls to the sword; no wonder he was popular with the rest. The Englishman in Canada has in the main got on perfectly

1 Mr. Joseph Cowen despairs of seeing the English even get on well with the Irish, because the Irish Celt is so poetic and the Englishman is so prosaic. The Englishman has produced a greater body of first-rate poetry than has been produced by any other nation, except perhaps the Greeks; the Irish Celt has produced Tom Moore.

well with the conquered Frenchman; even if there has been sometimes political antagonism between them, their social relations have been good. The French fought for England in the revolutionary war, and again in the war of 1812. If the hostile attitude of the Puritans of New England towards their religion decided them in the first case, it can hardly have decided them in the second; at least, the rule under which they had lived in the interim can hardly have been oppressive. It was one of their leaders, Etienne Taché, who said that the last gun fired in favour of British dominion on the continent would be fired by a French Canadian. The late Sir George Cartier, the political chief of French Canada in his day, was proud to call himself a British subject speaking French.

It is not easy to make conquest an instrument of civilisation; and we may doubt whether, by the nations most advanced in morality, the attempt will ever be made again; but where has it been made in such good faith or with so much success as in British India? In British India there have been military mutinies, but there has been no political insurrection. In an American review the other day there appeared a furious invective against British rule in India, penned by one of the set of people called, I believe, cultivated Baboos,' who would be crushed like eggshells if the protection of the Empire were withdrawn. The best answer to the Baboo was that his invective could be published with impunity. If most has been said against the British conqueror, it is because the British conqueror has allowed most to be said against him. To accuse England of having played the Turk or the Austrian to the least favoured of her dependencies would surely be the grossest injustice.

There was a disastrous quarrel between the American colonies and the Government of George the Third, arising out of the retention by the Imperial Parliament of legal powers over the colonies, which could not be practically exercised—a most dangerous relation, which the proposed plan of reserving to the British Parliament powers over the Irish Parliament would, in the teeth of experience, reproduce. George the Third was legally in the right, while morally and politically he was in the wrong. The quarrel was inflamed, I strongly suspect, by a Republican party at Boston and by Boston merchants, who were suffering from the Imperial restrictions on trade. But if it were asserted that the connection was regarded by the colonists generally as oppressive, or that it was not affectionately cherished by them, abundant evidence to the contrary might be adduced. Washington himself, on taking the command, felt it incumbent on him to declare, in answer to an address, that the ultimate object of the war was the restoration of the connection on a righteous footing.

There is, I believe, no feeling whatever among the French Canadians against England. But French nationality grows daily more VOL. XX.-No. 113.

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intense and daily finds more political as well as literary expression. We had trouble with it the other day, when Quebec sympathised on national grounds with the rising of the French half-breeds under Riel in the North-West, as she had with previous attempts to secure that vast realm for the French race and religion. Regiments from Quebec were sent to the theatre of war, but they were not sent to the front. The priests, of course, hate the French Revolution, and this has hitherto retarded the renewal of the connection with the mother country; now, however, the connection is being renewed, and it can. hardly fail to affect both the relations of French Canada to British Canada and the state of French Canadian opinion. From contact with the American Republic also the priests have shrunk, fearing democratic and sceptical contagion; but the circulation of population between French Canada and the States is beginning to introduce American ideas into French Canadian villages. The ice in which the pre-revolutionary France, like a Siberian mammoth, has been preserved is likely soon to melt.

In the meantime the clergy are powerful in politics as well as in other spheres, and the people, trained in religious submission, are politically submissive also, and follow the political leaders who have the confidence of the priests and represent the interests of French Catholicism at Ottawa. Being thus under the control of an antirevolutionary Church, Quebec has naturally formed the basis of a Conservative party. There is, however, in the province a party called Rouge, but deserving of that name only by contrast with the extremely sable hue of its opponents. Anywhere else it would be simply Liberal. It can hardly fail to be strengthened by the increased intercourse with Republican France.

British Canada, now the province of Ontario,2 was the asylum of the Loyalists after the revolutionary war. Their last civil war the Americans generously and wisely closed with an amnesty. Their first civil war they closed not so generously or so wisely with Acts of Attainder. The schism which time would have healed in the first case, as it has in the second, was thus perpetuated in the form of a territorial secession. No doubt the Loyalists had been guilty of atrocities. Lord Cornwallis compares to them the Fencibles who were guilty of atrocities in Ireland. They were largely of the poorest and most unsettled class, the more respectable colonists having been driven by the folly of the King and his commanders into the arms of the rebellion. Still there were many of the better sort, and two thousand exiles for loyalty's sake left the coast of Massachusetts alone. If ever the balance of power with its evil consequences is

2 It may seem that here, and perhaps elsewhere, I am giving needless information. But we have read a proclamation of the Privy Council, about the Colorado beetle, beginning with these words: 'Whereas intelligence has been received from Ontario, Canada, that the country round that town is being devastated,' &c.

introduced into America, the Americans will have themselves to thank. England would probably have been willing to retire from the continent altogether, as her wisest counsellors advised; but she was bound in honour to protect the Loyalists, and honour still had its seat in the breasts of British statesmen in those days. The United Empire Loyalists, as they are called, carried into exile hearts burning with loyalty and vengeance; they fought heroically for their new home in 1812, and their descendants still form a sort of loyal league cherishing and celebrating the memory of a glorious misfortune.

In her early days British Canada was well content to be ruled by Royal governors. Her constitution was, in fact, what in theory and according to Blackstone the British Constitution is: there was an elective assembly, but the representative of the Crown chose his own Ministers, determined his own policy, and governed as well as reigned. The governors might sometimes make mistakes and sometimes be arbitrary in their behaviour; but they were men of honour, and they were under the control of a Parliamentary Government at home. Their administration was far more economical than that of the party politicians who have succeeded them, and perhaps practically as good in most respects, both material and moral, for the people. For a new settlement, at all events, it was about the best. There was no trouble with the Indians in those days, and had the NorthWest been under the rule of a governor like Simcoe, instead of being a field for the exercise of patronage by a party Government at Ottawa, we should have had no half-breed rebellion. During the French war and in the period immediately following, while Toryism reigned in the mother country, it prevailed also in the colony; all the more because British Canada was a Tory settlement. But the great tidal wave of Liberalism which afterwards set in extended in course of time to the colony. To the Loyalist exiles had now been added settlers of a different origin and temper, Presbyterians from Scotland and Americans from the other side of the line. At the same time discontent was provoked by an oligarchy of office nicknamed the Family Compact, which kept political power and pelf to itself, though its corruption has probably been overstated, since nothing is more certain than that none of its members left large fortunes, while the land, to which they seem to have freely helped themselves, was a drug in those days. An agitation commenced for responsible government, in other words for the transfer of supreme power from the governor and his council to the representative assembly. The oligarchy of course fought hard for its system and its places, and colonial politicians not being carpet-knights in those days, a good many rough things were said and some rough things were done. The contest raged for some time in the assembly and the courts of law; at last, owing partly to the mismanagement of Sir Francis Head, it assumed the form of a petty civil war. A similar outbreak