Transactions of The Royal Society of Canada 



SECTION II 

 Series III JUNE AND SEPTEMBER 1917 Vol. XI 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 

 By Professor George M. Wrong, F.R.S.C. 



Fifty Years of Federation — A Look Backward and a Look Forward. 



(Read May Meeting, 1917.) 



For a long time after the British Conquest, Canada had a rather 

 unhappy political history due in part to cleavage of race, in part to 

 the chafing of a proud people at restrictions upon their political 

 liberty. The origins, indeed, of British Canada were of the stormiest 

 kind. They are found first in the seizure by the British as spoils 

 of war of a great territory, scantily peopled by a race alien in language 

 and in religion, and bringing these under British dominion. The 

 second chief factor at the beginning of Canadian life is found in the 

 sorrow and desolation of a civil war which drove from their homes 

 in the United States to the wilds of Canada many thousands of people 

 who would not break with the British monarchy and help to found a 

 revolutionary republic. Out of such beginnings we should not expect 

 a tranquil history and assuredly the history of Canada has not been 

 tranquil. 



Thus it happens that when we look backward it is over a troubled 

 sea. The French, first in the land, were determined to remain forever 

 masters where they had settled and to preserve their language and 

 their institutions. During thirty years after the conquest there 

 was no chance for the exercise of this determination by the medium 

 of the vote, but after 1791 the habitant had the power to choose 

 members of the Legislature of Lower Canada, and it was not long 

 before he was revelling in his newly-won privilege. The French 

 are probably a more intellectual people than the English, and they 

 are also more emotional. The voters of Lower Canada took from the 

 first a passionate interest in the issues of the elections, and they soon 

 found themselves so completely that a rapid social transformation 

 was effected. Eight years after the first election in Lower Canada a 

 Governor could write that the Canadian gentry had nearly become 



