248 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



opening of the war, however, we have received an attention from 

 our Southern kinsfolk which is almost beyond our deserts. 



It is not to be supposed that during the first half century that elapsed 

 after the American Revolution the ruling classes in Britain had awaken- 

 ed fully to the promise and potency of the Empire that still was theirs; 

 they feared to extend self-government to the colonists lest they should 

 with the taste of freedom demand separation. Some indeed believed 

 them to be a drag in the wake of the ship of state and would have been 

 willing at any time to cut the painter and let them go. Lord John 

 Russell, who might have been supposed to look with favour on the 

 granting of responsible government, disappointed the hopes of the 

 Canadians, and his action drew forth a remarkable series of letters from 

 the Hon. Joseph Howe in 1839, from which I take this extract: 



"Can an Englishman, an Irishman or a Scotchman, be made to 

 believe, by passing a month upon the sea, that the most stirring 

 periods of his history are but a cheat and a delusion; that the scenes 

 which he has been accustomed to tread with deep emotion are but 

 mementoes of the folly and not, as he once fondly believed, of the 

 wisdom and courage of his ancestors; that the principles of civil 

 liberty, which from childhood he has been taught to cherish and to 

 protect by forms of stringent responsibility, must, with the new light 

 breaking in upon him on this side of the Atlantic, be cast aside as a 

 useless incumbrance? No, my Lord, it is madness to suppose that 

 these men, so remarkable for carrying their national characteristics 

 into every pmrt of the world where they penetrate, shall lose the most 

 honourable of them all, merely by passing from one portion of the 

 Empire to another . . . My Lord, my countrymen feel, as they have 

 a right to feel, that the Atlantic, the great highway of communication 

 with their brethren at home, should be no barrier to shut out the civil 

 privileges and political rights, which more than anything else make 

 them proud of the connection ; and they feel also that there is nothing 

 in their present position or their past conduct to warrant such ex- 

 clusion . . . Many of the original settlers of this province emigrated 

 from the old colonies when they were in a state of rebellion — not 

 because they did not love freedom, but because they loved it under 

 the old banner and the old forms; and many of their descendants have 

 shed their blood on land and sea, to defend the honour of the Crown, 

 and the integrity of the Empire. On some of the hardest fought 

 fields of the Peninsula my countrymen died in the front rank with 

 their faces to the foe. The proudest naval trophy of the last American 

 \A'ar was brought by a Nova Scotian into the harbour of his native 

 town; and the blood that flowed from Nelson's wound in the cock-pit 

 of the Victory mingled with that of a Nova Scotian stripling beside 



