30 

 pointing to Alaska : — " We are to make this part of the 

 United States; and now, don't you think, my dear sir, that it 

 would be for the interest of all, if that which intervenes 

 should come in too ?" 



He seemed disappointed at my answer ; for already the 

 resources of our great North- West were beginning to be 

 known to the statesmen at Washington ; and when, during 

 the same visit, I was asked to give some facts regarding it 

 before the standing Committee on Railways, then discussing 

 the charter asked for the Northern Pacific line, I found a full 

 appreciation of the possible benefits to accrue from a trade 

 from here to different parts of the projected line. 



Seward was no friend to England or to Canada ; but he 

 was truthful enough to declare his error in the forecast he 

 had made of our political future from the Capitol steps at 

 St. Paul in 1860, in a memorable speech he afterwards made. 

 He had indeed obtained Alaska by purchase, but he had had 

 time to reflect on the bitter lessons of the v/ar for the Union 

 of North and South, the failure of which meant the disruption 

 of East and West as well ; and he frankly acknowledged 

 his early prophetic error in these words : 



" Hitherto, in common with most of my countrymen," he 

 said, " I have thought Canada a mere stri|), lying north of the 

 United States, easily detachable from the parent state, but in- 

 capable of sustaining itself, and therefore ultimately, nay, 

 right soon, to be taken by the Federal Union, without materi- 

 ally changing or affecting its own condition or development. 

 I have dropped the opinion as a national conceit. I see in 

 British North America, stretching as it does across the conti- 

 nent, from the shores of Labrador and Newfoundland to the 

 Pacific, and occupying a considerable belt of the temperate 

 zone, traversed equally with the United States by the Lakes, 

 and enjoying the magnificent shores of the St. Lawrence, with 

 its thousands of islands in the river and gulf, a remon urand 

 enough for the seat of an Empire, in its wheat fields in the 

 west, its broad ranges of chase at the north, its inexhaustible 

 lumber lands, the most extensive now remaining on the globe ; 



