COMMERCIAL INTERCOURSE AND TRANSPORTATION. 955 
tario and Quebec have no access to the sea in the long 
winter, save through the United States. 
Thus, if it be possible to conceive of two countries, 
which would appear to be naturally destined to con- 
stitute one Government, they are the United States 
and the British Bravia, to the special advantage 
of the latter rather than the former. 
We therefore can afford to wait. We have nothing 
to apprehend from the Dominion Pacific Railway: if 
constructed, it will not relieve Ontario and Quebec 
from their ¢ranset dependence on the United States. 
We welcome every sign of prosperity in the Domin- 
ion. With the natural limitations to her growth, and 
the restricted capacity of her home or foreign mar- 
kets, her prosperity will never be sufficient to prevent 
her landowners and her merchants from looking wist- 
fully toward the more progressive population and the 
more capacious markets of the United States. Her 
conspicuous public men may be sincerely loyal to the 
British Crown; many of the best men of Massachu- 
setts, New York, and Virginia were so at the opening 
of the American Revolution; but neither in French 
Canada, nor in British Canada, nor in the maritime 
Provinces, do any forces of sentiment or of interest 
exist adequate to withstand those potent natural and 
moral causes, or to arrest that fatal march of events, 
which have rendre nearly all the rest of America 
independent of Europe, and can not fail, sooner’ or 
later, to reach the same consummation in the Domin- 
ion of Canada. 
The spirit of independence is a rising tide, in Can- 
