In fact, Canada has a rich heritage of associations that connect us with
some of the most momentous epochs of the world's history. The victories
of Louisbourg and Quebec belong to the same series of brilliant events
that recall the famous names of Chatham, Clive, and Wolfe, and that gave
to England a mighty empire in Asia and America. Wolfe's signal victory
on the heights of the ancient capital was the prelude to the great drama
of the American revolution. Freed from the fear of France, the people of
the Thirteen Colonies, so long hemmed in between the Atlantic Ocean and
the Appalachian range, found full expression for their love of local
self-government when England asserted her imperial supremacy. After a
struggle of a few years they succeeded in laying the foundation of the
remarkable federal republic, which now embraces forty-five states with a
population of already seventy-five millions of souls, which owes its
national stability and prosperity to the energy and enterprise of the
Anglo-Norman race and the dominant influence of the common law, and the
parliamentary institutions of England. At the same time, the American
Revolution had an immediate and powerful effect upon the future of the
communities that still remained in the possession of England after the
acknowledgement of the independence of her old colonies. It drove to
Canada a large body of men and women, who remained faithful to the crown
and empire and became founders of provinces which are now comprised in a
Dominion extending for over three thousand miles to the north and east
of the federal republic.

The short review of the French régime, with which I am about to
commence this history of Canada, will not give any evidence of
political, economic, or intellectual development under the influence of
French dominion, but it is interesting to the student of comparative
politics on account of the comparisons which it enables us to make
between the absolutism of old France which crushed every semblance of