striking contrast which was presented between Canada and the United
States "in respect to every sign of productive industry, increasing
wealth, and progressive civilization" was considered by the people of
the latter country to be among the results of the absence of a
political system which would give expansion to the energies of the
colonists and make them self-reliant in every sense. Lord Durham's
picture of the condition of things in 1838-9 was very painful to
Canadians, although it was truthful in every particular. "On the
British side of the line," he wrote, "with the exception of a few
favoured spots, where some approach to American prosperity is
apparent, all seems waste and desolate." But it was not only "in the
difference between the larger towns on the two sides" that we could
see "the best evidence of our own inferiority." That "painful and
undeniable truth was most manifest in the country districts through
which the line of national separation passes for one thousand miles."
Mrs. Jameson in her "Winter Studies and Summer Rambles," written only
a year or two before Lord Durham's report, gives an equally
unfavourable comparison between the Canadian and United States sides
of the western country. As she floated on the Detroit river in a
little canoe made of a hollow tree, and saw on one side "a city with
its towers, and spires, and animated population," and on the other "a
little straggling hamlet with all the symptoms of apathy, indolence,
mistrust, hopelessness," she could not help wondering at this
"incredible difference between the two shores," and hoping that some
of the colonial officials across the Atlantic would be soon sent "to
behold and solve the difficulty."

But while Lord Durham was bound to emphasize this unsatisfactory state
of things he had not lost his confidence in the loyalty of the mass of
the Canadian people, notwithstanding the severe strain to which they