while, close alongside, your great rival grew with giant's growth,
looking far into the future before him, cutting his cloth with
perspective ideas of what his limbs would attain to in after-time,'
digging his canals and grading, his railroads, with one eye on the
Atlantic and the other on the Pacific, spreading himself, monopolizing,
annexing, outmanoeuvring and flanking those colonial bodies who sat in
solemn state in Downing Street and wrote windy proclamations and
despatches anent boundary-lines, of which they knew next to nothing.
Macaulay laughs at poor Newcastle for his childish delight in finding out
that Cape Breton was an island, but I strongly suspect there were other
and later Newcastles whose geographical knowledge of matters American
were not a whit superior. Poor Canada! they muddled you out of Maine,
and the open harbour of Portland, out of Rouse's Point, and the command
of Lake Champlain, out of many a fair mile far away by the Rocky
Mountains. It little matters whether it was the treaty of 1783, or 1818,
or '21, or '48, or '71, the worst of every bargain, at all times, fell to
you.

I have said that the possession of the canal at the Sault St. Marie
enabled the Americans to delay the progress of the Red River Expedition.
The embargo put upon the Canadian vessels originated, however, in the
State, and not the Federal, authorities; that is to say, the State of
Michigan issued the prohibition against the passage of the steam boat,
and not the Cabinet of Washington. Finally, Washington overruled the
decision of Michigan-a feat far more feasible now than it would have been
prior to the Southern war-and the steamers were permitted to pass through
into the waters of Lake Superior. From thence to Thunder Bay was only the
steaming of four-and-twenty hours through a lake whose vast bosom is the
favourite playmate of the wild storm-king of the North. But although
full half the total distance from Toronto to the Red River had been