classes was the very personification of strength, purpose, courage,
freedom.


III

But Destiny plays us strange tricks. When Quebec fell in 1759, New
France passed under the rule of that English and Protestant race which
she had been fighting for two centuries; and when the American colonies
won their independence twenty years later and the ultra-English
Loyalists trekked in thousands across the boundary to what are now
Montreal and Toronto and Cobourg, there came under one government two
races that had fought each other in raid and counter-raid for two
centuries--alien and antagonistic in religion and speech. It is only
in recent years under the guiding hand of Sir Wilfred Laurier that the
ancient antagonism has been pushed off the boards.

The War of 1812 probably helped Canada's national spirit more than it
hurt it. It tested the French Canadian and found him loyal to the
core; loyal, to be sure, not because he loved England more but rather
because he loved the Americans less. He felt surer of religious
freedom under English rule, which guaranteed it to him, than under the
rule of the new republic, which he had harried and which had harried
him in border raid for two centuries. The War of 1812 left Canada
crippled financially but stronger in national spirit because she had
tested her strength and repelled invasion.

If mountain pines strike strong roots into the eternal rocks because
they are tempest-tossed by the wildest winds of heaven, then the next
twenty years were destined to test the very fiber of Canada's national