"Since the Royal Speech, Governments have done something, and events
have done more, to ripen public opinion into action. The Governments at
home and in Canada have organized and explored. The more perfect
discoveries of our new gold fields on the Pacific, the Indian Mutiny,
the completion of great works in Canada, the treaties with Japan and
with China, the visit of the Prince of Wales to the American Continent,
and, at the moment, the sad dissensions in the United States, combine
to interest us in the question, and to make us ask, 'How is this hope
to be realized; not a century hence, but in our time?'

"Our augmenting interests in the East, demand, for reasons both of
Empire and of trade, access to Asia less dangerous than by Cape Horn,
less circuitous even than by Panama, less dependent than by Suez and
the Red Sea. Our emigration, imperilled by the dissensions of the
United States, must fall back upon colonization. And, commercially, the
countries of the East must supply the raw materials and provide the
markets, which probable contests between the free man and the slave may
diminish, or may close, elsewhere. Again, a great nation like ours
cannot stand still. It must either march on triumphantly in the van, or
fall hopelessly into the rear. The measure of its accomplishment must,
century by century, rise higher and higher in the competition of
nations. Its great works in this generation can alone perpetuate its
greatness in the next.

"Let us look at the map: there we see, coloured as 'British America,' a
tract washed by the great Atlantic on the East, and by the Pacific
Ocean on the West, and containing 4,000,000 square miles, or one-ninth
of the whole terrestrial surface of the globe. Part of this vast
domain, upon the East, is Upper and Lower Canada; part, upon the West,