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any man born beneath the Stars and Stripes. He is much more in sympathy with the traditions of this continent than the average New Yorker, who is so often the antithesis of everything truly American, New York, not Montreal or Toronto,—is the least American city to be found between Hudson's Bay and the Gulf of Mexico,

It is ridiculous to imagine that the Anglo-Saxon race can build up and maintain two separate and aggressive nations on this continent. Such a proposition is an elaborate cobweb, not capable of sustaining any important commercial friction. The French Canadian dream of establishing a great French papal state on the St. Lawrence and in New England, with Boston as its capital, is quite as tenable. The English speaking Canadians and the Americans have a past that almost equally belongs to both, and to-day their sympathies and ideals are identical. If the Declaration of Independence had not been declared quite so suddenly, Canada would now have been included in the United States. The lines of demarcation between the two countries are altogether arbitrary, and the intersection of railroads and canals has in reality, though not in law, effected a complete fusion of commercial interests. The best summary of the natural physical relations of the two countries is to be found in Professor Goldwin Smith's work already quoted. He says:

"Whoever wishes to know what Canada is, and to understand the Canadian question, should begin by turning from the political to the natural mapр. The political map displays a vast and unbroken area of territory, extending from the boundary of the United States up to the North Pole, and equalling or surpassing the United States in magnitude. The physical map displays four separate projections of the cultivable and habitable part of the Continent into arctic waste. The four vary greatly in size, and one of them is very large. They are, beginning from the east, the Maritime Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; Old Canada, comprising the present provinces of Quebec and Ontario; the newly-opened region of the Northwest, comprising the Province of Manitoba and the districts of Alberta, Athabasca, Assiniboia, and Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. The habitable and cultivable parts of these blocks of territory are all contiguous, but are divided from each other by great barriers of nature, wide and unclaimable wildernesses or manifold chains of mountains. The Maritime Provinces are divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles, through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight by the way. Old Canada is divided from Manitoba and the Northwest by the great fresh water sea of Lake Superior, and a wide wilderness on either side of it. Manitoba and the Northwest again are divided from British Columbia by a triple range of mountains, the Rockies, the Selkirks, and the Golden or Coast range. Each of the blocks, on the other hand, is closely connected by nature, physically and economically, with that portion of the habitable and cultivable continent to the south of it which it immediately adjoins, and in which are its natural markets—the Maritime Provinces, with Maine and the New England States; Old Canada with New York and with Pennsylvania, from which she draws her coal, Manitoba and the Northwest, with Minnesota and Dakota, which share with her the Great Prairie; British Columbia, with the States of the Union on the Pacific. Between the divisions of the Dominion there is hardly any natural trace, and but little even of forced trade has been called into existence under a stringent system of protection. The Canadian cities are all on or near the southern edge of the Dominica,—the natural cities, at least, for Ottawa, the politiical capital, is artificial. The principal ports of the Dominion in winter, and its ports largely throughout the year, are in the United States, trade coming through in bond. . . . Such is the real Canada. Whether the four blocks of territory constituting the Dominion can forever be kept by political agencies united among themselves and separate from the Continent of which geographically, economically, and with the exception of Quebec ethnologically, they are parts, is the Canadian question."

The difficulties in the way of assimilation consist almost purely of tariff entanglements; and these, with an enlightened government, are easily disposed of. It is not too much to say that the election of an honest government, for the people and not for the plutocracy of the United States, which would put the commerce of the nation upon the only logical basis of national, and not clique, prosperity, would soon bring about the end of all the prejudices now existing between the United States, Canada, and England, and establish the most cordial feelings between the three peoples, now practically united in the aims of a common democracy.

One of the arguments of the government organs against destroying the customs wall between the two countries is that it will be discriminating against the British manufacturer, and that is too