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portance of Montreal as the summer port of Canada, jest as Montreal wrested the trade from Quebec after the deepening of the channel, making it possible for ocean-going vessels to ascend the St. Lawrence. Between Boston and New York the winter trade of the Maritime ports will vanish into thin air. Being brought into competition with the other great American roads, the Canadian Pacific offers its American patrons lower rates of freight than are given to the Canadian farmers who have been taxed for its construction and support. Why? Because, although there may be truth in the assertion of the Opposition party's statement that the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Dominion Government are one and the same thing, the railroad as a commercial enterprise must pay running expenses and produce a profit for its shareholders, and to do this it must obtain an amount of business which the Canadian traffic does not afford.

The ultra-conservative classes in the Dominion, who pooh-pooh the annexation movement, and attempt to vilify and browbeat its promoters and adherents, are merely those who would necessarily be the victims of a national reorganization. They adore all the British institutions—especially the hereditary and "letters patent" social hierarchies. They are the imported civil service heavy swells of Ottawa; the Ministers of the Crown, who would lose a portfolio; and the "skippers" of the government organs, who would lose subsidies, government printing, and, in fact, a reason for existence. But the Canadian people, in whose hands rest the destinies of Canada, are wedded to democracy irrevocably, and the whole paraphernalia of titular distinction and hereditary precedence, which is the creed of English society, is utterly distasteful to them. In fact, Anglomania is not so popular an exotic in Canada as it is in New York. A sentiment, to be enduring, must always have a basis of fact in common aspirations, interests, and sympathies. English-speaking Canadians cannot have any such bond of sympathy with the people of Great Britain; all their interests belong distinctively to this continent. With the growth of cosmopolitanism, of course, the English-speaking Canadians, like all other peoples sprung from the old Anglo-Saxon stock, look to England with a reverence which is natural, but which, like the similar sentiment in the States, has nothing of servile deference in it. Canadians are gradually outgrowing some of the provincialism which their isolation, belonging neither to this hemisphere nor the other, quite naturally forced upon them; and now, equally naturally, they are turning toward their near neighbor rather than to the parent country, removed from them in ideas, institutions, and sentiment, and too much inclined to sneer at all things colonial. Canadians are as much at home in New York or Boston—if any one not a native can feel absolutely annexed to Boston—as in Montreal, Toronto, or Ottawa.

The small clique of Canadian aspirants for minor titles at the Court of St. James, who wax enthusiastic over the glories of an Imperial Federation of England with all her colonies, are the laughing stock of Downing Street. The following excerpt from a letter written by Lord Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, is very interesting, as showing the indifference about Canada which has always existed in England:

"The fisheries affair is a bad business. Pakington's circular is not written with a thorough knowledge of the circumstances. He is out of his depth, more than three marine miles from shore. These wretched colonies will all be independent, too, in a few years, and are a millstone around our necks. If I were you I would push matters with Filmore, who has no interest to pander to a populace, like Webster, and make an honorable and speedy settlement."

This was in a confidential letter, and may be found in Lord Walmesbury's "Memoirs of an ex-Minister." In his public utterances, Lord Beaconsfield was as conventionally sentimental as his successors and admirers. He said in the House: "No minister in this country will do his duty who neglects an opportunity of reconstructing as much as possible our Colonial Empire, and of