Canada, its Defenses, Condition, and Resources: Being a Third and Concluding Volume of My Diary, North and South
Sir William Howard Russell
9781465663122
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I do not pretend to offer any new observations on the climate, soil, or capabilities of Canada, nor can I venture to call these pages a “work” on that great province. I have nothing novel to advance in the hope of attracting an immigration to its wide-spread territories, and any statistical facts and figures I may use are accessible to all interested in the commerce or in the past, present, and future of the land. Nor do I write with any particular theory in view, or with any crotchet on the subject of colonies, outlying provinces, and dependencies, and their value or detriment to the dominant commercial and imperial power. My actual acquaintance with the country and the people is only such as I acquired in a few weeks’ travelling in the depth of winter; and such sort of knowledge as I gathered would certainly afford no great excuse in itself for intruding my remarks or opinions on the public when so many excellent books on Canada already exist. But it happened that my visit took place at a very remarkable period of Canadian and American history, and at a time, too, when certain doctrines, broached not for the first time, but urged with more than usual ability, as to the relations between what for convenience I call the mother-country and her colonies, were exciting great attention across the Atlantic. When I left Washington in the winter, a great crisis had been peacefully but not willingly averted by a concession on the part of the Federal Government to what the sentiment of the American people considered an exhibition of brute force. The first year of the war had closed over the Federals in gloom. Their arms were not wielded with credit at home—if credit ever can attach to arms wielded in a civil war—and the foreign power which it had been their wont to treat with something as near akin to disrespect as diplomatic decency would permit, aroused by an act which outraged the laws of nations and provoked the censure of every European power with business on the waters, had made preparations which could only imply that she would have recourse to hostility if her demands for satisfaction were refused. It was under these circumstances that England obtained the reparation for which she sought, and in the eyes of Americans filched a triumph over their flag and took an insolent advantage over their weakened power “to do as they pleased.” General McClellan, playing the part of Fabius, perhaps because he knew not how to play any other part, had fallen sick and was nigh at death’s door in the malarious winter at Washington. The great Union army, like a hybernating eel in the mud, lay motionless, between the Potomac and the clever imposture of the Confederate lines and wooden batteries at Manassas.
