We have no desire to see your wheat-fields fail or to decry their products in the market. We only say that they are too limited for dangerous competition with ours. And we further say, that if you will but develop other and more legitimate industries, so that your wheat-growing districts cannot feed your people, we will be sure to have bread enough and to spare. And you may be also sure that all your efforts will not so overstock the markets we can offer as to make trade languish, when the thousands now peopling this continent shall become millions, though the Old World should want nothing that you can give. And, then, you have but a doubtful road to the markets of the Old World. For half the year your highway to the ocean and to other lands must be across our territory. Intercolonial railways through unsettled and unproductive countries will not answer the demands of commerce. They will not pay; and, if they would, the interests served ought not to be so burdened where access may be had to readier and cheaper lines of communication.
Does all this imply annexation? Call it what you will. As one of your Canadian statesmen said to the people of a lesser province, "If you do not want us to annex you, we are willing that you should annex us." If you are more conservative than we are, a little conservatism will do us no harm; and the interests you would conserve would be quite as safe under the eagle's beak as under the lion's paw. If one be a bird, the other is surely a beast of prey; and we believe that harmless folk have less to apprehend from one alone than from the jealous rivalries of both.
Of one thing we feel assured: the time is not far distant when the people of this northern half of America will have to adopt a policy so distinct from that of the older nations of Europe that self-preservation will demand a union of power where there is now an evident identity of interests.
It were well that this union should be preceded by such guarantees of existing rights and privileges as might, without specific and just conventions, be open to subsequent question and dispute. And it were also well for governments to direct the march which necessity compels their people to make, rather than incur the risk of finding themselves at variance with those for whose greater good civil government is designed. We do not purpose to discuss the origin or foundation of civil government. It is enough for us to know that man requires and God wills it; and that, in the absence of other and higher sanctions, the best evidence of his will is found in the intelligent, honest consent of the governed. Does any one doubt what the more intelligent and honest people of Canada and the United States require? We do not ask what may be the _rôle_ of the political adventurer, the office-seeker, the government speculator or tuft-hunter. We always know that the end of all their loyalty or patriotism is self. But we ask what is needed for the greater good of the people. Not alone the people of to-day or to-morrow, but of the future as well. How the people of to-day esteem the policy of their lawgivers, may be known by their conduct under it. And the army of government revenue officers and detectives on either side along the frontiers of Canada and "the States" offers sufficient evidence of the esteem in which the laws of trade are held. We know not which is the more corrupt--the law-breakers or the agents of the law; but we do know, from the notoriety of the fact, that the commercial relations now existing between the Canadas and the States are, in effect, so demoralizing, to commercial people and commercial interests, that the laws which propose to govern them were better abrogated than left to offer a premium to chicanery and fraud.