That Canada possesses, in every sense of the word, a healthier atmosphere than its Southern neighbour, and that it owes its continued moral salubrity to the defeat of Mackenzie's allies in 1837-8, I for one confidently hold--with Mackenzie himself. That this superiority is due to the greater and more habitual respect paid to all authority--Divine and secular--I devoutly believe. That our present and future welfare hangs, as by a thread, upon that one inherent, all-important characteristic, that we are a religious community, seems to me plain to all who care to read correctly the signs of the times.
The historian of the future will find in these considerations his best clue to our existing status in relation to our cousins to the south of us. He will discover on the one side of the line, peaceful industry, home affections, unaffected charity, harmless recreations, a general desire for education, and a sincere reverence for law and authority. On the other, he may observe a heterogeneous commixture of many races, and notably of their worst elements; he will see the marriage-tie degraded into a mockery, the Sabbath-day a scoffing, the house of God a rostrum or a concert-hall, the law a screen for crime, the judicial bench a purchasable commodity, the patrimony of the State an asylum for Mormonism.
I am fully sensible that the United States possesses estimable citizens in great numbers, who feel, and lament more than anybody else, the flagrant abuses of her free institutions. But do they exercise any controlling voice in elections? Do they even hope to influence the popular vote? They tell us themselves that they are powerless. And so--we have only to wish them a fairer prospect; and to pray that Canada may escape the inevitable Nemesis that attends upon great national faults such as theirs.
My good friend and host, Henry Cook Todd, was one of the most uncompromising Tories I ever met with. He might have sat for the portrait of Mr. Grimwig in "Oliver Twist." Like that celebrated old gentleman, "his bark was aye waur than his bite." He would pour out a torrent of scorn and sarcasm upon some luckless object of his indignation, public or private; and, having exhausted the full vials of his wrath, would end with some kind act toward, perhaps, the very person he had been anathematizing, and subside into an amiable mood of compassion for the weaknesses of erring mankind generally.