Excerpt from Onlooker
Whatever Professor Wrong may choose to write on the status of Canada is entitled to profound respect. He is the possessor of a clear, logical mind, is a patient student of historic origins and tendencies, and not adverse, it would seem to taking upon himself the role of a prophet. His style is like unto a pane of clear glass. He is, of course, but one person, and entitled to hold and maintain exactly one opinion.
It is, indeed, a very perilous and risky thing to proclaim in advance the predestined channel of the continually augmenting tide of national hopes and fears. The American colonies were lost to the Crown as much through the fatuous sense of security of the loyalists, who refused to take seriously the increasing anger of the people against a mistaken imperial policy, as from any other cause whatsoever. Had they made their influence felt in the right quarters, as they might have done, the most deplorable and regrettable schism in all history would never have taken place, and the spiritual unity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples would have been intact at this hour. The cry, "No taxation without representation," was, of course, a mere piece of political blague. The mad-cap frolic known as "The Boston Tea-Party" had its origin in something deeper than anger at a tax on a novel luxury of the rich. The Quebec Act, which extended the boundaries of a Roman Catholic province from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouths of the Mississippi - thus, on paper, at least, confining the Puritanic, enterprising British colonists to the Atlantic seaboard for ever - was the true cause of the American revolution. The fact that the Puritan was at heart a Cromwellian republican, and classed kings, nobles and prelates as Stymphalian birds of the same feather, no doubt, provided a fruitful soil in which the weed of disloyalty could flourish. An empire was lost overnight, not because England was unjust; but because even so great a genius as Pitt was new to the game of colonization, and erred through sheer magnanimity. He thought he was binding a small conquered folk by bands of love to the great empire of which he dreamed, and in this he was right; but he did not foresee that men of his own blood and tradition would turn again and rend him.
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