CANADA AND GREAT BRITAIN. T HERE are two questions involved in
this Canadian matter which almost everybody mixes up, and which require to be disentangled,—does the country intend to defend Canada, and is it possible to defend Canada by land ? The first, which has been already overmuch discussed, may be very briefly dis- missed, for the nation has made up its mind. It will defend Canada as it would defend Cornwall. The Government has affirmed its purpose in unmistakeable language, the House of Commons affirmed it on Thursday night by a vote of seven to one, and it does not matter a straw whether Government or House choose to affirm or deny. The nation is stronger than both, and though it has in its long history of victory been often visited, as it is visited to-day, with spasms of appre- hension,—those qualms which the bravest feel till the cannonade drives them away,—it has never yet failed to respond to an invitation to battle, never yet scrupled to over- turn any Government which feared to maintain the national honour. It quaked before Louis XIV., but supported William and sent out Marlborough, talked loudly of the hopelessness of resisting Napoleon and fought him for twenty years, declared Russia invulnerable and sent an army to the Crimea, stood aghast at American armaments, and literally leaped to battle when an American officer insulted the flag of a British mail steamer. Mr. Lowe's arguments are useful doubtless, as were those of Mr. Fox, but were they as unanswerable as we believe them weak they would have no effect. One shot, one formal threat, and the arguments will be forgotten, and the only Anglo-Saxon feeling which never sleeps or changes, its imperial pride, will coerce any administration, any House of Commons into a struggle to the death. Alone in England this journal, when every other was predicting peace, declared that the shot fired at Sumter would rouse the one irresistible passion of the race—its sense of imperial position, and a shot fired at Quebec would be at least as efficacious. If the control of our affairs rested with Manchester alone the result would be the same; and war, if Canada is attacked, we regard as beyond the range of argument. r•But can Canada be defended by land ? On that point no doubt there does exist very considerable divergence of opinion. The forty gentlemen who on Thursday night took advantage of Mr. Bentinek's motion against the vote for fortifying Quebec to express their belief that Englishmen residing in Canada may be honourably given up to slaughter, provided we fight for them a thousand miles away, were it is true voted down, but they expressed in a cynical way a fear which per- vades a class more numerous and less unscrupulous than themselves. The English mind, habituated to scenes where everything is minute—to an island where a hundred miles is a great distance and a million of people a large population, where the army has always been under a hundred thousand and the enlistment of a thousand recruits per week is proof of enthusiasm for war—is always appalled by terri- torial vastness and enormous numbers. The square mileage of Russia frightened it almost as much as the muster-roll of the Russian armies. When it hears of a frontier of fifteen hundred miles it declares at once that defence is impossible, forgets, as Lord Palmerston said, that its own frontier is some three thousand, that distance baffles invasion as much as it embarrasses defence, and that an army if it is to carry artillery with it must keep clear of the pathless wilderness. The Caucasus presents a frontier of nearly three hundred miles, but every Russian soldier who has entered it has passed by a route not fifty feet wide. When, again, the Englishman is told of armies of half a million he looks to his own muster-roll and quails, never reflecting on the work the half-million has to do, the impossibility of concentrating that number or feeding them if they were concentrated, the immense difference between the number recorded on paper and the number ready at any one time to shoot or be shot. The speakers who on Thursday night demanded the evacuation of Canada, and the writers who are so diligently inculcating cowardice as a duty, all assert that for every man we can produce in Canada America can produce ten. Why ? The population of the -United States is a fraction less than our own, its people no more disposed to war, its rulers far less capable of revolutionary energy. But the States, it is said, are near and Britain is far. Distance is to be measured by time' not space, and in time England is but a few days behind the North. In twenty days an army might be debarked at Quebec, and it would take at least half that time to set an American one in motion. But the enthusiasni of the people? Why should it be greater than that of the Canadians? The skill of their Generals? They are good, but where is the proof that they are better than General Cameron, or General Mansfield, or any one of the ten thousand officers to whom our aristocratic system leaves so little chance of early command ? But the American numbers? The delusion which exists upon this point is absolutely inex- plicable. For purposes of defence the resources of the United States are almost unlimited, she could call a million of men to .arms, just as we also could, just as in 1815 with only half our present population we actually did. But her resources for aggressive war are certainly not greater than our own, are pro- bably less than our own. If indeed we accepted the advice of Mr. Lowe and attacked the States themselves, then we might reckon on meeting irresistible force, for in self-de- fence the American Government can rely on every man capable of bearing arms, but that is a very different matter from an aggressive war. We reckon our Volunteers wisely among our best resources for defence, but what would they be worth in war for the revindication of Normandy ? The American draft is not available for any purpose of conquest, a bounty is impossible in the teeth of the demand for labour, and the Union will after the war have great difficulty in keeping together 150,000 men. Of these at least one-third will be re- quired to garrison the South, Texas, and the districts ravaged by guerillas, and the remainder makes but an ordinary Euro- pean army. On the other side, we can do for Canada if we choose what we did in 1857 for India, when we had no volun- teers, despatch an army of 70,000 men and keep it up to that strength, while the Canadians close up their ranks as the Sikhs did behind us. The territory is not greater, the climate not worse, the duty to be done far less obnoxious to the moral sense, and we have for allies instead of the 200,000 natives who accepted our pay 200,000 Canadians, brave, eager, and accustomed to the severity of border life. Why are our trained soldiers to be beaten by Sherman's,—volunteers from the Canadas by volunteers from Maine ? We have no generals ? How many had we when the mutiny exploded, and how long did we remain without them ? As Mr. Disraeli wisely said, no man should speak of campaigns without reckoning the possibilities latent in individual genius,—hope to conquer Sebastopol without allowing for a possible Todle- ben. The United States cannot do more against Quebec than they have done against Richmond, and Richmond defended by an army inferior to that of Great Britain, and a population certainly less hardy than that of Canada is not yet taken, after four years of battle. It may be argued that the Cana- dians are not as much in earnest as the people of the South, but that is a pure assumption. The French Canadians certainly do not wish to see their Church and themselves im- proved off the face of the earth, and for English enthusiasm we may trust to the first shot, to the instinct which makes Canadians as well as Londoners resolve that they will not be menaced into improving their condition. The truth is that in all these questions men see the deficiencies on their own side and not those on their adversary's, see the vast extent of Russia and not the lives that extent will destroy en route to the threatened point, the immense army kept on foot and not the drain that army makes on the national strength. Are we weaker than the South ? And we should not be fighting, as the South were, a people without a debt ; we should not be resisting, as the South was, a country which imported more men than it could expend ; we should not be contending, as the South was, without a chance of inflicting a blow at the enemy's heart.
Let us look at the other side of the picture for the moment. Suppose we evacuate Canada and maintain the conflict only by sea. The Canadians, without forts to rally behind or troops to give them confidence, will naturally think that they have been basely deserted, that the claim established by their long and submissive alliance has been disregarded, and that while we fight by sea to retain our empire they are left to protect their homes, endangered by a sovereignty we do not intend to relinquish, as they best may. We do not grant independence, but we refuse protection ; commence war rather than give up Canada, yet leave the Canadians at the mercy of any general who chooses to levy requisitions upon them; retain the control of the police but tell the householder that if he disapproves burglars he must throttle them for him- self. One of two things must then hapi)en,—either they 011 join the United States, in which case we shall have a vast war on our hands without an object to gain or a cause to defend, or in an irrepressible burst of enthusiasm they will continue the struggle alone, in which case we shall be forced to re-cement with an alien- ated people the alliance which we have betrayed, and shall find we have fought a great war in order to lose the territory and empire and renown we commenced it in order to protect.. Or, is the colonel to run away from the battle, and leave- it to the privates, and then if they win it to be re-elected by- them to the command ? We have never been followers of Lord Palmerston, but in this matter he is wiser as well as- braver than any of his opponents. The old man who was in office when England was at war with half Europe, who iremembers how fifteen millions of people stood up against more than sixty, Great Britain against France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Western Germany, all controlled by a military and administrative genius of the highest order, blankly denied the proposition that Canada could not be- defended, and summed up the arguments of those who would. desert it in one unanswerable sarcasm :—" So as you are not able to cope with the 'United States in Canada, where you. have a large army, and where you can join your forces to those of the Canadians, you should send an expedition and attack the people of the -United States in their own homes and in the centre of their own resources, where they can bring a larger force to repel our invasion." The special case lies in that single sentence, and the true alterna- tive may be stated at least as briefly. Great Britain must either protect her subjects or give up their allegiance, defend her vast dominion at all points or acknowledge that the task is impracticable, that the spirit which built her empire has departed, and that she must henceforth humbly hold her own as a third-rate Power. If the middle class is really prepared for the second alternative there is a reason for universal suffrage which we have never taken into account. The rule of the masses at all events would protect us from the visible skulking which Mr. Lowe and The Times. represent as wise.
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