I devote the first chapter of this short history to a brief review of the colonisation of the valley of the St. Lawrence by the French, and of their political and social conditions at the Conquest, so that a reader may be able to compare their weak and impoverished state under the repressive dominion of France with the prosperous and influential position they eventually attained under the liberal methods of British rule. In the succeeding chapters I have dwelt on those important events which hav

Though the principal object of this book is to review the political, economic and social progress of the provinces of Canada under British rule, yet it would be necessarily imperfect, and even unintelligible in certain important respects, were I to ignore the deeply interesting history of the sixteen hundred thousand French Canadians, about thirty per cent of the total population of the Dominion. To apply to Canada an aphorism of Carlyle, "The present is the living sum-total of the whole past";

For nearly four years after the surrender of Vaudreuil at Montreal, Canada was under a government of military men, whose headquarters were at Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal—the capitals of the old French districts of the same name. General Murray and the other commanders laboured to be just and considerate in all their relations with the new subjects of the Crown, who were permitted to prosecute their ordinary pursuits without the least interference on the part of the conquerors. The conditi

When Canada was formally ceded to Great Britain the Thirteen Colonies were relieved from the menace of the presence of France in the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Nowhere were there more rejoicings on account of this auspicious event than in the homes of the democratic Puritans. The names of Pitt and Wolfe were honoured above all others of their countrymen, and no one in England, certainly not among its statesmen, imagined that in the colonies, which stretched from

On the 16th August, 1784, as a consequence of the coming of over ten thousand Loyalists to the valley of the St. John River, a new province was formed out of that portion of the ancient limits of Acadia, which extended northward from the isthmus of Chignecto to the province of Quebec, and eastward from the uncertain boundary of the St. Croix to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It received its present name in honour of the Brunswick-Luneburg or Hanoverian line which had given a royal dynasty to England,

The causes of the war of 1812-15 must be sought in the history of Europe and the relations between England and the United States for several decades before it actually broke out. Great Britain was engaged in a supreme struggle not only for national existence but even for the liberties of Europe, from the moment when Napoleon, in pursuance of his overweening ambition, led his armies over the continent on those victorious marches which only ended amid the ice and snow of Russia. Britain's battles

Responsible government in Canada is the logical sequence of the political struggles, which commenced soon after the close of the war of 1812-15. As we review the history of Canada since the conquest we can recognise "one ever increasing purpose" through all political changes, and the ardent desire of men, entrusted at the outset with a very moderate degree of political responsibility, to win for themselves a larger measure of political liberty in the management of their own local affairs. Grave

Lord Durham's report on the affairs of British North America was presented to the British government on the 31st January, 1839, and attracted an extraordinary amount of interest in England, where the two rebellions had at last awakened statesmen to the absolute necessity of providing an effective remedy for difficulties which had been pressing upon their attention for years, but had never been thoroughly understood until the appearance of this famous state paper. A legislative union of the two C

The idea of a union of the provinces of British North America had been under discussion for half a century before it reached the domain of practical statesmanship. The eminent Loyalist, Chief Justice Smith of Quebec, so early as 1789, in a letter to Lord Dorchester, gave an outline of a scheme for uniting all the provinces of British North America "under one general direction." A quarter of a century later Chief Justice Sewell of Quebec, also a Loyalist, addressed a letter to the father of the p

The Dominion of Canada took its place among the federal states of the world on the first of July, 1867. Upper and Lower Canada now became known as Ontario and Quebec, while Nova Scotia and New Brunswick retained their original historic names. The first governor-general was Viscount Monk, who had been head of the executive government of Canada throughout all the stages of confederation. He was an Irish nobleman, who had been a junior lord of the treasury in Lord Palmerston's government. He was a

I have deemed it most convenient to reserve for the conclusion of this history a short review of the relations that have existed for more than a century between the provinces of the Dominion and the United States, whose diplomacy and legislation have had, and must always have, a considerable influence on the material and social conditions of the people of Canada.—an influence only subordinate to that exercised by the imperial state. I shall show that during the years when there was no confederat

   CANADA. AUSTRALIA. |     Name. Name    The Dominion of Canada The Commonwealth of Australia.     How Constituted. How Constituted    Of provinces. Of states.     Seat of Government. Seat of Government    At Ottawa until the Queen Within federal territory in    otherwise directs. New South Wales, at least 100                                        miles from Sydney Executive Power. Executive Power Vested in the Queen. Vested in the Queen. Queen's representative, a Queen's representative, a gov

I confine these notes to the most accurate and available books and essays on the history of Canada. For the French régime consult.— Jacques Cartier's Voyages , by Joseph Pope (Ottawa, 1889), Charlevoix's History and General Description of New France , translated by J. Gilmary Shea (New York, 1868); Cours d'histoire du Canada , by Abbé Ferland (Quebec, 1861); Histoire du Canada , by F.X. Garneau (4th ed., Montreal, 1882); F. Parkman's series of admirable histories of the French régime (Boston, 18