be, I hope and I believe that Canadians will be found as ready and as devoted in the twentieth century as in the nineteenth—if that dread possibility become a certainty and Canada must fight to remain Canada and British (absit omen) she will not be found recreant—the land where died Montcalm and Wolfe and Brock and the boys from the University of Toronto, has produced their like, and they will not be found wanting.
What of the future?
In material wealth, Canada’s future is secure—her forests and mines and plains must of necessity make her rich, if but her career be not checked by some external force—and that I do not dread. In education, in the sense for justice and right, in all that makes life worth living, there is likewise nothing to fear. The heart of the people is sound and their instincts will, on the whole, prevent them going far astray.
How will her destiny be best served?
Here I must speak with diffidence, though none the less with a strong conviction, which I believe to be well-founded.
Until within a very few years there did exist amongst us a number of citizens, some of them of influence, who, secretly, if not openly, held the view that it was the manifest destiny of Canada to become part of the greater union of States. Some here and there to be found rather desired it. With the exception of a very few indeed—and, in the open, with the exception of one man, who is not a Canadian (by birth at least), such a feeling does not now exist.
Into the merits of the Venezuela Message, I have
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