Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CANADIAN IDEAS ABOUT ENGLAND. 9 present Conservative premier of the Dominion, that he bore a strong personal resemblance to the mother country's Conservative premier, Mr. Disraeli. Surely filial affection cannot go further than that. If asked by a Canadian whether there is anything un-English in his tone of voice, be careful, as you hope for forgiveness, not to hint that there is ; not that this, indeed, is a point of difference between him and the American; for to mistake even the latter for an Englishman is certainly often accepted as a subtle and delicate flattery. A Confederate officer, in talking of the Canadians, once said to me, with a touch of that national humour which mainly consists in a boldness of exaggeration, that they were chiefly distinguishable from the British ' by being a great deal the Britisher of the two.' ' Lord!' he added, as if in illustration of his opinion, ' how they did hate the Yankees in our war! ' clearly considering the strength of this feeling the true test and measure of Britishness. And it cannot be doubted, that the sympathy of Canadians for the South was indeed a proof of their tendency to be swayed by the mother country's supposed predilections. Canada, whose boast over her neighbours had been ever, that she alone offered safety to the runaway slave, and for whom to have felt, upon her own account, any emulous jealousy of the greatness of the Union would have been rather too absurd an exaggeration of the story of the Frog and the Bull— Canada, further, who had few of those aristocratic sympathies, which might have led to a fellow-feeling with the Southern land-owners—in so far as she was anti-Northern, was drawn from her natural orbit by the attraction exercised over her by England. With regard to this admiration of Canadians for ...