The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People | Page 4

of
character--valuable qualities in the formation of a new community. If,
in their Toryism, they and their descendants were slow to change their
opinions and to yield to the force of those progressive ideas necessary
to the political and mental development of a new country, yet, perhaps,
these were not dangerous characteristics at a time when republicanism
had not a few adherents among those who saw the greater progress and
prosperity of the people to the south of the St. Lawrence and the Great
Lakes. These men were not ordinary immigrants, drawn from the
ignorant, poverty-stricken classes of an Old World; they were men of a
time which had produced Otis, Franklin, Adams, Hancock and
Washington--men of remarkable energy and intellectual power. Not a
few of these men formed in the Canadian colony little centres from
which radiated more or less of intellectual light to brighten the
prevailing darkness of those rough times of Canadian settlement. The
exertions of these men, combined with the industry of others brought
into the country by the hope of making homes and fortunes in the New
World, opened up, in the course of years, the fertile lands of the West.
Then two provinces were formed in the East and West, divided by the
Ottawa River, and representative government was conceded to each.
The struggles of the majority to enlarge their political liberties and
break the trammels of a selfish bureaucracy illustrate the new mental
vigour that was infused into the French Canadian race by the
concession of the parliamentary system of 1792. The descendants of the
people who had no share whatever in the government under French rule
had at last an admirable opportunity of proving their capacity for
administering their own affairs, and the verdict of the present is, that,
on the whole, whatever mistakes were committed by their too ardent
and impulsive leaders, they showed their full appreciation of the rights
that were justly theirs as the people of a free colonial community. Their
minds expanded with their new political existence, and a new people
were born on the banks of the St. Lawrence.

At the same time the English-speaking communities of Upper Canada
and the Maritime Provinces advanced in mental vigour with the
progress of the struggle for more liberal institutions. Men of no
ordinary intellectual power were created by that political agitation
which forced the most indifferent from that, mental apathy, natural
perhaps to a new country, where a struggle for mere existence demands
such unflagging physical exertion. It is, however, in the new era that
followed the Union that we find the fullest evidence of the decided
mental progress of the Canadian communities. From that date the
Canadian Provinces entered on a new period of industrial and mental
activity. Old jealousies and rivalries between the different races of the
country became more or less softened by the closer intercourse, social
and political, that the Union brought about. During the fierce political
conflicts that lasted for so many years in Lower Canada--those years of
trial for all true Canadians--the division between the two races was not
a mere line, but apparently a deep gulf, almost impossible to be bridged
in the then temper of the contending parties. No common education
served to remove and soften the differences of origin and language. The
associations of youth, the sports of childhood, the studies by which the
character of manhood is modified, were totally distinct. [Footnote:
Report of Lord Durham on Canada, pp. 14-15.] With the Union of 1840,
unpalatable as it was to many French Canadians who believed that the
measure was intended to destroy their political autonomy, came a spirit
of conciliation which tended to modify, in the course of no long time,
the animosities of the past, and awaken a belief in the good will and
patriotism of the two races, then working side by side in a common
country, and having the same destiny in the future. And with the
improvement of facilities for trade and intercourse, all sections were
brought into those more intimate relations which naturally give an
impulse not only to internal commerce but to the intellectual faculties
of a people. [Footnote: Lord Macaulay says on this point: Every
improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally
and intellectually, as well as materially, and not only facilitates the
interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to
remove natural and provincial antipathies and to bind together all the
branches of the human family.] During the first years of the settlement
of Canada there was a vast amount of ignorance throughout the rural

districts, especially in the western Province. Travellers who visited the
country and had abundant opportunities of ascertaining its social
condition, dwelt pointedly on the moral and intellectual apathy that
prevailed outside a