mber in comparison of their
invaders, they had

"'Hearts resolved and hands prepared
The blessings they enjoyed to guard.'

"There was doubtless as much true courage among the descendants of Great
Britain and Ireland in the United States as in Canada; but the former
fought for the oppressor of Europe, the latter fought for the freedom of
Europe; the former fought to prostrate Great Britain in her death
struggle for the liberties of mankind, and to build up the United States
upon her ruin, the latter fought in the glorious cause of the mother
country, and to maintain our own unity with her; the former fought for
the conquest of Canada, the latter fought in her defence; the fire that
kindled the military ardour of the former was the blown-up embers of old
enmities against Great Britain, the gross misrepresentations of
President Madison, the ambition of adventure, and the lust of booty--the
fire that burned in the hearts of the latter, and animated them to
deeds of death or freedom, was the sacred love of hearth and home, the
patriotic love of liberty, and that hallowed principle of loyalty to
truth, and law, and liberty combined, which have constituted the life,
and development, and traditions, and strength, and unity, and glory of
British institutions, and of the British nation, from the resurrection
morn of the Protestant Reformation to the present day. A great writer
has truly observed: 'The most inviolable attachment to the laws of our
country is everywhere acknowledged a capital virtue;' and that virtue
has been nobly illustrated in the history of our United Empire Loyalist
forefathers, and of their descendants in Canada, and it grows with the
growth and increases with the strength of our country.

"I have said that loyalty, like Christianity itself, is an attachment to
principles and duties emanating from them, irrespective of rulers or
teachers; but if the qualities of our chief rulers were necessary to
give intensity to Canadian loyalty, those qualities we have in the
highest degree in our Sovereign and in her representative in Canada; for
never was a British Sovereign more worthy of our highest respect and
warmest affection than our glorious Queen Victoria--(loud cheers)--and
never was a British Sovereign more nobly represented in Canada than by
the patriotic, the learned, and the eloquent Lord Dufferin. (Loud
cheers.) And at no period were we more free or prosperous than now. The
feelings of his (the speaker'