o look over another land and diagnose its ills. Any
Canadian will acknowledge that Ireland's population dropped from
8,500,000 in 1850 to 4,400,000 in 1908 solely owing to mismanagement,
if not gross misgovernment; but he will not acknowledge that his own
country lost a million and a half people from the same cause. Ireland
lost her population at the rate of one hundred thousand a year for
forty years, and that lost population helped to build up some of the
greatest cities in the United States. The Irish vote is to-day a
dominant power solely owing to that population lost to Ireland. It is
no exaggeration to say that from 1880 to 1890 Canada lost her
population to the United States at a higher rate than one hundred
thousand a year. Why?

Go back a little in history! The most pugnacious United Empire
Loyalist that ever trekked from the American colonies to Ontario and
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would hardly deny that Canada was grossly
misgoverned under the French regime. Laborers were forced to work
unpaid on fortifications, on roads, on governors' palaces. The farmer
was taxed to death in tithes to the seignior. Shipping was confined to
French vessels owned by royal favorites. Fishing was permitted only
under a license. The fur trade was a corrupt monopoly held by a closed
ring round the Royal Intendant. New France was so mis-governed that
the sons of the best families took to the woods and the _Pays d'en
Haut_--to which fact we owe the exploration of three-quarters of the
continent.

And the most pugnacious Loyalist will hardly deny that under the
British regime from 1759 to Durham's Report in 1840 the mismanagement
was almost as gross as the misgovernment under the French. If any one
entertain doubts on that score, let him look up the record on grants of
thousands of acres to favorites of the Family Compact; on peculations
of public funds in Quebec by irresponsible executives; on mistrials of
disorders in the Fur Country, when North-Wester and Hudson's Bay
traders cut each other's throats; on the constant bicker and bark
between Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec, which kept the country
rent by religious dissensions when men should have been empire-building.

Set down the cause of Canada's slow progress up to 1840 to
misgovernment. Durham's Report remedied all that; and confederation
followed in 1867. Was Canada's progress as swift after 1867 as it
ought to have been? Examine a few figures: