ication from England to Lake Superior--a consummation which those
who laughed at him then never even dreamt of--and now a railroad all the
way to the Pacific is in progress of discussion.

Mac Taggart, a lively Scotch civil engineer, who wrote, in 1829, an
amusing work, entitled "Three Years in Canada," was even more sanguine
on this subject; and, as he was a clerk of works on the Rideau Canal,
naturally turned his attention to the practicability of opening a road
by water, by the lakes and rivers, to Nootka Sound.

Two thousand miles of water road by the Ottawa, the St. Lawrence, and
the Welland, has been opened in 1845, and a future generation will see
the white and bearded stranger toiling over the rocky barriers that
alone remain to repel his advances between the great Superior and the
Pacific. A New Simplon and a peaceful Napoleonic mind will accomplish
this.

The China trade will receive an impulse; and, as the arms of England
have overcome those of the Celestial Empire, and we are colonizing the
outer Barbarian, so shall we colonize the shores of the Pacific, south
of Russian America, in order to retain the supremacy of British
influence both in India and in China. The vast and splendid forests
north of the Columbia River will, ere long, furnish the dockyards of
the Pacific coast with the inexhaustible means of extending our
commercial and our military marine.

And who were the pioneers? who cleared the way for this enterprise?
Frenchmen! The hardy, the enduring, the chivalrous Gaul, penetrated from
the Atlantic, in frail vessels, as far as these frail barks could carry
him; and where their service ceased, with ready courage adopted the
still more fragile transport afforded by the canoe of the Indian, in
which, singing merrily, he traversed the greater part of the northern
continent, and actually discovered all that we now know, and much more,
since lapsed into oblivion.

But his genius was that of conquest, and not of permanent colonization;
and, trammelled by feudal laws and observances, although he extended the
national domain and the glory of France beyond his most ardent desire,
yet he took no steps to insure its duration, and thus left the Saxon and
the Anglo-Norman to consolidate the structure of which he had merely
laid the extensive foundation.

But, even now, amidst all the enlightenment of the Christian nations,
the descendants of the French in Canada shake off the dust of feudality
with painful