antry.

"There can hardly be conceived a nationality more destitute of all that
can invigorate and elevate a people, than that which is exhibited by the
descendants of the French in Lower Canada, owing to their retaining
their peculiar language and manners. They are a people with no history,
and no literature. The literature of England is written in a language
which is not theirs; and the only literature which their language
renders familiar to them, is that of a nation from which they have been
separated by eighty years of a foreign rule, and still more by those
changes which the Revolution and its consequences have wrought in the
whole political, moral, and social state of France. Yet it is on a
people whom recent history, manners, and modes of thought, so entirely
separate from them, that the French Canadians are wholly dependent for
almost all the instruction and amusement derived from books: it is on
this essentially foreign literature, which is conversant about events,
opinions and habits of life, perfectly strange and unintelligible to
them, that they are compelled to be dependent. Their newspapers are
mostly written by natives of France, who have either come to try their
fortunes in the province, or been brought into it by the party leaders,
in order to supply the dearth of literary talent available for the
political press. In the same way their nationality operates to deprive
them of the enjoyments and civilising influence of the arts. Though
descended from the people in the world that most generally love, and
have most successfully cultivated the drama--though living on a
continent, in which almost every town, great or small, has an English
theatre, the French population of Lower Canada, cut off from every
people that speak its own language, can support no national stage.

"In these circumstances, I should be indeed surprised if the more
reflecting part of the French Canadians entertained at present any hope
of continuing to preserve their nationality. Much as they struggle
against it, it is obvious that the process of assimilation to English
habits is already commencing. The English language is gaining ground,
as the language of the rich and of the employers of labour naturally
will. It appeared by some of the few returns, which had been received
by the Commissioner of Inquiry into the state of education, that there
are about ten times the number of French children in Quebec learning
English, as com