gland. Think
of the greater comfort it would afford to emigrants, and how much it
would facilitate and encourage emigration. With navigation on a large
scale, shipbuilding would become an object of great importance here,
and new vessels might be ready loaded with produce to depart with the
first opening in the spring. There are but few vessels trading from
England to Quebec, which make two voyages in a season, and then it is
with increase of risk that the second voyage is performed. Every vessel
could leave England, proceed to the extremities of Lakes Michigan or
Superior, and get back with ease in a season, or every vessel could
leave Lakes Erie or Ontario in the spring, proceed to England, get back
here, and again take home a second cargo of produce. In time of war
what security would such a scale of navigation yield. It would put all
competition on the lakes out of the question. Upper Canada would then
possess a vast body of thorough bred seamen and ship carpenters, with
abundance of vessels fit to mount guns, not only for their own
individual defence, but to constitute a navy at a moment's notice. In a
commercial competition too, the Great Western Canal of the States would
be quite outrivalled by such a superior navigation. Upwards, except at
the Falls of St. Mary, where a very short canal would give a free
passage, navigation is clear for more than a thousand miles, and when
population thickens on the wide-extended shores of the Upper Lakes,
only think how the importance increases of having the transport of
goods and produce uninterrupted by transhipment. Such was Mr. Gourlay's
dream in the jail of Niagara. It is now reality. Ships of war, American
and British, have passed from Lake Ontario down the St. Lawrence to the
ocean, the ship _Eureka_ embarked passengers for California, at
Cleveland, in Ohio, and passed down the St. Lawrence to sea, safely
reaching her destination on the Pacific, and sea-going vessels have
been built in Kingston to ply between that port and Liverpool direct.
Steamships pass up the St. Lawrence canals and down the St. Lawrence
rapids. Canada is advancing with giant strides, small as her beginning
was. It was in November, 1823, that George Keefer, J. Northrop, Thomas
Merritt, William Chisholm, Joseph Smith, Paul Shipman, George Adams,
John Decoes, and William Hamilton Merritt, advertised in the _Upper
Canada Gazette_ that, as freeholders of the district of Niagara, they
intended to petition t