l, from their giving
a certain rank to those objects of our regard, which every honest and
high-minded man values most, his children. To be the founder of a family
is the most honourable, the most gratifying, and the most permanent
reward of public talents. The Americans of our day affect to abhor a
peerage; though no people on earth are more tenacious of the trifling
and temporary titles of office. Nothing could have been easier at this
period, than the creation of an aristocracy in America; and nothing
could have been wiser. The landed proprietors, and there were some of
vast possessions; the leading men of commerce, and there were some of
great wealth; and the principal lawyers, and there were men of eloquence
and ability among them--would have formed the _nucleus_ of an
aristocracy purely English, closely connected with the English throne as
the fountain of honour, and not less strongly bound to English
allegiance. An Episcopacy, of all ties the most powerful, required only
a word for its creation. And in this manly, generous, and free-spirited
connexion, the colonies would have grown with the growth of England;
have shunned all the bitter collisions of rival interests; have escaped
the actual wars which inflicted disaster on both; and, by the first of
all benefits to America, she would have obtained the means of resisting
that supremacy of faction, which is now hurrying her into all the
excesses of democracy.

In Canada we are still pursuing the same system, inevitably to be
followed by the same fruits. We are suffering it to be filled with men
of the lowest order of society; with the peasant, the small dealer, the
fugitive, and the pauper. Those men no sooner acquire personal
independence, than they aim at political. But who ever hears of a title
of honour among even the ablest, the most gallant, or the most attached
of the Canadian colonists? The French acted more rationally. Their
Canadians have a noblesse, and that noblesse to this moment keep their
station, and keep up the interest of France in Canada. Our obvious
policy would be, to conciliate the leading men by titles of honour, to
conciliate the rising generation by giving them the offices of their own
country, and make it a principle of colonial government, that while the
command of the forces, or the governor-generalship should be supplied
from home, every office below those ranks should be given to those brave
and intelligent individuals of the colony wh