who in Canada as in Scotland were coming into possession of
their heritage; and if the intellectual level attained was never very
high, an honest attempt was being made to educate the shop-keepers and
farmers of Canada into wholesome national ideals.

Little literary activity seems to have existed outside of politics and
the newspapers. For a time cheap reprints from America assisted
Britons in Canada with their forbidden fruits, but government at last
intervened. It is a curious fact that this perfectly just and natural
prohibition had a most unfortunate effect in checking the reading
habits of the colony.[42] In the larger towns there {40} were
circulating libraries, and presumably immigrants occasionally brought
books with them; but newspaper advertisements suggest that school
books, and the like, formed almost the only stock-in-trade of the
book-shop; and the mercurial Major Richardson, after agitating the
chief book-sellers in Canada on behalf of one of his literary ventures,
found that his total sales amounted to barely thirty copies, and even
an auction sale at Kingston discovered only one purchaser, who limited
his offer to sevenpence halfpenny. In speaking, then, of the Canadian
political community in 1839, one cannot say, as Burke did of the
Americans in 1775, that they were a highly educated or book-reading
people. Their politicians, progressive and conservative alike, might
have shortened, simplified, and civilized certain stages in their
political agitations, had they been able more fully to draw on the
authority of British political experience; and their provincialism
would not have thrust itself so disagreeably on the modern student, had
Locke, Rousseau, Burke, and the greater leaders in modern political
science, been household names in early Victorian Canada.

As with other young communities, the church and religion had their part
to play in the shaping {41} of modern Canada. And yet it would be
impossible to attribute to any of the Canadian churches an influence so
decisive as that which religion exercised through Presbyterianism in
the creation of the Scottish democracy, or through Independency in
moulding the New England character. For while the question of a
religious establishment proved one of the most exciting issues in
politics, influences more truly religious suffered a natural
degradation and diminution through their over-close association with
secular affairs.

Once again the situat