ject
American overtures in favour of the overtures of our own great England,
but to keenly watch and actively resist American influence, as it
already threatens us through the common channels of life and energy. We
often say that we fear no invasion from the south, but the armies of
the south have already crossed the border. American enterprise, American
capital, is taking rapid possession of our mines and our water power,
our oil areas and our timber limits. In today's Dominion, one paper
alone, you may read of charters granted to five industrial concerns
with headquarters in the United States. The trades unions of the two
countries are already international. American settlers are pouring into
the wheat-belt of the Northwest, and when the Dominion of Canada has
paid the hundred million dollars she has just voted for a railway to
open up the great lone northern lands between Quebec and the Pacific,
it will be the American farmer and the American capitalist who will
reap the benefit. They approach us today with all the arts of peace,
commercial missionaries to the ungathered harvests of neglected
territories; but the day may come when they will menace our coasts to
protect their markets--unless, by firm, resolved, whole-hearted action
now, we keep our opportunities for our own people."

They cheered him promptly, and a gathered intensity came into his face
at the note of praise.

"Nothing on earth can hold him now," said Bingham, as he crossed his
arms upon a breast seething with practical politics, and waited for the
worst.

"The question of the hour for us," said Lorne Murchison to his
fellow-townsmen, curbing the strenuous note in his voice, "is deeper
than any balance of trade can indicate, wider than any department of
statistics can prove. We cannot calculate it in terms of pig-iron, or
reduce it to any formula of consumption. The question that underlies
this decision for Canada is that of the whole stamp and character of
her future existence. Is that stamp and character to be impressed by the
American Republic effacing"--he smiled a little--"the old Queen's head
and the new King's oath? Or is it to be our own stamp and character,
acquired in the rugged discipline of our colonial youth, and developed
in the national usage of the British Empire?"...

Dr Drummond clapped alone; everybody else was listening.

"It is ours," he told them, "in this greater half of the continent, to
evolve a nobler ideal. The America