Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/29

 by this scheme, which, in the words of the resolution, "is for the best interests and present and future prosperity of British North America."

If we are not blind to our present position we must see the hazardous situation in which all the great interests of Canada stand in respect to the United States. I am no alarmist, I do not believe in the prospect of immediate war. I believe that the common sense of the two nations will prevent a war; still we can not trust to probabilities. The government and legislature would be wanting in their duty to the people if they ran any risk. We know that the United States at this moment are engaged in a war of enormous dimensions: that the occasion of a war with Great Britain has again and again arisen and may at any time in the future again arise. We can not foresee what may be the result; we can not say but that the two nations may drift into a war as other nations have done before. It would then be too late, when war had commenced, to think of measures for strengthening ourselves or to begin negotiations for a union with the sister Provinces.

At this moment, in consequence of the ill feeling which has arisen between England and the United States—a feeling of which Canada was not the cause—in consequence of the irritation which now exists owing to the unhappy state of affairs on this continent, the reciprocity treaty, it seems probable, is about to be brought