The measure of its accomplishment must,
century by century, rise higher and higher in the competition of
nations. Its great works in this generation can alone perpetuate its
greatness in the next.
"Let us look at the map: there we see, coloured as 'British America,' a
tract washed by the great Atlantic on the East, and by the Pacific
Ocean on the West, and containing 4,000,000 square miles, or one-ninth
of the whole terrestrial surface of the globe. Part of this vast
domain, upon the East, is Upper and Lower Canada; part, upon the West,
is the new Colony of British Columbia, with Vancouver's Island (the
Madeira of the Pacific); while the largest portion is held, as one
great preserve, by the fur-trading Hudson's Bay Company, who, in right
of a charter given by Charles II., in 1670, kill vermin for skins, and
monopolise the trade with the Native Indians over a surface many times
as big again as Great Britain and Ireland. Still, all this land is
ours, for it owes allegiance to the sceptre of Victoria. Between the
magnificent harbour of Halifax, on the Atlantic, open throughout the
year for ships of the largest class, to the Straits of Fuca, opposite
Vancouver's Island, with its noble Esquimault inlet, intervene some
3,200 miles of road line.
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