But if any one for a moment will remember that the trade
of the whole front of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia gravitates at
present along-shore to Portland and Boston, while the trade of Upper
Canada, west of Kingston, has long gravitated across the lakes to New
York, he will see, I think, that a mere Zollverein treaty without a
strong political end to serve, and some political power at its back,
would be, in our new circumstances, merely waste paper. The charge that
we have not gone far enough--that we have not struck out boldly for a
Consolidated Union, instead of a union with reserved local
jurisdictions--is another charge which deserves some notice. To this I
answer that if we had had, as was proposed, an Intercolonial Railway
twenty years ago, we might by this time have been perhaps, and only
perhaps, in a condition to unite into one consolidated government; but
certain politicians and capitalists having defeated that project twenty
years ago, special interests took the place great general interest
might by this time have occupied; vested rights and local ambitions
arose and were recognized; and all these had to be admitted as existing
in a pretty advanced stage of development when the late conferences
were called together. The lesson to be learned from this squandering of
quarter centuries by British Americans is this, that if we lose the
present propitious opportunity, we may find it as hard a few years
hence to get an audience, even for any kind of union (except democratic
union), as we should have found it to get a hearing last year for a
legislative union, from the long period of estrangement and non-
intercourse which had existed between these Provinces, and the special
interests which had grown up in the meantime in each of them.
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