troops operating on the Canadian frontier. The various events leading up to that conflagration which made the Potomac wear the colour of Lake Ontario and the Bay, when little York was given to the flames, it is not mine to tell; nor the repulse of the attempt on Baltimore; nor yet the repulse of the assault on New Orleans and the consequent retreat; a repulse which was perhaps favourable to peace, as it placed the Americans on better terms with themselves.

On the 8th of August the plenipotentiaries of Great Britain and the United States held their first conference at Ghent, but the treaty of peace was not signed until the 24th of December. In the interval occurred the inglorious advance on Plattsburgh which gave the coup de grace to any military reputation Prevost may ever have enjoyed. The British troops were indignant at being ordered to retire. Tears of anger burst from many eyes, and officers broke their swords declaring they would never serve again.

The disaster on Lake Champlain encouraged the Americans besieged in Fort Erie to make a sortie. After a struggle for a time doubtful, they were driven back and pursued to the glacis of the fort with a loss of 500 men. Izzard was now advancing in force, and Drummond thought it prudent to withdraw to Chippawa. On Lake Ontario, all had gone well for the Union Jack, and as Niagara frontier could be therefore abundantly provisioned, Izzard who had 8,000 men despaired of the invasion, blew up the works at Fort Erie, crossed over to American territory, and that beautiful frontier disturbed for three years, was once more left to repose in the varied radiance of the Indian summer.

The last date in Isaac Todd's correspondence from Canada, is Quebec, 16th July, 1814. He was then on the point of leaving for the old country, for the next letter is dated Portsmouth, August 17th. In a memorandum of the 16th July, he says: "Wrote Jane and Agnes I would send them a piano." At that date pianos were not as plentiful in Montreal as they are to-day. He says nothing about the war; he sends such a message as he would in times of security, and indeed throughout 1814, there seems not to

He

* This great business Irishman seems to have been a man of ability, very correct formal habits, much capacity for friendship and with genuine kindness of heart. died in England in 1819. His partner was the founder of McGill University.

PREVOST'S DISGRACE.

TRIUMPHANT PEACE.

241

have been the least misgiving in Canada as to the result of the

war.

On the 5th of January, 1815, Isaac Todd writes from Bath, England, addressing a Montreal firm, that the signing of the Preliminaries of peace was very unexpected. He feared the particulars would not be such as would please in Canada, "as there will be no extension of boundary." He adds, " peace is no doubt desirable, as it gives security, and from the heavy taxes laid on lands, &c., in the United States, you will have numbers flock into Canada, and what with discharged soldiers &c., the Upper Province will very soon be greatly increased in inhabitants. You will see by the newspapers (most probably English newspapers sent by the same mail as the letter) various reports about Sir George Prevost, &c., which I believe have little foundation." Unfortunately for poor Prevost's reputation, those reports had only too much in their foundation that was other than unsubstantial.

For three years, the United States had carried on an unjust, an unsuccessful, and an inglorious contest. Canada had waged a defensive warfare, just, noble, unequal, full of success and glory. Materially injured for the time, it is probable the shrewd fur merchant was right in anticipating advantages, as likely to accrue, though Howison and Miss Machar both insist that materially the results were pernicious. There can be no dispute however, that morally the war was beneficial to Canada. Irishmen, Scotchmen, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and men of these great races born on Canadian soil, fought side by side, and learned to love more intensely the beautiful country for which they bled. The budding national life took a deeper and more beautiful tint, and gathered a more splendid promise, because its root-soil was enriched with blood. If peace was pale from mourning over precious lives wasted, the light of victory was in her eye, the rythm of triumph gave stateliness to her step, and all her form was instinct with the ennobling consciousness of duty.

CHAPTER VII.

IN the perusal of history nothing is so sad as the truth forced on us from every side that hitherto the lot of the poor as compared with that of others has been unbearably hard. It is not merely that, in the ordinary course of life, they are without the pleasant surroundings which smoothen the existence of those raised above a hand-to-mouth economy. Are harvests bad? The poor suffer most. Does pestilence sweep over the land? The destroying angel visits the crowded room and smites down the ill-fed and little washed. War? The poor have thousands and tens of thousands slain and they afterwards pay for the cost of the bloody machine by which their sons and fathers have been mown down. Does any sudden increase in wealth take place? The poor do not share in it. They witness the land-owner increase his luxuries, the manufacturer ride to church in a more splendid carriage, the shopkeeper purse up his chin in folds of more insolent pride, but they are as they were before.

The great war had enriched the landowner, the capitalist, the manufacturer, and the farmer; the poor it made poorer. It is from the years lying between the Peace of Amiens and Waterloo, years which studded Europe with famous battle fields, which raised individuals to the height of glory and wealth and power, which filled a hundred trenches with nameless dead and scattered stars on a few padded breasts, it is from those years of blood and war prices that the historian dates that strife of classes, that social estrangement, that severance in sympathy between rich and poor,

[Authorities for Chapters VII and VIII. --Original information gleaned from all parts of the country. McMullen's "History." D'Arcy McGee's "Irish Position in British and Republican North America." "Five Years' Residence in the Canadas," By Ed. Allen Talbot. Mrs. Jameson's "Winter Studies." Green's "History of the English People." Scadding's "Toronto of Old." The Gazette. Almanacs for 1821, 1825, 1832, 1837, 1839. Fotheringill's "Sketch of the Present State of Canada." Lambert's "Travels." Morgan's "Celebrated Canadians." Morgan's "Parliamentary Companion." The Globe. The Mail. Poole's " Early Settlement and Subsequent Progress of the Town of Peterborough." David's "Biographies and Portraits."]

THE LEGACY OF GLORIOUS WAR.

243

between the capitalist and his "hands," between employers and employed, which constitutes one of the great difficulties of the politics of the Three Kingdoms, and projects into the future a lurid ominous light.

Nor was it merely the war which had led to the enormous increase of wealth. The discoveries of Watt and Arkwright, enabled the manufacturer to treble production without increasing his expenses, and that which was destined in the long run to benefit the poor, seemed at first to add to the weight of the millstone which ground them down. Even a succession of bad harvests swelled the causes which gave the agriculturists a feverish and unnatural prosperity. Wheat rose to famine prices and land shared proportionately in the upward movement. An idiot named Ned Ludd once broke some frames in a passion, and thus without designing it gave his name to a labour sect. In the winter of 1811 parties of men, maddened by want and thinking the inventions of Arkwright and Watt fatal contrivances for their own destruction, went about breaking frames and machinery. In the following year serious riots occurred. Numerous bodies of unemployed artisans committed great excesses. Several of the Luddites were tried and executed. The legacy of a glorious war was heavy taxation, an enormous debt and general distress, the pressure of which was increased by the selfish, short-sighted policy of a parliament of landowners. Aware that the enormous addition to their revenues depended on a factitious cause, which, once removed, they would have to be content with their incomes before the war, they sought to keep up the war price for corn, and to enact by law that the poor should be half-starved. They passed a bill in 1815 prohibiting the introduction of foreign corn. This is what an English parliament did for an English people. Napoleon's guns were not as dreadful as this statute. Better be food for powder than food for famine.

In Ireland, where the people were consumers of that ill-starred root, the potato, the situation was more complicated. An agricultural country, the farmers who were not in a position to be rack-rented, gained by the war. The squire had his income increased, and in consequence launched out into a lavish expenditure, which was destined to scatter his family as surely as his father's

sword had scattered the early owners of his broad acres. Hence to-day in fair old houses, by storied crystal streams, on green wood-embosomed terraces, the stranger is lord.* Sometimes the estate was purchased, not by a stranger, but by one of the old Catholic families who, having made money in trade, foolishly, but naturally, turned away from the cooperage, or the tanyard, to become an esquire of a Ballyscanlan or a Mount Leader. Sometimes by a curious irony, an illegitimate child put to trade as good enough for him, has purchased the "big house;" while the young mistresses of his unhappy mother have become governesses in Australia and in America, and his legitimate brethren have driven cabs in Melbourne, or loafed at farming in Canada. Where they had genius they have risen to eminence in some imperial or foreign employment; while those of energy and moderate talents have given officials and jurists to all the colonies of Great Britain. Ireland used to swell, as she does now, the population of the manufacturing towns of England, and the fall in the demand for labourers in Lancashire was felt in the remote west of Galway. Jealous English legislation all but destroyed the Irish linen trade. Population was rapidly increasing. The consequence of all was, that the poor in Ireland were in even a worse condition than they were in England, and soon after the termination of the war, a large emigration to Canada took place. The thirteen thousand emigrants who arrived at Quebec in 1819, were, Christie tells us, chiefly from Ireland. The same remark is true of the forty thousand who arrived in the four following years. In the seven years from 1819 to 1825, 68,534 emigrants came to Canada,

This change has been always going on. The son of the stranger of to-day will feel himself to be connected by family and "old associations" with Ireland, and his son or grandson will be swept off. Now economical laws do what revolutions did in other times. In a ballad of the Jacobite era, there runs a verse which has always struck me as being singularly pathetic :

'Tis my grief that Patrick Laughlin is not

Earl in Erris still;

That Brian Duff no longer rules as

Lord upon the Hill;

That Colonel Hugh McGrady should

Be lying stark and low;

And I sailing, sailing swiftly

From the County of Mayo.