There were in Canada and among Canadians those who sympathized with the South, whose affinities were with the South, and who wished the South to win. There were those, too, who believed then, and still believe, that the logic of Constitution was with the Secessionists of the South, but who, for humanity's sake, desired, unreservedly, passionately, that the logic of the War should make good the cause of the North. For the people of Canada, from the very beginning of the century, longed and prayed, and when the time came not a few of them fought and died, that the accursed mountain of human slavery might be dug away forever from the face of this American continent.

Canada once had a taste of negro slavery. When the Loyalists of the Revolution chose the old flag rather than the new, they were permitted to bring their property with them to Canada. That was before the days of parliamentary institutions in the Canadian colonies. By a special Act of the British Parliament slaves as slaves were brought to Canada from the slave States. But the "peculiar institution" of the South was shortlived in Canada. The first Parliament of Upper Canada was established in 1792, and in 1793, in the Navy Hall, Niagara, the first act of that first Parliament made for the total abolition of slavery. That act was drawn by the newly appointed Chief Justice Osgoode, and was signed by Governor Simcoe, with a grateful heart. It forbade the importation of slaves, and their sale under process of law. The relation between master and slave, a mild, patriarchal relationship, was allowed to continue, to the slave's very great advantage; but the children of the slave were free.

From the passing of that Act in 1793 until Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Canada was the sanctuary for the hunted runaways from the slave States. It is a story full of pathos, of infinite tragedy, and of heroism forever honoring to human nature.

At first Canada was far away, and there was safety in the free States of the North. But in 1851, the slave power was enthroned at Washington, and enforced the Fugitive Slave

Act. From that time on there was no safe place, not in Chicago, not even in Boston itself, for the fugitive from slavery. It was on to Canada, or back with Legree and the lash. Between the Ohio River and the shores of Lake Erie there stretched a vast and trackless forest, but the thought of freedom was sweet even to the ignorant negro slave, and many hunted refugees took the blazed trail that led to liberty. It is one of your own American writers of the slave history who says: "Early in the century the rumor gradually spread among the negroes of the Southern States that there was, far away, under the North Star, a land where the flag of the Union did not float; where the law declared all men free and equal; where the people respected the law, and the government, if need be, enforced it."

It is estimated that more than sixty thousand negro slaves found freedom when they touched Canadian soil. The celebrated "Underground Railroad" traversed the Northern States with its network of secret trails, its southern terminals far-flung from Kansas to the Atlantic along the Missouri, the Ohio, and the Chesapeake, its couriers in the cottonfields and the plantations of the South, and its northern terminals at Collingwood and Sarnia and Windsor and Amherstburg and Pelee and Port Stanley and Port Burwell and Niagara and Hamilton and Toronto and Kingston and Montreal and Halifax. None of your modern railroad kings has so gridironed the land or shown greater enterprise or downright courage. John Brown, of immortal memory, constructed his own branch line of that "Underground Railroad," from Missouri through Iowa and Illinois and Michigan, and made many a trip to Canada before "he died at Harper's Ferry on the fourteenth day of June"; and, though his body was left "mouldering in the grave, over those mysterious lines by which the slave might be free, "his soul went marching on."

To the slaves Canada was Goshen, not Canaan. Many of them grew to comfort and prospered. But Emancipation Day was the day of their deliverance. From that time they began to set their faces again to the warm southland. Canada never would have had the negro or a negro problem had

it not been for slavery. It is not a matter of law, but of latiIn the northern zone the thermometer is on the side of the white man.

tude.

Until Lincoln broke the slave power in the United States, slavery was a disturbing factor in Canadian life. The solid body of Canadian opinion was opposed to slavery. With the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1851, abolitionist feeling in Canada became intensely strong. This was due to one man and his work more than all other influences-excluding, perhaps, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." That man was the Hon. George Brown. No man knows anything of Canadian life and history who does not know of George Brown, the founder and first editor of the Globe. A giant Scot of the sturdiest type, from the day he arrived in Toronto in 1843 until the day in 1880 when in the Globe office he fell by the bullet of a frenzied assassin, George Brown, like Abraham Lincoln, was the great tribune of the people. He was the strong voice and the right arm of the common people. More than any other man, he left his impress on Canadian democracy, and made immovable the foundations of responsible government.

George Brown was a Liberal of the genuine Scottish type. He could not but abhor slavery. He saw it at close range in the slave States. He spoke against it, and he made the Globe ring out against it, long before Lincoln's voice was heard. He felt American slavery to be a personal wrong, a Canadian burden. Here are some words of his from a speech against the Fugitive Slave Act, delivered in Toronto in March, 1852:

"The question is asked: What have we in Canada to do with American slavery? We have everything to do with it. It is a question of humanity. It is a question of Christianity. We have to do with it on the score of self-protection. The leprosy of the atrocious system affects all around it; it leavens the thoughts, the feelings, the institutions of the people who touch it. It is a barrier to liberal principles. We are alongside this great evil; our people mingle with it; we are affected by it now. In self-protection we are bound to use every effort for its abolition. And there is another reason. We are

in the habit of calling the people of the United States 'the Americans';

but we, too, are Americans. On us, as well as on them, lies the duty of preserving the honor of the continent. On us, as on them, rests the noble trust of shielding free institutions from the reproach of modern tyrants. Who that looks at Europe given over to the despots, and with but one little island yet left to uphold the flag of freedom, can reflect without emotion that the great Republic of this continent nurtures a despotism more debasing than them all? How crushingly the upholders of tyranny in other lands must turn on the friends of liberty! 'Behold your free institutions,' they must say. 'Look at the American Republic,' they must sneer, 'proclaiming all men to be born free and equal, and keeping nearly four millions of slaves in the most cruel bondage!""

The man who spoke those words in 1852 was the dominant force in Canadian public opinion, the potent voice in the Canadian Parliament. His sentiments on slavery became the strong convictions of the Canadian people. With what eagerness, therefore, was the rise of Lincoln, the new star on your western horizon, watched by the people of Canada. From the day of his nomination in 1860 until his tragic death, the name of Abraham Lincoln was as highly honored, and his course was as intelligently and as anxiously followed, by the people of the Dominion as by you of the Republic. His success was not only yours; it was ours as well.

When the War broke out, feeling in Canada became acute. The original elements of strife were augmented by the inrush of Southerners. Many of the best families in Virginia and Kentucky came for safety to Toronto, while their men went with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The planter and the preacher came. Their runaway slaves had been there already. Then came the "skedaddler" from the South and the "bounty jumper" from the North. The agent of the Confederate Government at Richmond had his headquarters in Toronto, and many an escapade is told of how despatches and orders were carried to and fro through the Northern lines. We had also the recruiting sergeants of the North and the conspirators from the South. John Wilkes Booth and his allies developed their schemes in Montreal. Bennett Burleigh, now the famous London war correspondent, was then a daredevil young filibuster operating between Montreal and

Detroit in the Southern service, and was ringleader in an attempt to release twenty-five thousand prisoners from under the Northern guns on an island in Lake Erie. His trial for extradition in Toronto was equalled in public interest only by the great trial of William Anderson, the negro runaway, in 1860.

At the close of the War many of the Southern leaders found in Toronto and about Niagara their temporary homes, and their dignity, courtesy, and fine culture made them welcome citizens. Mr. Jefferson Davis himself visited Toronto immediately after his release from prison, and his wife made her home on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie, and there she died not long ago.

All these conflicting forces, social as well as commercial, were at work in Canadian public opinion during the four years of the War. A small group remained stout supporters of the Southern cause, but the great body of Canadian sentiment was with the North. While the Southern sympathizers were welcoming with cheers the poor old President of the overthrown Confederacy, at the wharf in Toronto in 1867, the children of the schools throughout the country, as I very well remember, were singing on their playgrounds,—

“We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree,

As we go marching on."

In a book by a professor of Harvard University, published only a few months ago, I read the statement that, "feeling in the United States was greatly incensed because of the sympathy of Canada with the South in the Civil War." My comment on that statement is that more than forty-eight thousand Canadians fought in the armies of the North, and eighteen thousand of them died for the Union cause. They were in the Army of the Potomac, in the Army of the James, in the Army of the Cumberland, in the Army of the Tennessee, and in the Army of the Rio Grande. They were with Grant at Vicksburg. They were with Thomas at Chickamauga. They were with Custer in the West. They were with Meade at Gettysburg. They went through the Shenandoah