Lawrence, and over all the lands lying east of the Mississippi,
save only New Orleans. To whom it would fall to develop this vast
claim, what mighty empires would be carved out of the wilderness,
where the boundary lines would run between the nations yet to be,
were secrets the future held. Yet in retrospect it is now clear
that in solving these questions the Peace of Paris played no
inconsiderable part. By removing from the American colonies the
menace of French aggression from the north it relieved them of a
sense of dependence on the mother country and so made possible
the birth of a new nation in the United States. At the same time,
in the northern half of the continent, it made possible that
other experiment in democracy, in the union of diverse races, in
international neighborliness, and in the reconciliation of empire
with liberty, which Canada presents to the whole world, and
especially to her elder sister in freedom.
In 1763 the territories which later were to make up the Dominion
of Canada were divided roughly into three parts. These parts had
little or nothing in common. They shared together neither
traditions of suffering or glory nor ties of blood or trade.
Acadia, or Nova Scotia, by the Atlantic, was an old French
colony, now British for over a generation. Canada, or Quebec, on
the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with seventy thousand
French habitants and a few hundred English camp followers, had
just passed under the British flag.
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