The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-24 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA,

(From the Times' Correspondent.)
CLIFTON HOUSE, NIAGARA FALLS, Aug. 8..
To escape the horrors of the " heated term". the
American phrase for the Dog-days, which have
this year burst upon the land into the tropical se-
verity of 96 degrees in the shade, I have betaken
myself for a iew days to the pleasant purlieus of
Niagara Falls. Had I merely wished to leave be-
hind me the suffocating streets and broiling pave-
ments of New York, where the victims of sun
stroke during the past week have amounted to
more than 130, of whom upwards of 50 were immo-
lated in one day, and where a worse than Egyptian
plague of mosquitoes renders life all but unendar•
able, I might have re:nained on the American side
of the great cataract. Here, with the thermometer
at 75, with no insect in the air more noxious than
a bee or a butterfly, with windows facing the most
magnificent waterfall in the world, filling the eye
with the colour and the ear with the murmur of
cool waters, I might have found repose and comfort;
but as, in addition to these physical pleasures, I
wished to enjoy the moral satisfaction of treading
upon a soil where the flag of England marks the
ownership, where law reigns supreme, where the
Government (if not the Administration) possesses
the love and confidence of the people, where no
rumour of approaching convulsion fills the air, where
no conscription takes the husband from his wife or
the son from his mother, and where the hands of
one half of the community are not raised in deadly
warfare against the other, I took up my quarters on
the Canadian side of the torrent—to study a newer
phase of the great American civil war than New
York affords, and to note what the Canadians think
of the not improbable contingency of a war between
Great Britain and the Federal Government.

Clifton-house is a favourite resort of Southern
Americans, and of those natives of the Northern
States who decline to take the oath of allegiance to
a revolutionary despotism, or who have by their
real or supposed " disloyalty" rendered themselves
obnoxious to the authorities of Washington. Here
they are safe from all molestation but that which
springs from the presence of the übiquitous spies of
the State Department. These emissaries of Mr. Se-
ward are both amateur and professional—male and
female, American and foreign. The professional spies
are the most numerous and the most mean. They
note dews who talks or dines with Mr. Vallandig-
ham, what refugees from the military tyranny of
Gen. Schenk at Baltimore or Gen. Burnside at
Cincinnati consort together, or what Englishmar.
or Canadian indulges in a tete-a tete with a gentle-
man from New Orleans or Virginia. They catch up
scraps and odds and ends of conversation ; they
sit, Yankee fashion, balancing their chairs, with
their heels on the window sills or the balustrades,
pretending to read the newspapers, but straining
their ears to catch the disjointed fragments of the
confidential talk of the bystanders. They claim
previous acquaintanceship with persons who never
saw their faces. They assume the guise of Southern
sympathisers the better to draw forth the free
thought and expression of those whom they wish to
betray, and not unfrequently carry their impudence
to the length of passing themselves off as British
officers who have seen service in the South.
They pretend to have travelled through the
seat of war, and to have been with Gen. Beau-
regard at Charleston, or with Gen. Leo at the
battles of Gettysburg, and resort to every despicable
shift to worm themselves into the confidence not
only of the American refugees and exiles, whom
their dastardly reports may ruin, but into that of
Englishmen and Canadians, to whom, fortunately.
they can do no greater injury than a skunk or a
polecat can do in the society of gentlemen. It must
not be presumed, however, from this slight sketch
that these creatures are peculiar to Niagara. They
abound in New York and other cities, and, in fact,
all through the North, and are maintained in their
disreputable calling at a very considerable outlay
from that all but illimitable fund of secret service
money which the President and his Ministers are
known to have at their disposal.
No traveler can remain six hours on Canadian
soil without recognising the fact that the sympa-
thies of the people are in favour of the Sluth. It
was so from the beginning, is so now, and is likely
to continue so to the end. Were the country
polled upon the question it is probable that 75 out
of every 100 Canadians, licth of the East and the
West, would declare themselves against the Federal
cause. The Northern Americans are at a loss to un-
derstand the reason. They fancy that if the Cana-
dians were to revolt against the rule of Great
Britain, and desire either to establish themselves as
a separate nationality or to annex themselves to the
Federal Union, Great Britain would resist by force
of arms. They argue, therefore, that in striving to
retain the unwilling South by the agencies of fire
and sword, and, if need be, of extermination, they
are but doing what England would do to Canada
now, and as it once unwisely strove to do against
Federal America in the days of George 111. But
the Canadians are better informed. They know
that if a? majority of their people were to vote
themselves out of the British Empire to-morrow
Great Britain would neither draw a sword nor fire
a gun to compel their loyalty or their submission
and that the British people, sympathising with the
British Government, whatever party might be in
power, would cheerfully acquiesce in the decision of
the Canadians, and bid them God speed in their new
career. For these reasons they look upon the North
as a nation of tyrants, at war with the principles of
their own Government, and content to destroy
liberty itself for the sake of the Union. They see
how illogical as well as how cruel is the war which
it thus wages. In spite of all considerations con-
nected with the question of slavery they sympathise
with the Southern people in their gallant struggle
to rid themselves of a partnership which:they abhor,
and from future connexion with a people whom
prior to the war they despised, and whom subse-
quently they have learnt to hate with a bitterness
unparalleled in history.
If the idea of annexation to the United States
ever recommended itself to the minds of any por-
tion of the Canadian people, as alike their destiny
cud their interest, the progress of the war has
ceatlY weakened, if it has not utterly dispelled it.
The s, canny " Scotch element prevails largely
among them. They look before they leap. They
know When they are well off. They prize the bird
T the
bandTo above the two birds in the bush.
They h
builders
in the fair eon the ship of the Yankee Republic
covered that tweatherh and in the foul, and have dis-
covered
e gallant vessel is not quite so sea-
worthy as in; ud
represent. They imagined and its
crew would
drawbacks of
the reality of liberty with-
out the
rafthconstant electioneering, and I
think it a blessing
poor than a misfortune that a
Governor of limited
either for good or evil,
should boa ppointed
expense
without the trouble,
the inconvenience, the
hart::: country to elect him.
nuisanceorconvulsingthewir,", and the general
In addition to this, they
dano desire to be involved
settle shqe
fuoerset questions thatcan
in the many intricate and
North and South have yet to
even become good neighbours. The
do not desire
participation in controversies that
miserable
anarchy and revolution in long and breed
succession. They have not the sligaest.
tion to submit themselves to the slavery of 'a con-
nt"'
seripticn ; to make themselves Portieieators in a
debt es huge as that of the mother country,
in-
curred. in about a hundredth part of the time; to 1
share in the onerous taxation which it will entail
upon themselves and their posterity if it be paid, or
in the shame of its repudiation should an indignant
and dishonest people resolve to shake it off. What-
ever force of attraction, the Federal Government
may have once exercised upon Canada has been
changed into repulsion, and even the vision of inde-
pendence, once cherished by many as the natural
growth and certain fortune of so noble a colony, has
ceased to possess its former charm in their eyes.
They see that Great Britain, strong with the
strength and wise with the wisdom of a thousand
years, possesses to-day a more stable as well as a
more liberal Government than it enjoyed a hundred
years ago, while the great American Popublic, that
has not seen its ninetieth birthday, is falling to
pieces, to be replaced, after a series of bloody and
fruities4 struggks, by a reten tlees military despotism,
that will allow no tight to the people bat the right

of making money, to be taken from them:by the tax-
gatherer. Annexation to such a Republic is not to
be thought of; independence alongside of it, without
the support of the parent State, is as little to their
minds. All the cry now is to strengthen the links
that unite Canada with the mother country, and
to borrow from it the last great ornament and
cement of a permanent Governor in the shape of
King or Viceroy of the Blood Royal of England.
Whenever the Federal Government is in ill-
humour with great Britain--which is almost every
day,—or venenever it wishes to regain the fast
perishing le your of its own Irish citizens—which is
about onr;s4 a week,—it instructs its organs to
threaten Ile seizure of Canada. The chief member
and leading spirit of the Federal Government was
not always so shortsighted. There was a time when
Mr. Seward was a prudent statesman—a time when
he decla red that on the inevitable secession of the
South fr:om the North the Americans of the North
would offer to the world the sublime spectacle of
allowing the disruption to be peaceably effected; a
time when he was not smitten with the madness of
war; a time when he believed in the strength of
great ideas ; a time when he would have loathed the
thought that he could become, even in the insanity
of passion, the minister and agent of a despotism,
and at that time he uttered the following memor-
able words on the subject of Canada and its rela-
tions to the Federal Government. Speaking before
the outbreak of the war, he said—
" Hitherto, in common with mostof m
men, as I suppose, I have thought Canay ry."
dcao,uourt,to
speak more accurately, British America,
easily a,ame
mere
strip lying north of the United States,
de-
tachable from the parent State,but incapablenay r
ofisguhs;
taming itself, and therefore ultimately,
soon, to be taken on by the Federal Union, without
or
materially changing or affecting its own co
development. I have dropped the opinion as a
national conceit. I see in British North America,
stretching as it does across the continent, from the
shores of Labrador and Newfoundland to the
Pacific, and occupying a considerable belt of the
Temperate Zane, traversed equally with the
United States by the Lakes, and enjoying the
magnificent shores of the St. Lawrence, with its
thousands of islands in the river and gulf, a region
grand enough for the seat of a great Empire. In its
wheat fields in the West, its broad ranges of the chase
at the North, its inexhaustible lumber lands, the
most extensive now remaining on the globe, its in- '
valuable fisheries and its yet undisturbed mineral
deposits, I see the elements of wealth. I find its in-
habitants vigorous, hardy, energetic, perfectel by
the Protestant religion and British constitutional
liberty. I find them jealous of the United States
and of Great Britain, as they ought to be; and
therefore when I look at their resources I know they
cannot be conquered by the former nor permanently
held by the latter. They will be independent, as
they are already self-maintaining. Having hap-
pily escaped the curse of slavery, they will never
submit themselves to the domination of slaveholders,
which prevails in and determines the character of
the United States. They will be a Russia behind
the United States, which to them will be France
and England. Bat they will be a Russia civilised
and Protestant, and that will be a very different
Russia from that which fills all Southern Europe
with terror."

Since Mr. Seward thus spoke Canadian jealousy
of Great Britain has diminished, while Canadian
jealousy of the United States has largely increased.
At the same time, the desire for independence has
all but died out. If he and his Government should
be so wicked and so unwise as to seek occasion of
quarrel with Great Britain, and attempt the inva-
sion or occupation of Canada, they will find that its
" vigorous, hardy, and energetic people," who count
about as many millions as the Americans of the era
of Washington, will render E uch an account of the
invaders as will duplicate the experiences of the
present war, and prove how impossible is the subju-
gation of a nation that is determined to be free. The
Canadians have up to this time been somewhat luke-
warm on the subject of their defences, but the
apathy appears to have been the result of incre-
dulity. They have not believed in the danger,
' and have consequently taken no means to avert
it. But at the first summons to arms, at the
first unmistakable symptom that war is upon
them, there is no reason to doubt that for every
20,000 men tat Great Britain shall send them the
Canadians will raise 100,000 to fight for their free-
dom and the maintenance of their connection with
the mother country. Whether in such a contingency
the Government at Washington attempted to seize
Quebec or Halifax, or to march an army of occupa-
tion to Montreal, the Canadians, backed by the
power of Great Britain, would be far more likely
to annex to their territory the State of Maine than
to be annexed or conquered by the Americans.
Such, at least, is the present feeling and convic-
tion of the great majority of the Canadian people
whether of British or French extraction. The
Canadian Britons have as little liking for the
"Yankees" as that entertained by the people of
South Carolina, which is the most emphatic term of
contempt which the French Canadian can use
towards an American is conveyed in the word
" Bostonais"—their synonym for all that is base and
unworthy.

The great favour with which the idea of the colo-
nisation of the arable lan& of the Hudson's Bay
Company—the creation of a line of colonies from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, all on British territory, and
their union under one of the sons of Queen Victoria,
of Viceroy, King, or Emperor, has been everywhere
received in British America, and more especially in
Canada, proves, if it prove nothing else, that
the people have high anticipations of the
future destiny of that magnificent region. It
also proves how little either now or hereafter
they have, or are likely to have, in com-
mon with the Federal 21..mericans, whether these
latter shall or shall not preserve their liberties,
Their dream of the future is that which Mr. Seward
has depicted—an empire stretching from ocean to
ocean, with railway and telegraphic communication
from Halifax to Vancouver, free from the contagion,
the guilt, and the embarrassment of slavery, in the
enjoyment of a climate better adapted, with its
bracing cold, to the full development of the physical
and intellectual energies of the Angle-Saxon, the
Anglo. Celtic, and the Anglo-Scandinavian races
than the warmer regions of New York and Penn-
sylvania; but without that independence of the
mother country, which Mr. Seward imagined to be
alike their wish and their destiny. There are, no
don'at, many and formidable difficulties in the way of
the union of these provinces ; but that the influence
of the civil war has been to de-Americanize their
aspirations, and to draw them
morey f
hn their
evr
into political and social
sentimentselese
closely
and
ae
their history the
to believe. For the first time in
relationship with Great Britain, it is impossible not
Canadians have awakened to the conviction that
the Federal Republic—or despotism, whichever
events may make it—
will not and cannot be their
friend, and if they would, in case of an attack,
secure the material aid of the mother country
to the extent of the last man and the last
shilling they must show that they value the con-
nexion sufficiently to defend themselves by a
general muster of their whole able-bodied male
population to resist invasion. There are many
persons in England who think that colonies are
a source of weakness rather then of strength to
the parent State, and who would be only too glad
if Canada would set up for herself, or join the
Federal Union ; but while Canada remains of the
contrary
opinion, and strains every nerve to
prove her faith by her works, there is little proba•
bility,
In view of the contingencies of the American
Civil War, both in the North and in the Mouth, that
either the people
or the Government of Great
Britain will shut their
e
in those es to the futurev
ionf Be
sr imt
as
yh
America, or refue such aid as thoseh
desire for building up
mayhereafter
regions a
kindred Empire, that
rsltand towards
which B
Great Britain in the relation in
auze n er
f
ilsltands
o sgl
to Portugal. The " balance of power', is
confined to the Old World ; it has extended
it e
to 010 New, and the Federal Union, rendered war-
like by its misfortunes, and nggressive by its desire
to retrieve them, will need a strong Power to the
north of Russia, if Mr. Seward prefers the
40 compel it to keep the peace. Its in-
phrast—"
velErate PurP°e is to cripple Engia.,d, to whom it

owes everything, even its territory, and to reduce
that "Mother of Nations" to the rank of a third-
rate Power. British America, on the one side, if
wisely fostered in its growth by the Home Govern-
ment, and Mexico on the other, may perhaps be the
agencies which, if they do not humble the pride of
the Yankee Government, whether Republican or
Imperial, may at all events teach it to know its
proper place in the world, and keep to it without
offence to its neighbours.