To the
British Crown many of them feel a certain attachment because of
the liberty guaranteed to them to pursue their own ideals of
happiness. In preserving their type of social life, their faith
and language, they have shown a resolute tenacity. To this day
they are as different in these things from their fellow-citizens
of British origin in the rest of Canada as were their ancestors
from the English colonies which lay on their borders.
The French in Canada are still a separate people. From time to
time a nervous fear seizes them lest too many of their race may
be lost to their old ideals in the Anglo-Saxon world surging
about them. Then they listen readily to appeals to their racial
unity and draw more sharply than ever the lines of division
between themselves and the rest of North America. They remain a
fragment of an older France, remote and isolated, still dreaming
dreams like those of Frontenac of old of the dominance of their
race in North America and asserting passionately their rights in
the soil of Canada to which, first of Europeans, they came.
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