Three hundred and thirty-seven years ago Jacques Cartier erected the cross at Gaspe, and, amid the triumphal shouts of his hardy mariners, flung to the breeze the Fleur-de-lis of old France. Since then what a land of adventure and romance has this been! We may have no native ballad for the nursery, or home-born epic for the study; no tourney feats to rhapsodise over, or mock heroics to emblazon on our escutcheon; we may have no prismatic fables to illumine and adorn the preface of our existence, or curious myths to obscure and soften the sharp outline of our early history; yet woven into the tapestry of our past, are whole "Volumes of touching poetry and great tomes of glowing prose that rival fiction in eagerness of incident, and in marvellous climax put fable to the blush. We need not ransack foreign romance for valorous deeds, nor are we compelled to go abroad for sad tales of privation and suffering. The most chivalrous we can match; the most tried we can parallel. Each stage of this country's progress recounts to us, in all the simplicity of unpremeditated record, sacrifices endured, hardships encountered, and brave deeds done, not amid the applause of an interested and anxious world, nor yet amid the pomp and pride of oft recurring circumstance, but rather in silent, ever-changing strait and myriad-formed danger, when every faculty sprang into earnest, vigorous action, and every sense grew sharp by reason of restless emergency; when civilization grappled with herculean savagery, and man fought with nature; and when, alas! the consciousness of duty done was the sole reward achieved, or the solitary unnamed mound, chapleted by the winter's snow, was the only monument won. Yet there are few heroes in our Pantheon. Where every man does his duty, heroes are not wanted and are not missed.
For years our frontier echoed to the roar of battle; the shrill scream of the Indian and the hoarse yell of the white man mingling in death-agony; while along the dim corridors of our forests the unpitying North Wind came laden with the half- stifled sighs of lonely yet patient women, and the shivering wail of starving children. In the old times war raged almost continuously, and every man was a soldier. First came the contests with the Iroquois and the Hurons, garnished with sad tales of civilized atrocities and savage vengeance. If one's appetite for horrors demands gratification, the needful stimulant may be found in the details of the massacre of Lachine, when 1,400 Iroquois warriors swooped down by night upon a slumbering village, and plied the torch and tomahawk with all the relentlessness of savage hate, showing mercy to neither age nor sex, and reserving only for a sickening butchery, those whom the inexorable flame spared. Two hundred men, women and children were burnt alive, and those who died under prolonged tortures were not a few. Houses, crops, everything was reduced to ashes, and woe held exultant sway amid desolation and blood. Next came the wars between England and France, with their mimic reproduction on this continent; the ambitions, animosities and jealousies of European diplomacy bringing devastation and death into Canadian homes; and the swaying incidents of the Old World, finding their obsequious parallel, three thousand miles across the sea, in the wilds of the New. In vain the New Englander made desperate and persistent efforts to win Canada. In spite of repeated invasions, and in the face of large odds, the flag of France kept proudly afloat. A people varying in number, from 25,000 in 1679 to 70,000 in 1761, not only thwarted every attempt at their subjugation by the much more densely populated colonies to the south, but with a little stingily rendered assistance from the parent land held their own against repeated attack by land and sea. Mournful is the history of those days. There were no ambulance trains then, no Christian charities to assuage the horrors of battle, and little skill to alleviate its sufferings. Mercy was a word unknown, for the civilized had become apt pupils of the savage. Need I rehearse in your ears the terrible punishment inflicted on the simple-minded, inoffensive Acadians who "dwelt in the love of God and of man,"—"their dwellings open as day, and the hearts of the owners "—when hundreds of families were torn apart, wife from husband, child from parent, and,
"the freighted vessels departed,
"Bearing a nation, with all its household gods, into exile,
"Exile without an end, and without an example in story;"