TWO OF THE GREAT FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES
of English Canadians have been the English Conquest of French
Canada and the American Revolution. While the great events
constituting them were unfolding, English Canadians hardly
existed, but as they came into existence, they found the two
experiences there ready-made, waiting for them. The English
Canadians were the heirs of the Conquest, and they were only
too much aware of what it entailed in the way of fancied racial
superiority. As for the American Revolution, it split the Eng-
lish race: that is its major significance in English Canada. For
Americans, the Revolution did what revolutions always do,
unloosed new springs of energy, opened new horizons, changed
the direction of the stream of history. It gave them shining
new gospels, which fitted their circumstances and have been
their chart and compass ever since. ¹¹ It gave them the necessary
enemy. It gave them the pride of equality with the former
mother country, whose measure they had so decisively taken.
It changed them from adolescents to men.

The Revolution did none of these things for Canadians. As
an English population slowly gathered north of the line, it in-
herited, not the benefits, but the bitterness of the Revolution.
It got no shining scriptures out of it. It got little release of
energy and no new horizons of the spirit were opened up. It
had been a calamity, pure and simple. And to take the place
of the internal fire that was urging Americans westward across
the continent there was only melancholy contemplation of
things as they might have been and dingy reflection of that
ineffably glorious world across the stormy Atlantic. English

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