CANADA HAS GROWN TO ITS PRESENT SIZE in a
series of spurts. Its course has been like that of one of its own
Laurentian rivers: a long quiet lake, then a quickening of the
stream and a hurried tumbling over the rapids, then again a quiet,
if larger, stream. After Jacques Cartier, nearly a century of
almost nothing, then the first pulsation of growth with the com-
ing of the French population. Then the quiet consolidation of
the eighteenth century, followed by the second major migra-
tion, that of the Loyalists and their successors. Once more a
stretch of 'slack water' until after the wars, and then, begin-
ning about 1820, a rush over the rapids from 1820 to
1850, a generation whose end sees a completely altered pic-
ture. Again, the pace slackens and it is not until the very
close of the nineteenth century that it begins again. This time,
from 1900 to 1930, it widens out into a flood, filling up the
West and vastly stimulating the East. Again, a period of rest,
followed by the frantic expansion of the post-war period from
1946 on, which has once more created a new country and a
new society. Thus from the refounding of Quebec in 1632 to
our own day, we have had five cycles of growth and expansion,
each one accompanied by an inpouring of new people who
altered the shape of things in some fundamental fashion. The
period of the present chapter, 1820-1850, is the middle one
and like the others, it is in high colours.

After more or less peaceful relations with the United States
had been assured by the Treaty of Ghent and the Rush-Bagot
Agreement, ¹ the British North American colonies could settle
down to what most of their people would have regarded as
their real business, and that was not war, but growth. Few
English colonists there were who did not look forward to
growth in population, in productivity, in urban life, industry,
education, even in self-government. Few would have wished a

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