The FrenchCanadian Author:Byron Nicholson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FRENCH-CANADIAN. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Certainly never since the Confederation of the British Provinces on the continent of North America in 1867, ... more »and perhaps never since the Treaty of Paris in 1763, has the newspaper press of Canada so frequently and so persistently directed public attention to the people of French origin in the Province of Quebec as during the last few years ; which would, of course, be altogether admirable if the object had invariably been to promote a better understanding and a closer friendship between these people and their fellow-citizens of British nationality than had existed before. But, unhappily, this praise-worthy object does not seem to have been always kept in view ; on the contrary, it seems to have been generally lost sight of, as is evident from certain inflammatory appeals to racial and religious feelings, as well as from the less open and violent, but more insidious and mischievous, incitements todiscontent and discord conveyed by the covert sneer and ungenerous sarcasm—or what we may call the journalistic shrugging of the shoulders and uplifting of the eyebrows. This appears to be largely traceable, first, to the fact that ever since the federal elections of 1896 Canada has had a French-Canadian as Prime Minister, which is not very grateful to a certain class of people who are proud, and justly so, of their British origin ; and, secondly, to the position which a few prominent French- Canadians are supposed to have assumed with respect to the war which now for more than two years has been going on in South Africa between the Boers and the British. It has thus come to pass that a deplorable spirit of antagonism, which it was fondly hoped had long since passed away, has begun to re-assert itself between the two great races which ...« less