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and Quebec full of possibilities in people, products and latent power. The wonderful region of the North-West, the future granary of the world; and British Columbia, the richest Province under the

sun.

This huge Samson of strength and power, this sleeping giant of the world, this vigorous, forceful home of a section of the Anglo-Saxon race. What possibilities abroad has this land of raw materials, of cheap food products, of abundant water power, of enormous distributive facilities, and of a brave and patient people."

But in speaking of Canada as a "sleeping giant," Mr. Wiman is neither generous nor just, as the following statistics will fully show. She has 15,020 miles of railway, towards which the Government has contributed about $147,000,000; the earnings of which in 1894 amounted to over $52,000,000, and the profits yielded some $15,000,000. During the year these trains had run over 45,000,000 miles of road, had carried 13,587,265 passengers, and had handled 22,414,357 tons of freight. On her canals there have been expended $68,000,000; to the credit of the people there are deposits in the banks to the amount of something over $225,000,000; the value of life insurance policies run up to $332,000,000; her shipping is estimated at $47,000,000, while the value of the imports and exports amounted last year to $241,000,000.

But there is another class of statistics of equal, if not of even greater importance than these, which require to be referred in order to reach right conclusions concerning the character of the Canadian people. From the report of the PostmasterGeneral, recently laid before Parliament, we learn that during 1894 there passed through the 8,477 postoffices of the Dominion 106, 290,060 letters, 23,000,000 cards, and over 93,000,000 papers and parcels. These were carried over 30,500,000 of miles by steamer, train or stage, at a cost to the country of nearly $5,000,000; over 75,000 miles of wire some

5,000,000 messages were sent; onefifth of the population attend the public schools, for whose education there is an annual expenditure of upwards of $10,000,000, besides large sums given to support of the universities, colleges and academies; nearly $2,131,000 is required for the maintenance of humane and charitable institutions, and many other things important in their influence but which cannot be reduced to statistical calculation.

But, perhaps, the most important factors in the formation of Canadian character, and those that will most largely affect her future are to be found in language and race. Theoretically it may be true that men are born free and equal, but as a matter of fact it is not so, and what is true of individuals is equally true of nations. As the Hebrew, Greek and Roman races were the leading ones in the olden times, the Anglo-Saxon leads to-day. However modified by circumstances, its great dominant features are the same everywhere-the respecter of law and order, the friend of freedom, the patron of progress, the protector of the home, and the defender of the rights of conscience: To build a home, to establish good government, and to worship his God as he sees fit, is the ambition of the Saxon; and all this he has done wherever he has obtained a foothold. This has been as true of the Canadian branch of the family as of any of its other members, as the foregoing figures clearly show.

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most certain. The industry needed to clear the land, the vigorous effort required to bring a living out of the soil or the sea, and the privations endured in subduing the soil, laid the basis for a great people.

When we say the language of the country is the English we are aware that the mother tongue of many is French, but the fact is that a knowledge of the latter is becoming less and less a necessity. While we do not say with some that ours will become the language of mankind, we feel assured the day is at hand when this will be true of every Canadian. And it is right it should be so, not only because it is the language of the majority and the ability to use it is needed by everyone who would intelligently fill any position in Church or State, but also because of the blessings which follow in its train. It is thought freighted with the noblest contributions from every cultured clime, while it bears to other lands native products of its own as rich in the ripened fruits of the loftiest genius as any that it brings home to its Saxon sons. The speech of Greece was more flexile, more

euphonious, more elastic and scientific; that of Rome more stately, majestic and philosophic; those of modern Italy and France more soft and flowing and sprightly; but in no speech that ever gave voice to human thought, or an outlet to human passion, is there treasured up for the lover of knowledge a richer endowment of wisdom and truth, of fact and deduction, of what is splendid in imagination and tender in pathos, than in the language in which was sung the lullaby over our cradle, and in which will be sobbed the requiem over our grave.

Such then is the Canada of to-day -young, strong and hopeful, her real strength unknown, her resources undeveloped, her capabilities as yet undreamed of. To those who must leave the Old Land she offers the rarest inducements, her greatest need to-day being honest and industrious settlers. What her future will be time alone will tell, but unless some unforeseen and unavoidable calamities overtake her we are warranted in looking to a career of ever-increasing prosperity and of ever-widening influence and power.

THE PIRATE.

BY R. WALTER WRIGHT, B.D.

[The Greek word pásov (tempter) is from the same root as our word "pirate."]

THE Pirate, with black hulk and murderous crew,

And blood-red flag, on every sea yet sails;
His hellish spoils, dead men that tell no tales,
And ruined souls, are ever victims new;
The fairest shores with blight he still doth strew,
Earth's mightiest mariner before him quails
When eagle-like he swoops, and when he hails
With treacherous truce, earth's wisest can outdo.
O Thou Great Admiral of Love and Light!

Thy blood-red flag floats, too, on every sea,
Beneath its folds for refuge shall we flee.
Thou, mightier than all the corsair's might,
Wiser than all his stratagem and sleight,

Shalt wing each ship of Faith with Victory.
PLATTSVILLE, Ont.

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JANE CLEMENT JONES.

BY THE REV. N. BURWASH, S.T.D., LL.D.

Chancellor of Victoria University.

"That also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her."

THE early years of this century still witnessed the movement of population from the United States to Upper Canada. A few years before the great Loyalist movement had broken in upon the solitude of our primæval forests and had proved that underneath their dark shadows there lay concealed a soil rich in all the resources of a prosperous people. And so for nearly half a century a portion of the stream of young enterprise and ability which was flowing from the rocky hillsides of New England, found its way to our Canadian shores. It would scarcely be fair to think or speak of these early settlers as foreigners or immigrants. They, or their fathers, were born under our British flag; they spoke our language; they were familiar with all the ways of our new country. They were often the old neighbours, sometimes the bloodrelations, of the Loyalist founders of Upper Canada, and when they came among us they were at once at home-loyal citizens of the young land and loyal subjects of its King.

Among these incomers, in the year 1811, was a young harness-maker named Clement, from the village of Goffstown, in New Hampshire. There was at that time, tradition says, no one of his trade between Montreal and Kingston, and when he built his little backwoods home, at what is now the town of Brockville, he soon obtained a contract from the Government to refit the cavalry, who then were continually moving from east to west-along the shores of the St. Lawrence and the lakes. Here, in the November of that year, he planted his wife,

Elizabeth Bancroft, and two little daughters, Phoebe and Elizabeth. In the course of years the little group grew to seven, Lucy, Martha, Sarah, Jane, and George being born in the Canadian home, on the banks of the beautiful St. Lawrence. Here, by the beginning of the thirties, the two elder daughters, Phoebe and Elizabeth, were married, the first to young Billa Flint, the son of the prosperous merchant of the same name, the second to Rufus Holden, then a young man in mercantile life, and afterwards for long years a prominent citizen and physician of the city of Belleville. Shortly

after, in the second cholera year, 1834, the father, who was evidently a man of ability, entrusted by the Canadian Government with important commissions, and who has left behind him a record as a friend of the poor, the sick and the afflicted, was suddenly taken from his household by the fatal epidemic.

The name of the mother, Elizabeth Bancroft, contains a history in itself. We meet it in places of influence far back in English history. In New England it stands on the earliest rolls of the colony, and holds a proud place in American history, for the large number of the name distinguished in literature and in public life. It carries with it many of the best intellectual and religious traditions both of Old England and of New England. Certain it is that Elizabeth Bancroft was not unworthy of her name, and handed down to her children, both in natural endowments and in careful Christian training, those noble traits which have distinguished both the family

and the race to which they belonged.

Already, in 1834, they had become connected with Methodism, which, in those early days, gathered to itself through its devoted pioneers all the earnest religious spirits of the land, except those attached to the two established Churches in the centres of population. The Flints, father and son, were both prominent and active Methodists, and it is not yet a year since the son, the Hon. Senator Flint, passed to his rest, in Belleville, at the ripe age of eighty-nine, after more than fifty years of active toil in Sabbathschool, temperance, and general church work. The Holdens were also a family widely influential and honoured, both in the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches.

Thus from the very beginning this family became linked with the best elements of our young Canadian life in religion, in commerce, and in public affairs; and when, in 1834, Mrs. Clement was left a widow, she was not without attached and influential friends. In the same year she removed to Belleville, where her son-in-law, Mr. Flint, was now established in business; and from this date her descendants were identified with all that is most important in the history of this city. Here she was again called to drink the cup of sorrow in the sudden death of her only son, and of a loved daughter. And here, in after years, she was permitted to see all her remaining children settled about her in beautiful, prosperous and happy homes. And here, in 1851, surrounded by her children, she died in peace in a good old age.

It is out of such a family history as this that we are introduced to Jane Clement Jones, the youngest surviving member of the household. We first meet her as the bright, happy, beautiful child, full of the energy and spirits of youth, enjoying all life to the full. There comes to us,

us

out of the tradition of childhood, a picture of the playhouse of the children in the shadow of the great rocks, under the overhanging vines, close by the gliding stream of the great St. Lawrence. In such a home as this was imagination quickened and the capacity for the purest enjoyments of life called out in full strength. Another picture sits before -the round, merry face of the happy child, with basket in hand, tripping her way to the cabin of some poor or sick neighbour with the good things provided by father's and mother's kindness. Nor must we forget the other picture, which fills with beauty the simple furnishings of every Puritan home, of the old Bible, the family altar, the blazing fireside, the sweet songs of Zion, mother's teaching, and the sunny quiet of the chamber where she prayed for and with the children till their hearts were melted into penitence by her tears.

But there were other tearful pictures as well in this young life. In a few short hours the father so kind and loved was stricken with the plague, died and was hurried away to the grave by the trembling neighbours. With almost equal suddenness, if not with equal terror, sister Sarah was taken by the rupture of a blood-vessel, and finally the only little brother she had ever

known was carried home from the cold, dark waters of the river, drowned.

It is easy to follow the results of all this on the sensitive, emotional spirit of the child. The unseen world came very near. The conviction of sin under the stern old Puritan teaching was deep and lasting. At ten years of age, just after her father's death, the decision of life appears to have been fully made in a revival which at that time touched the Sunday-school and gathered in many of the children; after earnest, prayerful seeking she found the peace of God. With the

example before them of this one of the noblest Christian lives of our time thus laying its deep foundations of repentance and faith in early childhood, let no one presume to question the reality of childhood piety. But let us lay, as here, the old foundations of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, not trusting to some shadowy modern conception of a universal regeneration.

But with this healthful, moral and religious development there was also the furnishing of education such as the facilities of that day afforded. The elementary schools of the thirties did not offer a very extensive curriculum, and all they could give was soon mastered by a bright young mind; and as yet but few higher schools had been planted in our country, and to these the young ladies were not admitted. But Methodism, both in its laity and ministry, had already appreciated the importance of this problem. The resolution had been taken as early as 1830 to found an academy for the liberal education of the youth of both sexes. After some six years of heroic effort the work was accomplished, and for the next six years the young men and the young women of our best Canadian Methodist families were found in Upper Canada Academy, pursuing studies which would fit them for lives of wider usefulness. Here we next find Jane Clement laying the foundations which enabled her to be the leader and teacher of hundreds of men and women in after days. Very speedily, indeed, did she enter on the employment of her talents, for already at sixteen we find her teaching in the Sabbath-school, a place maintained for fifty years until the last long affliction shut her out from work.

But we have been studying these early years of life as the trainingschool for her subsequent eminently useful career. Not least important

among the influences of this period was her close contact with the active business of life. When left alone with her one child her mother found her home with her elder daughter, Mrs. Flint. Mr. Flint was a practical, energetic and eminently successful merchant. Then other sisters, Mrs. Holden, Mrs. Holton, Mrs. Harrison, were all married to young men in Mr. Flint's employ, and who, a little later, founded successful business places of their own. The growing, active young woman was in daily contact with the plans and cares, the difficulties and the success of business, and with the strong, practical genius of her people, drank in its spirit and was familiar with its lessons. In 1847, she linked her life with another of Mr. Flint's assistants, Mr. Nathan Jones, and together they started to push the fortunes of life.

We have often had reason to admire the results of the "business colleges of those olden days." A Flint in Belleville, a Jackson in Hamilton, a Ferrier in Montreal, were typical examples. Their young men were not mere paid underlings or servants. They were rather as younger brothers, or as sons with their father, rendering due reverence and faithful and obedient work, but with nothing of the degradation of servitude, They were members of one household, they worshipped around one family altar. They had common thoughts and ambitions. The younger was impressed by the character of the elder and learned all his methods of business. It was both the ambition and the advantage of the senior to set his boys up for themselves as soon as they had proved their capacity, in branches and extensions of his business.

So was it here, and Belleville has on its roll of successful citizens, who through a long life built up the commercial strength of the Bay City and its back country, no more honoured and successful names than

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