“All this wretched small-talk about the failure of the republican experiment in the United States ought to be frowned down, wherever it appears, by the Canadian public,” he said. “I have no hesitation in declaring my own hope and belief—a belief founded on evidence accumulated through several years of observation—that the American system, so far from having proved a failure—that that system may emerge from this, its first great domestic trial, purified, consolidated, disciplined, for greater usefulness and greater achievements than before.”

“It is then, it seems to me, the duty of Canadian statesmen to look through the temporary to the lasting relations we are to sustain to our next neighbours,” he continued, “to suppress and discountenance all ungenerous exultation at the trials and tribulations which they are now undergoing; to show them, on the contrary, in this the day of their adversity, that while preferring on rational grounds the system of constitutional monarchy for ourselves and our children—while preferring to lodge within the precincts of the Constitution elaborated through ages by the highest wisdom of the British Islands, we can at the same time be just, nay, generous, to the merits of the kindred system, founded by their fathers, in the defensive and justifiable war of their Revolution. If we are freemen so are they, and the public calamities which befall one free people can never be matter of exultation to another, so long as the world is half darkened by despotism, as it is.”

These were wise words indeed from this future Father of Confederation.