Britain sells out Canada and Americans hate us

Tuesday, 26 January 2010 05:00

Clippings from the newspapers of January 26, 1904.

London (England) Times. Britain handled Canada’s foreign relations until after the First World War. Edward Musgrave, in a Times letter from Victoria, B.C., accuses Britain of sacrificing Canada’s interests in its dealings with the United States, in order to maintain “the ‘friendship” of the American people.

Musgrave accuses Britain of “surrendering” to the Americans the Alaska Panhandle and the San Juan Islands between Vancouver Island and the state of Washington; settlement of the Maine and Oregon boundaries on lines that gave large territory to the United States, and failure to stop American warships illegally seizing Canadian sealing vessels in the Bering sea.

Despite this, Musgrave says, “There is no friendship in the case of the great majority of the Americans towards the English people. They have never forgiven the past, are jealous of the present, and bitterly resent out status and progress on this continent.”

Montreal Star. Three thousand people jammed a Montreal hall to witness their hero, Hector Decarie, defeat “a gentlement named Rousseau, from Quebec,” for the title of the province’s strongest man. In the fifth feat of the evening, Decarie, with one hand, lifted a 149-pound bar bell “straight about his head,” lowered it to the floor, and again lifted it aloft. Rousseau was unable to lift it.

London (England) Times. Because of the looming war between Japan and Russia, “Canadian sealing schooners have abandoned for this season their usual practice of fishing in Japanese waters.”