[148] An ancestor of Lord Roberts of Kandahar and Pretoria.
Thus all along their frontier shores, from Mackinac to far St. John, the Canadians stood shoulder to shoulder in one bold, united line, and held the larger half of North America for the British crown.
Again, when Fenian hordes and restless soldiers, who had been disbanded from the armies of the American Civil War, were assembled and drilled under the protection of the United States, and launched in raids against Canadian homes, the Canadian volunteers mustered around their Union Jack, and along the Niagara frontier, in 1866, and at Eccles Hill, in the Province of Quebec, in 1870, again drove the southern invader back, and held their native soil inviolate beneath its three-crossed folds.
"Since when has a Southerner placed his heel On the men of the northern zone?
"Shall the mothers that bore us bow the head And blush for degenerate sons? Are the patriot fires gone out and dead? Ho! brothers, stand to the guns! Let the flag be nailed to the mast, Defying the coming blast! For Canada's sons are true as steel, Their metal is muscle and bone, The Southerner never shall place his heel On the men of the northern zone.
"Oh, we are the men of the northern zone, Where the maples their branches toss; And the Great Bear rides in his state alone, Afar from the Southern Cross. Our people shall aye be free, They never shall bend the knee, For this is the land of the true and leal, Where freedom is bred in the bone-- The Southerner never shall place his heel On the men of the northern zone."[149]
[149] Kernighan ("The Khan"): "The Men of the Northern Zone."
Such was the British patriotism of which the flag was the Union signal, and now another parliamentary union is to be included in the career of the Union Jack in Canada.
Up to 1867 the Eastern British Provinces in North America had remained under separate local governments, such as had been established in the previous century; but in this year Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Upper and Lower Canada were all united in the one "Dominion" of Canada, then extending only as far as Lake Superior. This "Act of Confederation" was passed in London, at Westminster, by the Parliament of Great Britain, and thus again the Union Parliament of the Union Jack was parent to a new Union Parliament established in united Canada. Each Province continues to have its own "Provincial Assembly," in which legislation is conducted on matters pertaining to its own local or home rule, but all general powers are centred in the Dominion Parliament of Canada. Hitherto the spirit of the flag had been solely that of union with the Motherland; thereafter it had an added and local meaning, for it became also the symbol of Canadian union, the patriot flag of the new daughter nation which had thus been brought into existence in the outer British American realm. Inspired by this union, the older Provinces thus combined began to extend their borders, and soon Manitoba and the Hudson Bay Territories of the central prairies[150] were added, in 1869, and British Columbia joined in 1871, followed by Prince Edward Island in 1873, to make the enlarged Dominion of Canada, now stretching across the continent of America from sea to sea.