Smith's Canadian Gazetteer

William H. Smith's excerpt reads something like if the Victorians had infomercials. He summarizes his tour of Canada's "great natural advantages" in what seems like an attempt to draw more emigrants from Britain, and in doing so casually reveals some prejudiced attitudes that might in truth be as antiquated as we'd want to believe.

After illustrating that the American economy is not as favorable as his Victorian reader might think, he goes on to explain why the way of life in both the U.S. and New Zealand are not as good as in Canada - in the U.S., he claims, "the only law is mob law, and the bowie knife is the constant companion of the citizens," while in New Zealand, the average settler may be "roasted for the breakfast of some native chief, and his interesting family." In the former claim, Smith spins America as an anarchic hellhole, while in the latter, he suggests that the natives of New Zealand are cannibals. I'd conjecture that part of the motivation of these depictions is an ethnocentric judgment of these two regions as not being quite British enough, in addition to the obvious colonial racism that rears its head in the latter statement.

Furthering the casual racism against indigenous people is the note Smith makes about native Canadians, saying that they are "tolerably civilized, none of them at any rate are cannibals, and few of them are even thieves." The use of 'even' suggests that Smith regards cannibalism and thievery as the natural state of the 'savages.'

Finally, a somewhat surprising element that appears near the end is Smith's claim that "Retired military men do not generally make good settlers," preceding his depiction of how veterans would squander their retirement pay and that their children would end up in "idle and dissipated habits."

As we brought up in class, modern prejudice is rarely spelled out as plainly as in these Victorian texts, but the fact is that racism, ethnocentrism/xenophobia, and prejudice against military veterans are attitudes held by fairly significant populations in the Western world.