In this and other works, Lower influenced many English Canadians with his view of Canada's two nations - notably novelist Hugh MacLennan, the author of Two Solitudes.
although he admired the quality Arianism generated by the frontier, he admitted it encouraged a careless and exploitative attitude toward natural resources, which angered him.
The very title of his book on the lumber trade, North American Assault on the Canadian Forest, suggested, a friend told him, an exposé of "conquest, demolition, ravage, plunder, and exploitation.
From one point of view this is the most significant thing about the Loyalist movement; it withdrew a class concept of life from the south, moved it up north, and gave it a second chance.
It had been a calamity, pure and simple.... To take the place of the internal fire that was urging Americans westward across the continent, there was only melancholy contemplation of things as they might have been and dingy reflection of that ineffably glorious world across the stormy Atlantic.
[6]Governor General Adrienne Clarkson quoted Lower at Rideau Hall in an October 2002 speech on the occasion of the presentation of the Public Service Outstanding Achievement Awards: "In every generation Canadians have had to rework the miracle of their political existence.