Agnes C. Laut

“ So of the United States with the Civil War blending into a union the diversities of a continent. When you come to consider the birth of national consciousness in Canada, you do not find the germ of an ambition to dominate, as in Japan and Germany. Nor do you find a fight for freedom. Canada has always been free—free as the birds of passage that winged above the canoe of the first voyageur who pointed his craft up the St. Lawrence for the Pacific; but what you do find from the very first is a fight for national existence ”

“ But it is like Canada's climate. Perhaps the climate has a good deal to do with it. Hard it may be; but the issue is clean-cut and crystal clear—work, or starve; be fit, or die; make good, or drop out; here is a fair field and no favors! Gird yourself as a man to it, and no puling puny whining for pity!
Can Canada keep a fair field and no favors? Her destiny as a power depends on the answer to that question. In every city in Canada to-day are growing up crowded foreign quarters peopled by men and women who have never had a fair field—with class hate in their hearts for inherited social wrongs ”

“ Sport in Canada, as in the United States, is the most absolute democracy. I can think of no man in Canada who has attained a permanently good place in social life through catering to women's favor with dandified mannerisms, though not a few have got a leg up to come most terrible croppers; but I do think of many men to whom all doors are permanently open because they are such clean first-rate sportsmen. Until the last ten years of opulent fevered prosperity came to the Dominion, Canada might have been described as a nation of athletes. ”

“ That is why at a colossal cost in land and subsidies and loans and guarantees of almost two billions, she has built up a transportation system east and west, instead of north and south. That is why for a century she has hewn her way through mountains of difficulty to a destiny of her own, when it would have been easier and more profitable to have cast in her lot with the United States.
What is the tie that binds? Is it the hope of an Imperial Federation, which shall bind the whole British Empire into such a world federation as now holds the provinces of the Dominion? ”

“ Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds, brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains—such a tangle as I have never seen in any swamp of the South—the skeleton of a moose, come to its death by a jump among the windfall, marked the eastern limit of big game; and presently the river was lost—not in a lake—but in a swamp. A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile, evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." ”

“ If you told Canada that within the life of men and women now living her Pacific Coast may bristle with as many forts and ports as the North Sea—you would be greeted with an amused smile. Yet all this may be part of the destiny of a Greater Britain Overseas.
With men such as Sir John Macdonald and Laurier and Borden on the roster roll of Canada's great, one dislikes to charge that Canadian statesmen have not grown big enough for their job. The Aztec Indians used to cement their tribal houses with human blood. ”

“ Where international boundaries in Europe bristle with forts and cannon, international boundaries in America are a shuttle of traffic back and forth of great migrations of population, of great waves of friendship and good feeling which all the trade rivalries and hostile tariffs of a half century have failed to stem. The pot shot of some fishery patrol across the nets of a poacher on the wrong side of the international line fails to excite anybody. Even if some flag lunatic full of whisky climbs a flagstaff and tears down the other country's national emblem—the boundary does not go on fire. ”

“ Her domain of the North rears more than fur-bearing animals. It rears a race with hardihood, with dauntlessness, with quiet dogged unspeaking courage; and that is something to go into the blood of a nation. A man who will run on snowshoes eighteen hundred miles behind a dog-train as a Senator I know did in his youth, and a woman of middle life, who will "come out"—as they say in the North—and study medicine at her own expense that she may minister to the Indians where she lives—are not types of a race to lie down whipped under Fate. Canada will do things in the world of nations shortly. ”

“ Conditioning these movements of population have been Canada's climate, her backwoods and prairie and frontier hardship—challenging the weakling, strengthening the strong. No country affords more opportunity to the fit man and none is crueler to the unfit than Canada. I like this fact that Canada is hard at first. It is the flaming sword guarding the Paradise of effort from the vices of inert softened races. Diamonds are hard. ”

“ He has been so busy handling the rush of prosperity that has come in on him like a tidal wave that he has not had time to pause over the problems of this new destiny—the fact, for instance, that in two more decades the newcomers will outnumber the native born.
II Unless the edifice be top heavy, beneath it all must be the rock bottom of fact. Beneath the tide is the pull of some eternal law. What facts is Canada building her future on? What pull is beneath the tide of four hundred thousand homeseekers a year? What has doubled population and almost doubled foreign trade? ”

“ Nature never was more lavish to any people in beautiful landscape from the quiet rural scenery of the maritime provinces, Quebec and Ontario, to the far-flung epic of the fenceless prairies and the Homeric grandeur of the mountains. Why are quiet rural beauty and illimitable freedom and lofty splendor not reflected in poem and novel and ballad and picture? The Canadian may answer—We go in more for athletics than aesthetics: we are living literature, not writing it. ”

“ Canadians are a vigorously virile people in their church-going. They do it with all their might. I sometimes think that the church does for Canada what music does for continental nations, what dollar-chasing and amusement do for the American nation—opens that great emotional outlet for the play of spiritual powers and idealization, which we must all have if we would rise above the gin-horse haltered to the wheel of toil. ”

“ Ten years have witnessed a complete change in the class of Englishmen coming to Canada. The drifter, the floater, the make-shift, rarely comes. The men now coming are the land-seekers—of the blood and type that settled England and New England and Virginia—of the blood and type, in a word, that make nations. Hard on the heels of the land-seekers have come yet another type—the type that binds country to country in bonds tighter than any international treaty—the investors of surplus capital. ”

“ Why posturize and theorize about platitudes? Canadians are not interested in the Lloyd George theory of the poor plundering the prosperous, because every man or woman who tries in Canada can succeed. He may hoe some long hard rows. Let him hoe! It will harden flabby muscle and give backbone in place of jawbone! Help the innocent children—yes! There is a child saving organization in every province. But if the adult will not try, let him die! If he will not struggle to survive, let him die! The sooner the better! No theoretical parasites for Canada, nor parlor socialism! ”

“ For years they stuck so closely to their nation-building that they had no time to stand back and view the size of the edifice of their own structure, but all that is different to-day. When four hundred thousand people a year flock to the Dominion to cast in their lot with Canadians, there is testimony of worth. Canadians know their destiny is upon them, whatever it may be; and they are meeting the challenge half-way with faces to the front. In the words of Sir Wilfred Laurier, they know that "the Twentieth Century is Canada's." ”

“ This was the real reason for the building of the Panama Canal—to give the American navy command of her own shores on the Pacific. Now that Panama is built it means the war fleets of the whole world on the Pacific. Canada can no more grow into a strong nation and keep out of the world conclave assembling on the Pacific than a boy can grow into strong manhood and keep out of the rough and tumble of life, or a girl grow to efficient womanhood and play the hothouse parasite all her life. ”

“ Freehold of land! For what else have a million and a half British born come to the free homesteads of Canada? For freehold of land—land unoppressed by taxes for war lords; land unoppressed by tithes for landlord; land absolutely free to the worker. That such a migration should break in waves over Canadian life and leave it untouched, uninfluenced, unswerved, is as inconceivable as that the Jutes and Angles and Saxons could have settled in ancient Albion and not made it their own.
II For years Canada was regarded chiefly in England as a dumping ground for slums. ”

“ Yet, though only two thousand whites are fur-trading in Canada, no interpretation of Canadian life is complete without reference to that far domain of the North, where the hunter roams in loneliness, and the night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the call of the wolf pack. It will be recalled that Canada's first settlers came in two main currents from two idealistic motives. ”

“ Has the Dominion any material justification for her high hopes of a world destiny? Switzerland possesses national consciousness to an acute degree. Yet Switzerland remains a little people. What ground has Canada for measuring her strength with the nations of the world? Having remained almost stationary in her national progress from 1759 to 1859, what reason has she to anticipate a progress as swift and world-embracing as that which forced the United States to the very forefront of world powers? It takes something more than high hopes to build empire. ”

“ Because its foundations were laid in some financial mud, which Canada never forgets and never forgives. Instances could be multiplied of brilliant politicians retired to private life, of moneyed men who spent fortunes to buy a knighthood, a baronetcy, an earldom—and died disappointed because in early life they had used fiduciary funds or trafficked in politics. It may impart a seeming snobbery to Canadian life, an almost crude insolence; but it keeps a title from becoming the insignia of an envied dollar bill. It keeps men from buying what their conduct failed to win. ”

“ It doesn't mean much to say that Canada equals Europe in area and that you could spread Germany and France and Austria and Great Britain over the Dominion's map and still have an area uncovered equal to European Russia. Nor does it mean much more to say that in Canada you can find the climate of a Switzerland in the Canadian Rockies, of Italy in British Columbia, of England in the maritime provinces and of Russia in the Northwest. Areas are so great and diverse that you have to examine them in groups to realize what basis of fact Canada builds from. ”

“ There is no man with an open free mind can ponder these facts and not answer forthwith and without faltering—to a democratised edition of a Greater Britain Overseas. Only a world cataclysm or national upheaval displacing every nation from its foundations can shake Canada from that destiny.
Will she grow closer to Britain or farther off? Will she grow closer to the United States or farther off? Will she fight Japan or league with her? Will she rig up a working arrangement with the Hindu? ”

“ That our mountains are dumb and inarticulate, that our forests chant the litany of the pines untranslated to the winds of heaven, and that our cataracts thunder their diapasons inimitable to art—is no proof that though we are dumb and inarticulate, we are not lifted and transported and inspired by the wondrous beauties of the heritage God has given us. The Canadian may say this theoretically, but is he strengthened in body and made greater in soul by the mystic splendors of his country? In a word, has the Canadian found himself? ”

“ Ask the average Canadian why the development of Canada has been slow; and he denies that it has been slow; or he proves that it is a good thing it has been slow; or he compares Canada's progress with that of some other country which has gone too fast, or too slow. All this is a mere clever dodging of fact. Blinking one's eyes to a fact doesn't eliminate the fact. ”

“ They can stand up neither to her climate nor to her measure of a man, but far from cause of regret, this is a thing for gratulation. Canada can never be an overcrowded land, where soft races crowd for room, like slugs under a board. She will always have her spacious domain of the North—a perpetual fur preserve, a perpetual hunting ground, where dauntless spirits will venture to match themselves against the powers of death; and from that North will ever emerge the type of man who masters life. ”