Canada

“ ERIN, MAVOURNEEN. A Prize Poem.
I know Canada is fair to see, and pleasant; it is well
On the banks of its broad river 'neath the maple trees to dwell;
But the heart is very wilful, and in sorrow or in mirth,
Mine will turn with sore love-longing to the land that gave me birth;
And I wish that, oh but once again! my longing eyes might see
The green island that lies smiling on the bosom of the sea;
That is fed with heaven's dew and the fatness of the earth,
Fanned by wild Atlantic breezes that sweep over it in mirth. ”

“ CANADA, Canada, land of the maple,
Queen of the forest and river and lake,
Open thy soul to the voice of thy people,
Close not thy heart to the music they make.
Bells, chime out merrily,
Trumpets, call cheerily,
Silence is vocal, and sleep is awake!
Canada, Canada, land of the beaver,
Labor and skill have their triumph to-day;
Oh! may the joy of it flow like a river,
Wider and deeper as time flies away. ”

“ Canada to-day is a young sleeping giant which has not yet felt its power, nor yet risen to consciousness of its own importance, wealth, power and grandeur. Our future no one can read. While we are proud to be a part of the great British Empire, and glory in it, we are none the less Canadians first, and we must never forget it. Some deep political thinkers and far-seeing statesmen have said that the white man’s governments and the flags of Anglo-Saxondom will some day be unified and made to wave over all the continent of North America north of the Rio Grande. ”

“ In thinking of Canada the earnest and logical man in the street has been led inevitably into a gigantic misconception. As a matter of fact, without a sense of humour it is difficult to make head or tail of the history of North America. Every schoolboy has been taught that Canada existed before the United States were created. Yet the United States have grown to be a mighty and wealthy nation of 92,000,000 people; while Canada, with a slightly larger area, still has a population of only 8,000,000. ”

“ At that supreme moment in our country's history, when Canada was at the cross roads of her destiny, she was indeed happy in the possession of the man who gathered in and marshalled, with a speed and noble energy seldom, if ever, equalled, the hosts of willing but untrained civilians who came rushing from the Pacific Coast, the Rockies, the grain-belt, the Western Prairie, and the fields and forests and cities of the East, to offer themselves to the Empire in her hour of need. ”

“ No, Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let England see to it that she, too, is loyal.
Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace, are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land. God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. ”

“ Well, indeed, has Canada been called the country of the Twentieth Century. To no inconsiderable extent the appliances that introduce a new order of life have been either invented or first experimentally considered in the Dominion. Indeed, as if already under the spell of Destiny, these great modern miracles of communication—the railways, telegraphs, and telephones will be forever associated with the name of Canada ”

“ And do their exiled hearts beat faster
Roaming in thought their native sod?
Dream they of Canada crowned and golden,
Flushed with her Autumn diadem?
In years to come when time is olden,
Canada's dream shall be of them ”

“ 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. ”

“ A plan by which it is proposed to ensure the tranquil government of Lower Canada, must include in itself the means of putting an end to the agitation of national disputes in the legislature, by settling, at once and for ever, the national character of the Province. I entertain no doubts as to the national character which must be given to Lower Canada; it must be that of the British Empire; that of the majority of the population of British America; that of the great race which must, in the lapse of no long period of time, be predominant over the whole North American Continent. ”

“ In conclusion, I will only say that nothing has struck me more than the enthusiasm manifested towards Canada among all classes of the community in England and Scotland wherever I have of late had an opportunity of hearing any expression of the public mind. Crowds at any public gathering have always given cheers for Canada. The great gathering of to-day is a renewed symptom of the same favourable augury, for a good augury I hold it to be, that men in the old country are ready to call "Hurrah for Canada!" On the other side of the ocean they are as ready to call "Hurrah for the old country!" ”

“ What else is Canada for, one may well ask, but to provide adventurous souls with the opportunity of landing penniless on her shores and ultimately becoming wheat, cattle or lumber kings, of taming wild horses on her illimitable plains, fighting and laying low camp bullies, or tracking evil-doers to the edge of beyond in the ranks of the North-West Mounted Police? ”

“ From Pole to borderland,
At Britain's side, whate'er betide
Unflinchingly we'll stand
With hearts we sing, "God save the King",
Guide then one Empire wide, do we implore,
And prosper Canada from shore to shore. ”

“ Oh Canada! thy gloomy woods Will never cheer the heart; The murmur of thy mighty floods But cause fresh tears to start From those whose fondest wishes rest Beyond the distant main; Who, 'mid the forests of the West, Sigh for their homes again. I, too, have felt the chilling blight Their shadows cast on me, My thought by day—my dream by night— Was of my own country. But independent souls will brave All hardships to be free; No more I weep to cross the wave, My native land to see. But ever as a thought most bless'd, Her distant shores will rise, In all their spring-tide beauty dress'd. ”

“ Service has inevitably been much quoted in these pages; no one can travel in Canada, no one can write of Canada, without this perpetual consciousness of the vivid way in which he has translated her landscapes and her life. What a ring of the vitality that conquers the wilderness is in his Call of the Wild! ”

“ If Canada had not been a French colony, and had been inhabited by coloured men alone, or if Canada, as a French colony, had been in a different continent from the British North American colonies, the task of construction or re-construction would have been infinitely easier. It would have been easier, too, if the French Canadians had been the only inhabitants of Canada. But, as it was, one white race conquered another white race, which in its turn had secured mastery over a coloured race, and in the land of that coloured race had not merely conquered or traded, but settled and colonized ”

“ Canada is no longer a child, sleeping in the arms of nature, dependant for her very existence on the fostering care of her illustrious mother. She has outstepped infancy, and is in the full enjoyment of a strong and vigorous youth. ”

“ You cannot offend the modern Canadian more than by describing him as a “Colonial.” He is a Canadian—an Imperialist, a man who claims his full share in the concerns of the British Empire—a man who has firmly convinced himself that within a hundred years Canada, so far from being a British Dependency, will be the most stalwart protector of the Mother Country. The epoch-making offer of a gift of seven millions for the addition of three super-Dreadnoughts to the British Navy is the first expression of the Canadian sense of Imperial destiny. ”

“ I had seen enough of Canada to inspire me with a real regard for the people, and a sincere interest in the fortunes of such a magnificent dependency of the Crown, and I resolved, as far as in me lay, to attract the attention of the home country to a region which offers so many advantages to her children, and promises one day to be the seat of flourishing communities, if not of a vast and independent empire. ”

“ So while Canada resents being regarded as a fur land, her domain of the North sends down something more than roaring winds—though winds are good things to shake dead leaves off the soul as well as off trees. ”

“ O call sounded by the pipes of this New Era is more insistent than that of the Canadian Sea-coast. One sometimes wonders if Canadians as a whole even yet realize the important gift bestowed, when Heaven gave to Canada so magnificent a coastline as that which the constant sword-play of land and sea traces from Saint John, New Brunswick, to the Newfoundland-Labrador Boundary? ”

“ Cross the straits of the mainland, and you touch the hospitable shores of Nova Scotia, a country as large as the kingdom of Greece. Then mark the sister province of New Brunswick—equal in extent to Denmark and Switzerland combined. Pass up the river St. Lawrence to Lower Canada—a country as large as France. Pass on to Upper Canada—twenty thousand square miles larger than Great Britain and Ireland put together. Cross over the Continent to the shores of the Pacific, and you are in British Columbia, the land of golden promise,—equal in extent to the Austrian Empire. ”

“ They ever did before.
But there are eyes in Canada
That cannot see for tears,
And there are hearts in Canada
Grown weary with their fears,
The nesting-birds of Canada,
They pipe to deafened ears. ”

“ Canada was laying her foundations of yesterday for the superstructure of prosperity to-day and to-morrow—the New Empire.
When one surveys the country as a whole, the facts are so big they are bewildering. ”

“ Canada is the splendid and spacious home of a great nation now in the making. It is not so much a country as half a continent. It marches conterminously with the United States for 4,000 miles at a latitude corresponding to that of the south of Europe. Its Eastern Provinces are washed by the Atlantic waves and blown on by the Atlantic breezes: 3,000 miles westward British Columbia and the Yukon territory face the Pacific: northward from the United States Canada stretches into the Arctic Ocean. ”

“ Do you know that during the last twenty years the rate of Canada's growth was three times greater than ever in the history of the United States? You are a great commercial nation, but do you know that the per capita rate of Canada's trade to-day is many times that of the United States? You are a great agricultural people, but do you know that three-quarters of the wheat land on this continent is Canadian, and that before many years you will be coming to Canada for your wheat, yes, and for your flour? ”

“ Not only is the outside world largely ignorant of the importance of Canada, but few of her own people realize the greatness of the country they possess. Its area of more than three and one-half millions of square miles—one-sixteenth of the entire land surface of the earth—is great enough to include an immense variety of natural conditions and products. This area constitutes forty per cent. of the far extended British empire, while its richness of soil and resources in forest and mineral wealth are as yet almost untouched, and its promise of future yield is immense. ”

“ Where Pines and Maples grow,
Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow.
Thou art the land, O Canada,
From East to Western sea,
The land of hope for all who toil,
The land of liberty. ”

“ Assuming that the population of Canada had been homogeneous and of British descent, and assuming that Canada had been a single, well-defined colony, so that no question of subdivision could arise, it would still have remained a most difficult problem to decide within what limits political representation should be given and how far it should involve responsibility and real self-government. The British demand in Canada was for institutions to which Englishmen had always been accustomed, and which the old North American colonies of Great Britain had enjoyed. ”

“ The record of Canada, as compared with that of the English colonies in America, is much more a series of biographies, much less a chronicle of a community. Of the great men, whose lives and doings make up Canadian history in French times, it may be said that some created Canada, while others were Canada's own creations. In other words, some were in but not of Canada; they came out from France to make, to rule, to save, or to try to save, the French colony on the St. Lawrence ”

“ Canada's prosperity is literally overflowing from a cornucopia of super-abundant plenty. Will her constitution, wrested from political and civil strife; will her moral stamina, bred from the heroism of an heroic past, stand the strain, the tremendous strain of the {437} new conditions? Will she assimilate the strange new peoples—strange in thought and life and morals—coming to her borders? ”

“ Mistress of a zone of territory favourable for the maintenance of a numerous and homogeneous white population, Canada must, to judge from the increase in her strength during the past, and from the many and vast opportunities for the growth of that strength on her new Provinces in the future, be great and worthy her position on the earth. Affording the best and safest highway between Asia and Europe, she will see traffic from both directed to her coasts. With a hand upon either ocean she will gather from each for the benefit of her hardy millions a large share of the commerce of the world. ”