Canadian people

“ 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. ”

“ This glimpse of the extent and grandeur of the national heritage of Canadians—the fit home of a great people—made him still more emphatically a Canadian, and gave him a still stronger impulse and more earnest aim to use all the powers he possessed to aid in moulding the still plastic life of a young nation born to such privileges and responsibilities. ”

“ The Canadian, like the native of old France, is a thinking animal. He is ever doubting, ever mistrustful. In spiritual matters, he is guided by his curate, who, if he wishes to stand well with him, must meddle with nothing else. And who will say that such a people are incapable of improvement? Railroads, intercourse with others, and time, will yet make the Canadian think for himself much sooner than they will influence others, more naturally confiding, generous, and credulous than he is, but whose very energy and bravery only cover a multitude of sins. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Banish distrust and suspicion, and the way is open to a realization of our not unreasonable hope that Canada may shortly attain to that position among the nations of the earth for which her infinite resources, and the thrift and enterprise of her people amply qualify her, and continue to be the bright particular star of that mighty Empire, upon whose dominions the sun never sets. ”

“ Forty years has accomplished as great a change in the habits and tastes of the Canadian people as it has in the architecture of their fine cities and the appearance of the country. A young Canadian gentleman is as well educated as any of his compeers across the big water, and contrasts very favourably with them. ”

“ With the ever-increasing political and social unification of the people and the intellectual and commercial expansion of the country, a genuine sentiment of Canadian nationality gradually developed, until by the time of the Great World War, 1914-1918, and largely in consequence of Canada’s part in that war, the sentiment of Canadian nationality suddenly acquired a pervasive intensity and evolved into a definite and profound sense of distinct nationhood. ”

“ 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? ”

“ There is more human nature in the revival of Canadian loyalty to England, England’s greater appreciation of Canada, and a joint cold shoulder to the United States, than there is statesmanship or economic wisdom. The natural routes of trade and commerce in Canada lead to the south; the character and social conditions of the people are North American, not English. The temperate zone of the North American continent, along the northern fringe of which lies Canada, is all one country in its aspirations and material progress. ”

“ Yet, if a Canadian imbued with true patriotism, content with the applause of his own countrymen, should devote to the task much patient research, and a graceful style, and while leaving out all petty and unimportant details, should bring into bold relief the salient and noteworthy features of the social and political development of Canada, such a writer would lift Canadian history out of that slough of dullness into which so many have succeeded in throwing it in their efforts to immortalise themselves rather than their country. ”

“ Against it we have to place the tendency of so many of our young men to leave Canada for a home in the United States; the increasing difficulty our farmers experience to make farming pay; and the want of a large foreign market for our manufactures.
8. Literary and Social Progress.—Perhaps it is because the energies of the Canadian people have been directed so largely towards overcoming the difficulties met with in settling a new country, that we have so few great writers of prose or verse. ”

“ In short, the country is a good country for those to whom it is adapted; but if people will not conform to the doctrine of necessity and expediency, they have no business in it. It is plain Canada is not adapted to every class of people. ”

“ The Americans in three or four years are blended with the native-born population, and the blend is considered the finest possible from the point of view of the development of the Dominion along Anglo-Saxon lines. As a matter of fact, the Americans a few years after arrival are almost more Canadian than the Canadians themselves—it is the Americans rather than the Canadians who show jealousy at the flocking in of people of other nationalities and raise the cry of “Canada for the Canadians.” ”

“ In the United States a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of the people have until recently considered that the absorption of Canada into the Republic was its manifest destiny, though there has been little concerted effort to hasten fate. In Canada such course of action has found much less backing. United Empire Loyalist traditions, the ties with Britain constantly renewed by immigration, the dim stirrings of national sentiment, resentment against the trade policy of the United States, have all helped to turn popular sentiment into other channels. ”

“ Canada does not begrudge the down-and-outs, the failures, the disinherited, the dispossessed, a chance to begin over again. She realizes that she has room, boundless room, for such as they are to succeed—and many more; but what she can not and will not do is assume the burden of these people when they come to Canada and will not try and fail. What she can not and will not do is permit Europe to clean her pig-sties of vice and send the human offal to Canadian shores. ”

“ Like our American neighbours, the mass of Canadians is able to think intelligently, and come generally to a right conclusion, on all matters of local concern; in this respect, no comparison need be made with the mass of Englishmen or Frenchmen in the Old World, for the social and educational facilities within the reach of the people of this country, give them undoubted advantages over others. ”

“ Canada has a vast, an illimitable back country—the area of all Russia; and to the lakes and wild rivers and mountain passes of that country her people are born and bred. To her climate her people are born and bred. The climate would take care of the rest. You can't exactly despatch motors and motor guns down swamps for a hundred miles and over cataracts and through mountain passes on the perpendicular. Canada's back country is her perpetual city of refuge. ”

“ Many persons lose sight of the fact that Canada, young though she is compared with the countries of the Old World, has passed beyond the state of mere colonial pupilage. One very important section of her population has a history contemporaneous with the history of the New England States, whose literature is read wherever the English tongue is spoken. The British population have a history which goes back over a century, and it is the record of an industrious, enterprising people who have made great political and social progress. ”

“ Canada has been greatly retarded in its progress by such causes, and this will in a great measure account for its backwardness when compared with the United States, without attributing the difference to the different forms of government. It was manifestly the intention of the British government, in conferring representative institutions on Canada, that the people should enjoy all the privileges of their fellow-subjects in the mother-country. ”

“ Thus in the fullness of time, like Acadia, but without any Evangelise of Grand Pre, without any drastic policy of expulsion, impossible with seventy thousand people scattered over a wide area, even Canada would become a good English land, a newer New England. ”

“ I have heard immigration officials figure how each colonist was worth to the country as a producer fifteen hundred dollars a year. This is an excessive estimate, but the bargain was a good one for Canada. In 1901, when Canada's population was five millions, there were seven hundred thousand people of British birth in the Dominion; so that of Canada's present population of 7,800,000, there are in the Dominion a million and a half people of British birth. ”

“ What was it that, on the psychological or spiritual side, brought about Responsible Government in the various Provinces that came to form the original Dominion of Canada, and What was it that brought about Confederation? we must answer that the people in the British North American Provinces were gradually coming to see themselves, their country, civilization, and institutions from the Canadian point of view, and were gradually expressing, with more and more of conscious fervor and power, in prose and poetry, their growing interest in and love of Canada and the Canadian point of view. ”

“ When France no longer owned a foot of land in British North America, except two or three barren islets on the coast of Newfoundland, the total population of the provinces known now as Canada was not above seventy thousand souls, nearly all French. From that time to 1840, the population of the different provinces made but a slow increase, owing to the ignorance that prevailed as to Canada, the indifference of English statesmen in respect to colonization, internal dissensions in the country itself, and its slow progress, as compared with the great republic on its borders. ”

“ Hence is it that a Canadian, residing, as it were, on the Neutral Ground, can so much better appreciate the tone of feeling in America, as the United States' people love to call their country, than an Englishman, Scotchman, or Irishman can; for here are visible the very springs that regulate the machinery, which are covered and hidden by the vast space of the Atlantic. You can form no idea of the American character by the merchants, travelling gentry, or diplomatists, who visit London and the sea-ports. ”

“ If our natural conditions are favourable to our mental growth, so, too, it may be urged that the difference of races which exists in Canada may have a useful influence upon the moral as well as the intellectual nature of the people as a whole. In all the measures calculated to develop the industrial resources and stimulate the intellectual life of the Dominion, the names of French Canadians appear along with those of British origin. ”

“ It is now the purpose of the present writer to show that, in the essential elements of intellectual development, Canada is making not a rapid but certainly at least a steady and encouraging progress, which proves that her people have not lost, in consequence of the decided disadvantages of their colonial situation, any of the characteristics of the races to whom they owe their origin. ”

“ Give the people back their old laws and customs in civil matters, let them feel thereby secure in their property, take a few Canadians into the service of the Crown, enlist in the King’s forces ‘a few companies of Canadian foot, judiciously officered’, ‘hold up hopes to the gentlemen, that their children, without being bred up in France, or in the French service, might support their families in the service of the King their master,’ and, at any rate, some proportion of the French Canadians would be found loyally attached to the British Government. ”

“ Since 1867, Canada has commenced a new period in her political development, the full results of which are yet a problem, but which the writer believes, in common with all hopeful Canadians, will tend eventually to enlarge her political condition, and place her in a higher position among communities. ”

“ They helped to make the country what it is, and to prepare the way for the larger population which came into it under more favourable auspices after the Union of 1840. From that time Canada received a decided impulse in everything that tends to make a country happy and prosperous. ”

“ England had only Canada's population when a Shakespeare and a Milton rose like stars above the world. Scotland and Ireland both have a smaller population than Canada, and their ballads are sung all over the world. Canada has had a multitude of sweet singers pipe the joys of youth, but as life broadened and deepened their songs did not reach to the deeps and the heights. Something arrested development. They did not go on. Why? It may be that literature rises only as high as its fountain springs—the people ”

“ In Eastern Canada, or, as it is better known, Lower Canada, the contrary is the case. The Canadian French, as a people, are temperate, although the canoe and batteaux men, lumberers and voyageurs, from the lonely and hard lives they lead, drink to excess; yet the Canadian is a sober character. ”