Canadian

“ 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. ”

“ But in and through and above all, it opened to me the high heart of the Canadian, the undaunted faith in established principles, and the patriotism that is a veritable passion.
"O Canada, my Canada!" an old French Canadian once exclaimed to me as we sat by the box-stove in his little "cabin". "There is no land like it; no land where they live at peace as we do here; no land where they are so content by their own fireside." ”

“ 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. ”

“ I believe that Canada will, in future times, cherish her memory more and more, for of all Canadian poets she was the most distinctly a daughter of the soil, inasmuch as she inherited the blood of the great primeval race now so rapidly vanishing, and of the greater race that has supplanted it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As that which we inherited as men Canadian born.
We count no man so noble as the one who makes the brag
That he was born in Canada beneath the British flag.
The Dutch may have their Holland, the Spaniard have his Spain,
The Yankee to the south of us must south of us remain;
For not a man dare lift a hand against the men who brag
That they were born in Canada beneath the British flag. ”

“ The Canadian differs from the American largely, I think, in the closeness of his forest-and-farm associations. Not that the American hasn’t the farm and the forest, too, but he has moved farther away from them. The mill, the factory, and the office have supplanted them—in imagination when not in fact, and in fact when not in imagination. If the woods call him he has to go to them—for a week, or two, or three at a time; but he comes back inevitably to a life in which the woods play little part. The Canadian never leaves that life. ”

“ Imagine the position of a fretful, frivolous woman, strong neither in mind nor frame, abandoned to her own resources in the wilds of Upper Canada! No—nothing can be imagined so pitiable, so ridiculous, and, to borrow the Canadian word, "so shiftless." ”

“ 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. ”

“ We always speak of Canada as a new country. In one sense, of course, this is true. The settlement of Europeans on Canadian soil dates back only three hundred years. Civilization in Canada is but a thing of yesterday, and its written history, when placed beside the long millenniums of the recorded annals of European and Eastern peoples, seems but a little span.
But there is another sense in which the Dominion of Canada, or at least part of it, is perhaps the oldest country in the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ IV Before digging down to the subterranean springs of Canadian loyalty, we must take emphatic cognizance of several facts. Canada, while not a republic, is one of the most democratic nations in the world. Practically every man of political, financial or industrial prominence in Canada to-day came up by the shirt-sleeve route in one generation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But of Canada I do know much: and this—that both this country and the United States are society mad. If there is any greater snob on earth than the average Canadian, it is the average citizen of that particular Land of the Free. ”

“ Shining mast-high o'er all oceans;
In the name of France the glorious;
In the world-proud name of Europe;
Whence you draw your great traditions;
I adjure you trust your country!
By all noble thoughts of manhood;
By the toil of your forefathers;
By their sacrifices for you;
By the Loyalist tradition;
And your own heart's generous instincts;
I adjure you be Canadian.
II. "Is there a place, a work, a rank
Our Canada is called to fill:—
She has but struggled till she sank
Hers is it but to toil and till:
No seat among the peoples ours."—
So speaks the Tempter in our bowers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The Canadian retort always is—for the same reason that two million Americans have left the United States for Canada—to better their position. But the point is—why was it these million and a half Canadians found better opportunities in the United States than in Canada? Opportunities knock at every man's door if he has ears to hear, but they are usually supposed to knock loudest and oftenest in the new land. It is a truism that there are ten chances on the frontier for a man to rise compared to one in the city. One can understand American settlers thronging to Canada. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Canadian could only reason from his own experience, and that was so exceedingly limited, that his backwardness in enterprise is less to be wondered at than the eagerness with which he copies the enterprise of others. ”

“ Every nation has its characteristic quality of mind; we recognize Scotch thrift, English persistency and Irish quickwittedness wherever we see it; we know something, too, of the emotional, vivacious nature of the French, and the resourcefulness of the American; but what about the Canadian—what will be our distinguishing feature in the years to come? ”

“ THE PROGRESS OF THE CANADIAN NATION.
Canada is, in respect of extent, the noblest colonial possession over which any nation has ever exercised dominion. It covers an area of three million three hundred and thirty thousand square miles. Our great Indian Empire is scarcely larger than one-fourth of its size. Europe is larger by only half a million square miles; the United States is smaller to nearly the same extent. The distances with which men have to deal in Canada are enormous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Descendants of the pioneers of French Canada, English Canadians sprung from the Loyalists of the eighteenth century, eloquent Irishmen and astute Scotchmen, all, thoroughly conversant with Canadian interests, met in a convention summoned to discharge the greatest responsibilities ever entrusted to any body of men in Canada. ”

“ CANADA TO ENGLAND
SANG one of England in his island home:
"Her veins are million, but her heart is one;"
And looked from out his wave-bound homeland isle
To us who dwell beyond its western sun.
And we among the northland plains and lakes,
We youthful dwellers on a younger land,
Turn eastward to the wide Atlantic waste,
And feel the clasp of England's outstretched hand. ”

“ 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 ”

“ When the first Canadian Pacific train crossed the prairies of western Canada, not quite nineteen years ago, that land of promise held only a handful of white settlers. To-day there are six hundred thousand, and new settlers are coming in increasing numbers every year. A few years ago men would have laughed to scorn the idea that western Canada might some day become the granary of the British empire. ”

“ Canada is not the place for members of the British Association who long for the flesh-pots of Egypt or the champagne-cup. In Canada one has to live simply and to work hard. He who does so work, though in England he may die a pauper, there becomes a man. Canada offers to all independence, a fertile soil, a bracing air. ”

“ Doubt not, nor dread the greatness of thy fate.
Tho' faint souls fear the keen confronting sun,
And fain would bid the morn of splendor wait;
Tho' dreamers, rapt in starry visions, cry
"Lo, yon thy future, yon thy faith, thy fame!"
And stretch vain hands to stars, thy fame is nigh,
[297] Here in Canadian hearth, and home, and name;—
This name which yet shall grow
Till all the nations know
Us for a patriot people, heart and hand
Loyal to our native earth, our own Canadian land! ”