"Is Canada loyal to England?" is a question that sometimes meets us. 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. Most of these people in time will intermarry,—Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations. Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who will step out?
In the point of population, Canada begins the twentieth century where the United States began the nineteenth. The race is ours to run. Wise the nation, as is the individual, who can learn his lesson from a page torn out of his neighbour's book, learn what to follow and what to avoid. Our fore-elders who laid the foundations for us laid them four-square. As Canadians, we owe a debt to the Fathers of Confederation and their successors. In the West, our particular thanks are due to the Hudson's Bay Company, the R.N.W.M.P., and all those factors which established British law "in the beginning." Canada has never seen a lynching; we have had no Indian war; with but one weak-kneed exception there has been no attempt to hold up a train within our Western borders. This is the inheritance of the people of this generation, and on this foundation we must build. Our hope is in the children.
On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary. They were all singing "The Maple Leaf Forever." It is the lessons these children are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel wheat. In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed. Many signs are full of hope. Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children in school. Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post. At all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed out with them!
May I close with a purely personal note? At the end of a summer which had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my life. We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls, the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the Lake of the Woods country. I was anxious to get the story of the recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs. But the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve. We turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary. Looking in at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a blackboard problem. "If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a trench 82 yards long——." And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.
"You are interested?" queried the Father.
"Yes," I acknowledged, "I once taught school."
He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.
"I taught school for twenty-five years," I admitted.
We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he turned to me with, "And you taught school—for twen-ty five years?"