Meanwhile until the Government of Great Britain finds some better function for this phenomenon, we recommend that he be made the official economic investigator of the Empire. Up to the present this has been a pastime for leisured travellers like Lord Southesk, Sir Charles Dilke, and Rider Haggard. A man with Beaverbrook's ability to analyze economic conditions and gain the confidence of men in high positions could be of incalculable value in getting a thorough survey of the commercial and political resources of a commonwealth which as yet nobody seems to understand. After that the Government might well make him Viceroy of India, where he might apply his talent for group-coalition to the great problem of constitutional Home Rule.
CONCLUSION
A Canadian newspaperman once flippantly asked the late W. T. Stead:
"What do you think about continentalism in North America?"
The answer came just as flippantly:
"Every nation has a right to go to the devil in its own way. Canada should not be denied the privilege."
There was a blunt candour about the reply that even from an egotist like Stead meant infinitely more than the soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by some of the visiting prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that in establishing independence of the United States, Canada should cut the painter from the Great British Commonwealth. But he was a trifle cynical about the young nation, just as Disraeli was fifty years ago when he said that "these colonies would yet be a millstone about Britain's neck". Neither of them was more cynical about us than we usually are about ourselves, never in theory, but in practice.
Most of the men sketched in the foregoing pages, as well as hundreds of others in public life, realize that Parliament and Legislatures have a hard time to keep themselves from going to the devil, and that so far as they go along that road the nation travels with them. As an experiment in nationhood we have some peculiar and original weaknesses, as well as strengths. Belgium, for instance, could be tacked by Atlas overnight on to one of our northward coasts, or set down as an island in some of our northern waters, when only a geographer would notice the difference. Belgium has a king and two million more people than Canada. We have slightly more territory than the United States, when New York State alone has as many people as our whole country. We are as big as many Britains and we have enough railway mileage to make Britain a spider-web, when our population is about one-fifth of hers and our ultimate authority in democratic government comes from Downing Street. Yet there are prophets among us who predict that we shall yet be the pivot of the Empire.
Once you begin to speculate about the future of this country there is no end. And the past of the nation has rather little to do with estimating its future. We have been a wide-open immigration country. In twenty years we have transformed ourselves by a foreign policy with which Britain had nothing to do. Twenty years more and we could do it again with even more disastrous results. In 1867 the great compromise known as Confederation tied four and a half millions of people into a political unity. In half a century we doubled our population; built 30,000 miles of transcontinental and branch lines of railway; made ourselves a race congress imitation of the United States; enacted a National Policy of protective tariffs that failed to protect us from ourselves; created an Oriental problem on the Pacific, exaggerated a race problem on the Ottawa, and developed an American-penetration system clear across the country; sent a small army to help establish a similar government and dual problem to our own in South Africa and a huge army to Europe to help make the world safe for the kind of democracy of which we consider ourselves a fair sample; created a small army of millionaires and had bestowed upon us about an equal number of knighthoods as well as a number of peerages, and four years ago petitioned the King through Parliament to abolish the practice; gave a first mortgage on the country to one great transcontinental railway, and a second and a third to two more which we have since nationalized into government ownership because the roads were bankrupt for the present and built for the future, which is yet a long way off; developed a cycle of quite remarkable big industries and federalized banks which a large element of our heterogeneous democracy now consider a menace to the nation; and on the prairies which, shortly after Confederation, we bought for a few millions sterling from the Hudson's Bay Company, a Liberal Government, never contemplated by the Fathers of Confederation, carved out two new great Provinces which for ten years have tried to kill the Tory Party which gave the Northwest its birth, all Liberalism that does not go back to the furrow, and aims to abolish even the moderately successful economic system by which we have come to our present state of comparative prosperity.
If that is the kind of thing that Stead meant by "every nation going to the devil in its own way" it must be conceded that we have lost no time over the going. We are among the forward nations, even though we are less radical than Australia. No young nation ever accomplished visibly and materially so much in so brief a period. We had the enormous scientific resources of the 20th century to give us momentum. Perhaps we were a little too fast on the down grade. We still take some inspiration from looking at the map to reflect that no other part of the British Empire occupies so strategic a position as Canada. We note that Canada is not only the natural interpreter between Britain and the United States—which it took some of our far-seeing statesmen a long while to discover—but that we are also a transformer between the power-house at Downing Street and the one at Tokio; that we are fair on the highway of traffic and travel between London and Yokohama; that we have room within a reasonable time for as many people as are now living in Britain, and that if we are not too awfully anxious about going to the devil we can make that population one of the most potential in the world for its size, not only in producing things to eat and wear and export, but in helping to hold the British Commonwealth steady long enough to let the old thing work out its big share of the world's salvation.