Such is the outlook. Meanwhile we have our innate defects, the first of which arises from the vastness of geography and the littleness of politicians. Little politics in Canada are pocketed away in sections. Some of our native born are the most parochial. There are groups in Canada as un-national as Eskimos who in some respects are our best citizens because they owe nothing to, and expect nothing from, any Government.
People shout about assimilation, not knowing to what pattern, if any, foreign peoples should be assimilated. The missionary goes abroad and extracts from the heathen even the nobilities of his own faith and leaves him often the miserable animosities of a creed. Political and social missionaries in Canada make the same mistake about foreigners. It is a great thing to Canadianize a race. But we ought to begin by Canadianizing some of our native-born.
Even our public men believe in political servitude. A man goes to Ottawa burning with zeal to inaugurate political liberation. Six months or a year produces sleeping-sickness. He is given a hyperdemic [Transcriber's note: hypodermic?] of conformity. He gravitates into the formula of a group. His message is muzzled. If not, it too often breaks loose in a tirade on behalf of some section littler than even any of the groups in Ottawa.
Big men do not, as is often said, go into Parliament. There is a great reason. The wonder is that the few big men we elect stay there so long. Government is supposed to be business. But the business takes a long while to do—even badly. Ottawa is the place where the national field-glasses too often get turned wrong end about.
We are seldom honest about public men. A man's own party praises, the opposite party damns him. In an old nation this intellectual strabismus is pardonable. In a young nation it is a form of political suicide. We too often wait for a man to make a great speech before admitting independent of party, that he is anything great as a man.
Because Canada is so vast, political leaders find it necessary to enunciate one doctrine here, another one there. This is an old trick; playing the lights on stage when the spot-light is reserved for the big local issues. We are constantly besieged by "national policies". Many of them have very little to do with national citizenship. Most of them sketch out milleniums that are never realized. We are a people of extremisms. When national prosperity is the objective we tolerate, and even idolize, any man who is bold and big enough to capture the country with his special-interest programme. Then the delirium is over, heyday is done, and the nation wakes up to classify as public plunderers the very men whom it once regarded as the economic saviours of the country.
Our faculty of national criticism is not as yet strongly developed. Thank heaven, we are not cynical; but it is better to be a hopeful cynic than a disgruntled idealist. Men will arise with specious programmes by means of which they can hypnotize a group and aim at capturing the country. Progress carries on by means of such men and such groups. But the devil himself stands behind the stage bush to prod these zealots into the limelight and the next moment to lead the claque in the gallery. We are carried away by the act, afterwards find that we have been duped and hold indignation meetings after the show is safely ten miles down the line.
Like all other nations we have had our share of "the new time coming". During the war we had all the old parties dead and buried along with patronage and race cries and public graft. But while the preacher was busy over the funeral rites a number of chief mourners were somewhere "making hay". A nation's adversity is too often some man's opportunity. In moneymaking this is even worse than in politics. It is too easy to shout and to shed tears. We deplore the past, suspect the future and work hard to make ourselves solid for the present.
Many men in Canada do not regard public life as public service. There is little or no preparation for doing the nation's business. Men are log-rolled into Parliament and pitchforked into Cabinets. The work they are expected to do has little or no relation to the work for which nature and experience intended them. It is regarded a simpler matter to administer a great State department than to manage a big industry.
Ottawa is the natural objective of all those who "want" something. When interests camp on the trail of Governments and of Parliament, the interest of the nation is going to suffer—and it always has. We are paying in taxes now for the lobbying that went on ten years ago. No Government is ever considered so patriotic and humanly powerful that can resist the inroad of "big interests".