As Hugh Brokenshire and I were walking along the Ocean Drive a few days after Larry Strangways had come and gone, the dear lad got some satisfaction from charging me with inconsistency.
"You're certainly talking about England and Canada to-day very differently from what you used to."
"Am I? Well, if it seems so it's because you don't understand the attitude of Canadians toward their mother country. As a country, as a government, England has been magnificently true to us always. It's only between Englishmen and Canadians as individuals that irritation arises, and for that most Canadians don't care. The Englishman snubs and the Canadian grows bumptious. I don't think the Canadian would grow bumptious if the Englishman didn't snub. Both snubbing and bumptiousness are offensive to me; but that, I suppose, is because I'm over-sensitive. And yet one forgets sensitiveness when it comes to anything really national. In that we're one, with as perfect a solidarity as that which binds Oregon to Florida. You'll never find one of us who isn't proud to serve when England gives the orders."
"To be snubbed by her for serving."
"Certainly; to be snubbed by her for serving! It's all we look for; it's all we shall ever get. No one need make any mistake about that. In Canada we're talking of sending fifty thousand troops to the front. We may send five hundred thousand and we shall still be snubbed. But we're not such children as to go into a cause in the hope that some one will give us sweets. We do it for the Cause. We know, too, that it isn't exactly injustice on the English side; it's only ungraciousness."
"Oh, they're long on ungraciousness, all right."
"Yes; they're very long on ungraciousness—"
"Even dad feels that. You should hear him cuss after he's been kotowing to some British celebrity—and given him the best of all he's got—and put him up at the good clubs. They bring him letters in shoals, you know—"
"I'm afraid it has to be admitted that the best-mannered among them are often rude from our transatlantic point of view; and yet the very rudeness is one of the defects of their good qualities. You can no more take the ungraciousness out of the English character than you can take the hardness out of granite; but if granite wasn't hard it wouldn't serve its purposes. We Canadians know that, don't you see? We allow for it in advance, just as you allow for the clumsiness of the elephant for the sake of his strength and sagacity. We're not angels ourselves—neither you Americans nor we Canadians; and yet we like to get the credit for such small merits as we possess."
Hugh whipped off the blossom of a roadside flower as he swung his stick.