“Doesn’t it presuppose an assurance that any one you address must be interested in your views?”
“I deserve that,” he laughed; “but you’re not quite right. We say, in effect, ‘These are my sentiments, but I won’t be down-hearted if you haven’t the sense to agree with them.’ The last, however, doesn’t apply to you.”
“Thank you for the explanation,” she rejoined. “But why do you insist on a national difference? You’re really English, aren’t you, in Canada?”
“No,” he answered; “you and the others who talk in that strain are mistaken. We’re a brand new nation still fusing and fuming in the melting-pot. The elements are inharmonious in some respects—French from the Laurentian littoral, Ontario Scots, Americans, Scandinavians, Teutons, Magyars, Slavs. The English element’s barely strong enough to temper the mixture; the land’s too wide and the people too varied for British traditions to bind. When the cooling amalgam’s run out it will be into a fresh mold.”
“One made in Pennsylvania, or wherever the American foundries are?”
“They run the one you have in mind at Washington. You understand things a good deal better than many people I’ve talked to here; but you’re not right yet. If Canadians deliberately chose the American mold because it was American, a number of us would kick; but the cause is a bigger one than that. From Texas to Athabasca, from Florida to Labrador, pretty much the same elemental forces are fanning the melting fires. We have the same human raw material; we’ve much the same problems to tackle; the conditions are, or soon will be, pretty similar. It’s only natural that the result should be more or less identical. I’ve said nothing yet about our commercial and social relations with our neighbors.”
“But doesn’t England count?”
“Morally, yes. It’s your part to keep our respect and show us a clean lead.”
“After all,” she rejoined, “you, in particular, are essentially English by connection with the part of the country you’re now staying in.”
He smiled curiously.