SIX MONTHS OUT FROM HOME.
CHAPTER II
THE HOME OF A NATION
Canada is the splendid and spacious home of a great nation now in the making. It is not so much a country as half a continent. It marches conterminously with the United States for 4,000 miles at a latitude corresponding to that of the south of Europe. Its Eastern Provinces are washed by the Atlantic waves and blown on by the Atlantic breezes: 3,000 miles westward British Columbia and the Yukon territory face the Pacific: northward from the United States Canada stretches into the Arctic Ocean. It is curious to think that the first English hold on what is now Canada was limited to three or four forts and trading stations on the Hudson’s Bay. Trading stations are still there in charge of servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but that Company has been shorn of its glory, although it is still doing a prosperous trade between its collection of furs from the Indians, its Stores in the Prairie Provinces, and the selling of its lands. North Central Canada, however, with the development of its Prairie Provinces, ceased to be the mere commercial backyard of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It has ceased also to be a collection of British “Colonies.” You cannot offend the modern Canadian more than by describing him as a “Colonial.” He is a Canadian—an Imperialist, a man who claims his full share in the concerns of the British Empire—a man who has firmly convinced himself that within a hundred years Canada, so far from being a British Dependency, will be the most stalwart protector of the Mother Country. The epoch-making offer of a gift of seven millions for the addition of three super-Dreadnoughts to the British Navy is the first expression of the Canadian sense of Imperial destiny. That offer will certainly be only the first of many Canadian contributions to Imperial defence and British supremacy on the seas. It was not merely inspired by the feeling of men of all political parties in the Dominion that the Atlantic and Pacific coasts must be safeguarded against foreign attack and the blocking up of the outlets and inlets of Canadian trade, but by the over-mastering consciousness of the Canadian people that they are a Nation of Destiny and that in the near future they will play a great and increasing part in the shaping of the industrial and political history of the world.
Already there is the keenest sense of nationality in the Canadian people. There has grown up in recent years an interest in the history of Canada which would have surprised the fathers and grandfathers of the present generation. An illustration of this interest is the arrangement by Dr. Lock (the very able Public Librarian at Toronto) of gatherings of school children two or three times a week to hear stories from Canadian history told in ways that will make the future citizens proud of being Canadians. In talks that I had with public men in all the Provinces the necessity of keeping the Anglo-Saxon type and Anglo-Saxon ideals dominant was continually urged. Canada opens wide its doors to men of all nations seeking a larger life and richer opportunities in the spacious Provinces and the freer air of the Dominion. But there is the firm resolve that in the composite nation now in its infancy the Anglo-Saxon type shall not be swamped or weakened by the infusion of foreign blood. This is why the Dominion and Provincial Governments give the heartiest welcome to immigrants from the American side as well as from Great Britain. At least 100,000 Americans are pouring yearly into the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia. They bring with them Anglo-Saxon ideas, Anglo-Saxon religion, the Anglo-Saxon spirit of democracy, Anglo-Saxon energy and inventiveness in industry, and Anglo-Saxon solid and scientific methods of agriculture. The Americans in three or four years are blended with the native-born population, and the blend is considered the finest possible from the point of view of the development of the Dominion along Anglo-Saxon lines. As a matter of fact, the Americans a few years after arrival are almost more Canadian than the Canadians themselves—it is the Americans rather than the Canadians who show jealousy at the flocking in of people of other nationalities and raise the cry of “Canada for the Canadians.” There is ample room, however, in the Provinces (most of which equal or exceed in size the area of France or Germany) for immigration from every nation under the sun, and there is no reason why the process of assimilation should not be even more complete than it has been in the United States. Canada believes in churches and schools. The Governments of the Dominion and of the Provinces see to it that the schools are put up among the first buildings that arise in the new towns and that they are richly provided with all the equipment they need and all the funds that ensure their being carried on in the highest state of efficiency. These schools catch the children of the immigrants and manufacture them into citizens with Anglo-Saxon democratic ideals. The people themselves provide the churches. I was surprised during my tour in Canada to find how many churches there are, and how fine are the church buildings even in cities that cover what twenty years ago was virgin prairie. The Canadians are fully alive to the part played by religion in the development of nationhood and civilisation. The churches catch the immigrants, especially the bright young fellows and young women who are settling in the Dominion. They are not only spiritual hearths, but they are social centres, and nothing is more needful than social centres of the right kind in a new country with a rapidly flowing-in population. It is in the churches that the ideals are held up and kept alive which will save Canadian nationality from being materialised in its cradle. There is a possibility that the very richness of the resources of Canada, the variety and greatness of the opportunities it presents for getting on in the material sense, may lead to a coarsening of the national fibre which would prejudice the whole future of Canada. Canadians must be made to realise that a nation, like an individual, “lives not by bread alone,” that it has a soul to be saved as well as a body to be fed. Canada must be preserved from the national tragedy of growing to be a giant in bulk with the strength of a giant—but a giant without a soul.
CHAPTER III
THE MAKING OF MODERN CANADA