In agriculture, these “New Canadians” have been more than willing, and many of them keen and quick, to learn the ways of our country. Their natural thriftiness, ingrained by the poverty of bygone days, has largely saved them from branching out in the fatal course of over-ambition. Then the kind of land they have generally settled on, the brush land, has helped to keep them in the safe path of mixed farming.
There is something in the woodland that seems to fix a family to the soil with peculiar tenacity—partly, no doubt, because we value most what we have taken most trouble to secure. Then the Slavs have come to us with no idea except to make a permanent home. “In the brush country they can’t be beaten,” says an observer of experience. “It is wonderful,” says another who knows them well, “what a transformation they have made; how they have developed the country as well as their own homes.” [a]The Teacher and New Canadians]
Those who live near the unifying railway and the town easily pick up our language, and also have a chance of visiting a “better farming train” and hearing an agricultural lecturer. But the folk away out in the back country, who need most help, get least of it.
Look at this little schoolhouse, where a young teacher is playing with the boys and girls. It is in their free hours out of school, quite as much as in their “lessons,” that they learn our spirit and our ways as well as our speech. This young woman has such tact and sympathy and sense that the parents love her, as the children do, and come to her for information and advice on all sorts of subjects quite apart from school work. But she is absolutely alone; to every one else in this district English is a foreign tongue; our Canadian spirit and ideals are unfamiliar.
Lectures are valuable, when they are listened to and understood; books and papers, if they are read, and read with ease. But living interest, personal friendship and sympathetic insight, have ten times the attracting and stimulating force of all other influences put together. Without the power of winning affection by giving it, the strongest intellect is feeble at a task like this—to make the “New Canadian” not only at home in our country but at home with ourselves; to make him one of us. It is not paternalism that will do this, but fraternalism.
We must back up those solitary teachers, and, doing that, we shall back up those New Canadians themselves who are already keen to see their whole people on the highest level the best of us have reached. We cannot wish them to adopt our faults when they adopt our language. We have something to learn from them, as well as they from us. [a]Unity, not Uniformity]
It is not unnatural uniformity we want. If we got it we should not like it; and we are better without it. The highest music is not unison, but harmony, in which our varied voices play their natural parts. Unity is our aim, not monotony.
We must penetrate the remotest settlement, the densest mass, with the national spirit of Canada—the spirit and sentiment that knit us together, the ideals that shame us instinctively when we are unworthy of them. But only when inspired ourselves by such ideals can we inspire others with them.
Whether by casual neighborly intercourse, by travelling among them as an unassuming friend, by large and carefully thought-out systems of intensive education, or by establishing among them little community settlement houses in which the teachers of several districts and others who see the need and the opportunity would live together—or by all these means and any others which good-will and good sense united can devise—this aim can and must be achieved.
Achieving this, we shall have laid the sure foundation of a splendid future for our country, every diverse element joining, in mutual appreciation and respect, to form one great harmonious community.