Nevertheless, I think that Canada has every reason to be grateful for the able business men whom the States have sent her. That negro porter at the Niagara Hotel who said that Canadians were a stupid people, and would have done nothing without the Americans, was taking rather a spread-eagle view of the facts. Still there is no doubt that American brains have been—and still are—of great service to Canada; nor can I see that they can be charged with Americanising tendencies. Business men are nearly always cosmopolitan in their achievements, whatever their motives may be.
It is rather different with American journalists. They can hardly as yet be charged with being citizens of the world, and where their influence penetrates, an American trend is noticeable. They are beginning to leave their mark in Canada. Canadian papers are numerous and creditable, but an American atmosphere broods over them. The most trivial incident is magnified by headlines, which repeat three times over in large type and increasingly pompous language all and more than all that follows in the news space. I am not talking of the best Canadian newspapers but of the average ones. If their methods are American, so very largely are the matters they deal with. In some small up-country Canadian journal one will find the leading columns occupied with the account of some dinner given, say, by Mrs. Van So-and-So of New York, wife of the Coffin King, with full accounts of the costumes, menu, etc.,—wearisome and vulgar matter, staringly of no interest whatever to the bucolic readers of the journal in question. But it was all very cheaply wired from the States: whereas news from England would be costly in the extreme. The result is that Canadians—in spite of their local sagacity—are at least as ignorant of the things that happen in Great Britain and Europe as we are of what is happening in Canada. Often I have felt while the Canadian-born were talking to me of the 'Old Country,' talking of it too, not only in a loyal, but a fond and even wistful manner—that they had in their minds a picture of it that would probably have fitted England better in the fourteenth century than it does now. A poor, worn-out, tottering old country is what they are thinking of; and nothing would amaze some of them more than to see modern England as it is.
Why should they have got this idea into their heads? Largely, I suppose, because the new with them is necessarily best. The old things were put up anyhow by men in a hurry and they are always superseded by better things. The very epithet 'old' connotes badness to a Canadian. Then, again, it is a country of young men, and young men are apt to favour youth, which they hardly associate with England. No country—not even Spain—can be as antique and ramshackle as many of them undoubtedly believe England to be. Birmingham and Manchester are on paper such very ancient cities compared with Regina and Moosejaw that the untravelled Canadian thinks pityingly of the former; whereas he considers the latter infinitely up-to-date and important, and would be hurt to know that we have in England hundreds of little prosperous country towns very like them, of which the ordinary Englishman hardly knows the names and, if he did, would think no more of than he would think of Regina and Moosejaw.
I would not seek to minimise that Canadian pride and optimism which finds such satisfaction in everything that they build. Pride and optimism are valuable assets to any country. All I would suggest is that they should realise that the English habit of grumbling and self-depreciation does not indicate that all Englishmen live in a tottering old realm, doing nothing but decay and grumble.
Here we come back to newspapers. Most people derive their facts from newspapers nowadays, and if Canadians find that everything of importance happens in the new world, whereas in the old world nothing happens except an occasional sensational murder or the deposition of a third-class king, they cannot infer that Europe is still an important continent, and that perhaps the most important country in it is England. What is to enlighten them? I suppose the receipt of more news from Europe.
Probably the All Red Cable would do much in this direction. News has to be cheap or it is not news (the converse proposition that news if it is cheap must be news, is not true). Much also might be done by private enterprise. English publishers could do more to push their wares. So could English magazine proprietors. Most of the books and magazines one can get in a hurry in Canada are American. English Cabinet Ministers might now and again make a tour in the Dominion and explain to Canadians some of those political principles in which at home they have such fervid belief. It may be that the Americanising tendency is too strong for any of these suggestions to be of much avail in combating it. Reciprocity treaties between the States and Canada may inevitably result in closer union, though I never could feel that it was a marked human characteristic to pine for fellow-citizenship with the man whom one supplies with bread in return for a reaping-machine. Trade relations may result in that mystic fraternal sentiment by which nations come together, though hitherto in the world's history men have never shown any very frantic desire for a heart-to-heart intimacy with their tradespeople. 'Utility, Reciprocity, Fraternity' sounds rather a cold cry by which to rally two great people together.[[1]]
[[1]] This chapter was written before the Reciprocity business flamed forth. I return to the subject later.
When all is said and done, and there are a hundred other pros and cons which might be considered, the chief obstacle to the Americanisation of Canada is climate. Canada is north and America is south; and those two show less inclination to rush together than even east and west. Of course it is not extremes of north and south that are represented in the two countries;—along the boundary the climates are not dissimilar. Yet it seems to me that while Canada is bound to be mainly a country of northern peoples, Americans are fast becoming more and more southernised, I do not mean in the old sense of becoming languid and effeminate and semi-tropical, but southernised in just the same way as the French from being Norsemen have become southernised. Have you seen prints of old Paris when it was a Gothic city? If you have, you will realise the completeness of the change that has come over it. It spreads itself to the sun now, faces to the Midi, and some such change might easily come over New York, Chicago, and the rest of those at present northern cities. Already the typical American is far from being the son of a grim and dour Pilgrim Father. Rather he is lively and energetic—with a temperament always on tiptoe—logical and apt to be materialistic, yet sentimental and passionate too. You find such a temperament among the French and Italians of northern Italy. It is the sun working on them. Even the stolid German and the moody Scandinavian feels it when he gets to the States, and thaws—into an American.
It is not so in Canada. The northern immigrants there remain silent and frosty, though the touch of fortune makes them perhaps more genial. Canada will never become a southern country, even though its northern parts are rendered temperate by the cutting down of timber and constant ploughing. No, I think Canadians will remain a hardy and somewhat dour race, slow-moving on the whole, but industrious and virtuous, suspicious of talkers and hustlers; so suspicious, too, of free thought and new morals as to lay themselves open maybe to the charge of hypocrisy; given at times to self-distrust and self-depreciation, but for the most part steadfast, and holding in their hearts the belief that there is no place like Canada and no men like the inhabitants thereof.
In short, they are as likely as not to end by becoming Anglicised.