For over a hundred years Canada had known only an atmosphere of peace and almost continuous prosperity. Truly, during that period the mother country had frequently waged warfare along the outskirts of the Empire, and had even engaged in one or two wars of considerable magnitude, but never had she felt the danger so pressing as to send a call for help across the Atlantic.
Canadian help was, indeed, offered during the Crimean campaign, but before this impulse could materialize on the field of battle the need had ceased to exist. Again, during the South African struggle, the same impulse had been manifested, and nearly eight thousand Canadian volunteers did eventually reach the fighting front against the Boers. But these had been inspired by a spirit of adventure, rather than by any sense of patriotic duty.
There was everything in their environment to develop peaceful instincts in the Canadians. To the east and west were limitless expanses of sea; northward was the frozen Arctic; and to the southward was another people who, though thirteen times greater in population, was equally isolated from the political jealousies and rivalries of Europe, and their kinsmen in speech, customs, and, to a large extent, in blood also. From this direction no danger had threatened during the century, and danger from across the seas had been of too intangible a quality to reach the imagination.
Under these conditions the Canadians had devoted themselves exclusively to the labors and arts of peace: of agriculture, manufacturing, and trade and commerce. Vast natural resources lay before them awaiting exploitation and development. The psychology of the Canadian was entirely constructive.
There remained, of course, the sense of responsibility involved in the ties binding the people to the British Empire, a subconscious realization that when Great Britain was at war, Canada, too, would be at war. Yet here again environment and local conditions tended to reduce this consciousness to the quality of abstract theory, a mere convention. The native Canadian, though of British ancestry, knew England only through hearsay or the written word. And a considerable portion of Canada's population felt not even the tie of a common speech and literature. In so far as they recognized this bond, the temperamental self-reliance of the Canadian people was inclined to reduce it to a sentiment, rather than any deep feeling of dependence on the power of the British navy. A keen sense of economic independence and strength served still further to intensify this feeling. Whatever allegiance the average Canadian owed to the Empire must have been, and undoubtedly was, of the nature of an ideal—something far more abstract than the ordinary sentiment of patriotism—love of country.
In a people in this state of mind the first threat of a great war involving themselves could only have roused varying degrees of skepticism—while the first actual confirmation must have struck them with the impact of a thunderbolt.
Canadians were shocked—unutterably, outrageously shocked.
Casual observers, basing their judgment on the mental attitude of the people, as briefly outlined above, might reasonably have expected a quick return to the previous state of mind, at most a strong sympathy for the mother country, which might manifest itself in substantial contributions of funds, supplies, and perhaps a few battalions of enthusiastic adventurers. For, whatever might have been said at the time as a recruiting argument, Canadians felt no danger of immediate, or even future, invasion by European armies. When it came to that they had every reason to believe that the hundred million population of the United States would stand solidly with them, quite aside from the Monroe Doctrine. There was, of course, the possibility that Canada's trade with Great Britain, totaling half a billion dollars a year, would be destroyed in case of naval disaster to the British navy, but that would be only temporary. Whoever conquered would be willing to pay a stiff price for a portion of Canada's tremendous wheat crops, nearly 140,000,000 bushels in 1913. Economically Canada was in no way dependent on European countries.
But such a chain of deductions would have ignored the chief premise—the spirit of the people who made up the Canadian nation. For a hundred years, indeed, the people of Canada had pursued the paths of peace; for three generations they had known no stronger passion than that involved in ordinary political partisan strife.
Vice and idleness, not the pursuits of peace, render men soft and flabby in spirit. A pioneer stock does not require the continuous excitement of military warfare to maintain its combativeness; it needs only a just cause to rouse it to furnace heat. And that just cause the Canadians found in the attitude of England that Germany and Austria should not dominate the political destinies of peoples outside their frontiers. Within twenty-four hours all Canada was aflame with the war passion, but it was a passion thoroughly controlled by the reason behind it.