The Canadian Commonwealth | Page 2

ideal gives them a poise, a concentration, a stability, a steadiness of
purpose, unknown to mad chasers after wealth. Obstinate, dogged,
perhaps tinged with the self-superior spirit of "I am holier than
thou"--they may be; but men who forsake all for an ideal and pursue it
consistently for a century and a half develop a stamina that enters into
the very blood of their race. It is a common saying even to this day that
Quebec is more Catholic than the Pope, and Ontario more ultra-English
than England; and when the Canadian is twitted with being "colonial"
and "crude," his prompt and almost proud answer is that he "goes in
more for athletics than esthetics." "One makes men. The other may
make sissies."
With this germ spirit as the very beginning of national consciousness in
Canada, one begins to understand the grim, rough, dogged
determination that became part of the race. Canada was never
intoxicated with that madness for Bigness that seemed to sweep over
the modern world. What cared she whether her population stood still or
not, whether she developed fast or slow, provided she kept the Faith
and preserved her national integrity? Flimsy culture had no place in her
schools or her social life. A solid basis of the three R's--then

educational frills if you like; but the solid basis first. Worship of wealth
and envy of material success have almost no part in Canadian life; for
the simple reason that wealth and success are not the ideals of the
nation. Laurier, who is a poor man, and Borden, who is only a
moderately well-off man, command more social prestige in Canada
than any millionaire from Vancouver to Halifax. If demos be the spirit
of the mob, then Canada has no faintest tinge of democracy in her; but
inasmuch as the French colonists came in pursuit of a religious ideal
and the English colonists of a political ideal, if democracy stand for
freedom for the individual to pursue his own ideal--then Canada is
supersaturated with that democracy. Freedom for the individual to
pursue his own ideal was the very atmosphere in which Canada's
national consciousness was born.
In the West a something more entered into the national spirit. French
fur-traders, wood-runners, voyageurs had drifted North and West, men
of infinite resources, as much at home with a frying-pan over a
camp-fire as over a domestic hearth, who could wrest a living from life
anywhere. English adventurers of similar caliber had drifted in from
Hudson Bay. These little lords in a wilderness of savages had scattered
west as far as the Rockies, south to California. They knew no law but
the law of a strong right arm and kept peace among the Indians only by
a dauntless courage and rough and ready justice. They could succeed
only by a good trade in furs, and they could obtain a good trade in furs
only by treating the Indians with equity. Every man who plunged into
the fur wilderness took courage in one hand and his life in the other. If
he lost his courage, he lost his life. Indian fray, turbulent rapids, winter
cold took toll of the weak and the feckless. Nature accepts no excuses.
The man who defaulted in manhood was wiped out--sucked down by
the rapids, buried in winter storms, absorbed into the camps of Indian
degenerates. The men who stayed upon their feet had the stamina of a
manhood in them that could not be extinguished. It was a wilderness
edition of that dauntlessness which brought the Loyalists to Ontario and
the French devotees to Quebec. This, too, made for a dogged, strong,
obstinate race. At the time of the fall of French power at Quebec in
1759 there were about two thousand of these wilderness hunters in the
West. Fifty years later by way of Hudson Bay came Lord Selkirk's

Settlers--Orkneymen and Highlanders, hardy, keen and dauntless as
their native rock-bound isles.
These four classes were the primary first ingredients that went into the
making of Canada's national consciousness and each of the four classes
was the very personification of strength, purpose, courage, freedom.
III
But Destiny plays us strange tricks. When Quebec fell in 1759, New
France passed under the rule of that English and Protestant race which
she had been fighting for two centuries; and when the American
colonies won their independence twenty years later and the
ultra-English Loyalists trekked in thousands across the boundary to
what are now Montreal and Toronto and Cobourg, there came under
one government two races that had fought each other in raid and
counter-raid for two centuries--alien and antagonistic in religion and
speech. It is only in recent years under the guiding hand of Sir Wilfred
Laurier that the ancient antagonism has been pushed off the boards.
The War