The Young Seigneur | Page 5

do you propose to get the people to follow this aim?"
"If they were shown a sensible reason why they ought to be a nation," said he with calm distinctness,--"a reason more simple and great than any that could be advanced against it--it is all they would require. I propose a clear ideal for them--a vision of what Canada ought to be and do; towards which they can look, and feel that every move of progress adds a definite stage to a definite and really worthy edifice."
"The-oretical" Chrysler murmured slowly, shaking his head.
"For a man, but not for a People!" the young Member cried.
Both were silent some moments. The elder looked up at last "What sort of Ideal would you offer them?"
"Simply Ideal Canada, and the vista of her proper national work, the highest she might be, and the best she might perform, situated as she is, all time being given and the utmost stretch of aims. As Plato's mind's eye saw his Republic, Bacon his New Atlantis, More his Utopia; so let us see before and above us the Ideal Canada, and boldly aim at the programme of doing something in the world."
"Can you show me anything special that we can do in the world?" the old man asked. His caution was wavering a little. "It is not impossible I may be with you," he added.
The Ontarian, in fact, did not object in a spirit of cavil. He did so apparently neither to doubt nor to believe, but simply to enquire, for in life he was a business man. His father had left him large lumber interests to preserve, and the responsibility had framed his prudence. He took the same kind of care in examining the joints of Haviland's scheme as he would have exacted about the pegging or chains of a timber crib which was going to run a rapid.
"Why, here for instance," answered Haviland, "are great problems at our threshold:--Independence, Imperial Federation, both of them bearing on all advance in civilized organizations,--Unification of Races--development of our vast and peculiar areas. Education, too, Foreign Trade, Land, the Classes--press upon our attention."
"You would have us awake to some such new sense of our situation as Germany did in Goethe's day?"
"I pray for no long-haired enthusiasts. We have business different from altering the names of the Latin divinities into Teutonic gutturals."
"The country itself will see to that. We have the fear of the nations round about in our eyes," grimly said Chrysler; then he added: "I have never known you as well as I wish, Haviland. You speak of this work as if you had some definite system of it, while all the notions I have ever met or formed of such a thing have been partial or vague."
Chamilly stood up and the firelight shone brightly and softly upon his flushed cheek; the dark portraits on the walls seemed to look out upon him as if they lived, and the statue of Apollo to rise and associate its dignity with his.
"I have a system," he said. "I almost feel like saying a commission of revelation. The reason, sir, why I asked you here was that you, my venerated friend, might understand my ideas and sympathize with them, and help me."
He hesitated.
"I will ask you to read a manuscript, of which you will find the first half in your room. The remainder is not written yet"
Pierre, the butler, brought in coffee and they talked more quietly of other subjects.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MANUSCRIPT.
"When yellow-locked and crystal-eyed, I dreamed green woods among * * * * * O, then the earth was young"
--ISABELLA VALANCEY CRAWFORD.
When Chrysler went up to his bedchamber he found the following on a table between two candles:--
BOOK OF ENTHUSIASMS.
Narrative of Chamilly d'Argentenaye Haviland.
At the Friars' School at Dormillière, racing with gleeful playmates around the shady playground, or glibly reciting frequent "Paters" and "Ave Marias," other ideas of life scarce ever entered my head; till one day my father spoke, out of his calm silence, to my grandmother; and with the last of his two or three sentences, "I don't destine him for a Thibetan prayer-mill," (she had fondly intended me for the priesthood) he sat down to a letter, the result of which was that I found myself in a week at the Royal Grammar School at Montreal. Here, where the great city appeared a wilderness of palaces and the large School an almost universe of youthful Crichtons whose superiorities seemed to me the greater because I knew little of their English tongue, the contrasts with my rural Dormillière were so striking and continual that I was set thinking by almost every occurrence.
A French boy is nothing if not imaginative. The time seemed to me a momentous epoch big with the question: "What path shall I follow?"
I admired the prize boys