When we cross the line which separates the United States from Canada we
find a national mechanism at work which converts immigrants of alien
nationalities into loyal Canadians. In Canada, however, our attention is
arrested by an example which illustrates the persistence and the
strength of the force which perpetuates a national spirit. The ancestors
of the French Canadians began to settle in the province of Quebec early
in the seventeenth century, 150 years before the Canadian national mill
was set agoing by Englishmen. The French settlers never passed through
that mill. They came, for the greater part, from the north-west of
France, and although speaking a different tongue, adopting a different
religion, and following different customs, they were yet in point of
race not essentially different from the English founders of Canada. Yet
the descendants of these early French settlers, now numbering well over
a million and a half, and although forming but a small island in the
midst of an English-speaking ocean for more than a century and a half,
have maintained their sense of separateness--their national
frontiers--intact. There is no question here of a racial frontier as
yet, but were this national isolation of French Canadians to become
permanent, then in course of time a racial differentiation would be
produced within their territory.
When we turn our faces westward and cross the Rocky Mountains we find
the minds of the white inhabitants, along the whole stretch of the
Pacific coast, occupied with a racial problem. They have erected a
racial barrier to keep out the native peoples of Asia. The native of
India is excluded just as strictly as the Chinaman or Japanese. They
are not excluded because of their speech or of their civilization, but
because the people of the United States and of Canada are conscious of a
certain feeling of difference--call it race prejudice, race antipathy,
or what you will. It is a conscious or subconscious state of feeling
which rebels against racial fusion.