I cannot more appropriately commence this address than by a reference
to an oration delivered seven years ago in the great hall of a famous
university which stands beneath the stately elms of Cambridge, in
the old "Bay State" of Massachusetts: a noble seat of learning in
which Canadians take a deep interest, not only because some of their
sons have completed their education within its walls, but because it
represents that culture and scholarship which know no national lines
of separation, but belong to the world's great Federation of Learning.
The orator was a man who, by his deep philosophy, his poetic genius,
his broad patriotism, his love for England, her great literature and
history, had won for himself a reputation not equalled in some respects
by any other citizen of the United States of these later times. In
the course of a brilliant oration in honour[1][A] of the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Harvard, James Russell
Lowell took occasion to warn his audience against the tendency of a
prosperous democracy "towards an overweening confidence in itself and
its home-made methods, an overestimate of material success and a
corresponding indifference to the things of the mind." He did not deny
that wealth is a great fertilizer of civilization and of the arts that
beautify it; that wealth is an excellent thing since it means power,
leisure and liberty; "but these," he went on to say, "divorced from
culture, that is, from intelligent purpose, become the very mockery
of their own essence, not goods, but evils fatal to their possessor,
and bring with them, like the Nibelungen Hoard, a doom instead of a
blessing." "I am saddened," he continued, "when I see our success as
a nation measured by the number of acres under tillage, or of bushels
of wheat exported; for the real value of a country must be weighed in
scales more delicate than the balance of trade. The garners of Sicily
are empty now, but the bees from all climes still fetch honey from the
tiny garden-plot of Theocritus. On a map of the world you may cover
Judea with your thumb, Athens with a finger-tip, and neither of them
figures in the Prices Current; but they still lord it in the thought
and action of every civilized man. Did not Dante cover with his hood
all that was Italy six hundred years ago? And if we go back a century,
where was Germany outside of Weimar? Material success is good, but
only as the necessary preliminary of better things. The measure of a
nation's true success is the amount it has contributed to the thought,
the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual hope and
consolation of mankind."
These eloquently suggestive words, it must be remembered, were
addressed by a great American author to an audience, made up of
eminent scholars and writers, in the principal academic seat of that
New England which has given birth to Emerson, Longfellow, Bancroft,
Prescott, Motley, Hawthorne, Holmes, Parkman, and many others,
representing the brightest thought and intellect of this continent.
These writers were the product of the intellectual development of the
many years that had passed since the pilgrims landed on the historic
rock of Plymouth. Yet, while Lowell could point to such a brilliant
array of historians, essayists, poets and novelists, as I have just
named, as the latest results of New England culture, he felt compelled
to utter a word of remonstrance against that spirit of materialism
that was then as now abroad in the land, tending to stifle those
generous intellectual aspirations which are best calculated to make a
people truly happy and great.
Let us now apply these remarks of the eminent American poet and thinker
to Canada--to ourselves, whose history is even older than that of New
England; contemporaneous rather with that of Virginia, since Champlain
landed on the heights of Quebec and laid the foundations of the ancient
capital only a year after the English adventurers of the days of
King James set their feet on the banks of the river named after that
sovereign and commenced the old town which has long since disappeared
before the tides of the ocean that stretches away beyond the shores of
the Old Dominion.[2] If we in Canada are open to the same charge of
attaching too much importance to material things, are we able at the
same time to point to as notable achievements in literature as results
of the three centuries that have nearly passed since the foundation of
New France? I do not suppose that the most patriotic Canadian, however
ready to eulogize his own country, will make an effort to claim an
equality with New England in this respect; but, if indeed we feel it
necessary to offer any comparison that would do us justice, it would
be with that Virginia whose history is contemporaneous with that of
French Canada. Statesmanship rather than Letters has been the pride and
ambition of the Old Dominion, its brightest and highest achievement.
Virginia has been the mother of great orators and great presidents,
and her men of letters sink into insignificance alongside of those
of New England. It may be said, too, of Canada, that her history in
the days of the French regime, during the struggle for responsible
government, as well as at the birth of confederation, gives us the
names of men of statesmanlike designs and of patriotic purpose. From
the days of Champlain to the establishment of the confederation, Canada
has had the services of men as eminent in their respective spheres,
and as successful in the attainment of popular rights, in moulding the
educational and political institutions of the country, and in laying
broad and deep the foundations of a new nationality across half a
continent, as those great Virginians to whom the world is ever ready
to pay its meed of respect. These Virginian statesmen won their fame
in the large theatre of national achievement--in laying the basis of
the most remarkable federal republic the world has ever seen; whilst
Canadian public men have laboured with equal earnestness and ability in
that far less conspicuous and brilliant arena of colonial development,
the eulogy of which has to be written in the histories of the future.
[Footnote A: In all cases the references are to the Notes in the
Appendix.]