RECRUITING BY VOLUNTARY SERVICE.
No stronger evidence could be given of the determination of the country
as a whole, and over all its component parts, to support Great Britain
and her Allies to final success, than the truly wonderful record of the
voluntary enlistment of more than four hundred thousand men, of all
walks in life, to rush to the front.
Recruiting in the Province of Quebec indeed started very well. Several
thousands of French Canadian youth rallied to the colors. I hope and
trust that, sooner or later, it will be possible to make a more
satisfactory statistical record of the number of French Canadians who
enlisted. I am fully convinced that the total is somewhat much larger
than the figures usually quoted. It would surely be conducive to a
better understanding of the case, if such statistical information was
carefully prepared and made public. It is easily conceivable that the
pressure of the work of maintaining the splendid Canadian army renders
it perhaps difficult to attend actually to the details of that
compilation. So we can afford to wait for the redress of figures which
may constitute a wrong to the race second in numbers but equal to any in
patriotism in Canada.
Pending my remarks upon certain causes which have contributed to check
recruiting amongst the French element in the Province of Quebec, I
consider it important to mention those which were easy to ascertain and
comprehend.
It is a well known fact that early marriages are a rule in the Province
of Quebec much more than in the other Provinces of the Dominion. As a
natural consequence, the available number of young unmarried men for
recruiting purposes was proportionately less. I myself have known
parishes in our Province where half a dozen of unmarried young men from
twenty years of age and upwards could not be found.
It was easily to foresee that a comparison would be made between the
number of Canadian-born volunteers in the English-speaking Provinces and
that from the Province of Quebec. The degree of enthusiasm for
enlistment in the other Provinces between the foreign born and the
Canadian born has also been noticed. It has generally been admitted that
most naturally the young men recently arrived in Canada were more
strongly appealed to by all the sacred ties still binding them to their
mother land. When generations have, for more than a century, enjoyed all
the blessings of peace and lived far away from the turmoil of warlike
preparations and military conflicts, is it to be much wondered at that
the entire population is not at once permeated with the feeling of the
dangers ahead, and do not rise rapidly to the full sense of the duty she
is suddenly called upon to perform.
My daily personal intercourse with hundreds of my French Canadian
compatriots allowed me to realize that many of them, even amongst the
leading classes, were over-confident that the Allies representing at the
beginning the united effort of England, France and Russia, soon to be
reinforced by Italy, breaking away from the Central Powers, would
certainly be equal to the task of being victorious over German
militarism. Repeatedly, before public meetings and in very numerous
private conversations, I urgently implored my hearers not to be so
deluded, doing my best to convince them that it would be a fatal error
to shut our eyes from the truth, that the military power of Central
Europe, comprising the two great Empires of Germany and Austria,
Bulgaria, with the help of Asiatic Turkey, and the undisguised support
of baneful teutonic influences and intrigues at the courts of Petrograd
and Athens, was gigantic, and that the terrible conflict would surely
develop into a struggle for life and death between human freedom and
barbarism.
This feeling of over-confidence was passing away, when it became evident
that to triumph over the modern huns and their associates was no easy
task; that the goal of freeing humanity from the threatening universal
domination would require the most determined effort of the nations who
had heroically undertaken to reach it.