A Canadian newspaperman once flippantly asked the late W. T. Stead:
"What do you think about continentalism in North America?"
The answer came just as flippantly:
"Every nation has a right to go to the devil in its own way. Canada
should not be denied the privilege."
There was a blunt candour about the reply that even from an egotist like
Stead meant infinitely more than the soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by
some of the visiting prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that
in establishing independence of the United States, Canada should cut the
painter from the Great British Commonwealth. But he was a trifle cynical
about the young nation, just as Disraeli was fifty years ago when he said
that "these colonies would yet be a millstone about Britain's neck".
Neither of them was more cynical about us than we usually are about
ourselves, never in theory, but in practice.
Most of the men sketched in the foregoing pages, as well as hundreds of
others in public life, realize that Parliament and Legislatures have a
hard time to keep themselves from going to the devil, and that so far as
they go along that road the nation travels with them. As an experiment
in nationhood we have some peculiar and original weaknesses, as well as
strengths. Belgium, for instance, could be tacked by Atlas overnight on
to one of our northward coasts, or set down as an island in some of our
northern waters, when only a geographer would notice the difference.
Belgium has a king and two million more people than Canada. We have
slightly more territory than the United States, when New York State alone
has as many people as our whole country. We are as big as many Britains
and we have enough railway mileage to make Britain a spider-web, when our
population is about one-fifth of hers and our ultimate authority in
democratic government comes from Downing Street. Yet there are prophets
among us who predict that we shall yet be the pivot of the Empire.
Once you begin to speculate about the future of this country there is no
end. And the past of the nation has rather little to do with estimating
its future. We have been a wide-open immigration country. In twenty
years we have transformed ourselves by a foreign policy with which
Britain had nothing to do. Twenty years more and we could do it again
with even more disastrous results. In 1867 the great compromise known as
Confederation tied four and a half millions of people into a political
unity. In half a century we doubled our population; built 30,000 miles
of transcontinental and branch lines of railway; made ourselves a race
congress imitation of the United States; enacted a National Policy of
protective tariffs that failed to protect us from ourselves; created an
Oriental problem on the Pacific, exaggerated a race problem on the
Ottawa, and developed an American-penetration system clear across the
country; sent a small army to help establish a similar government and
dual problem to our own in South Africa and a huge army to Europe to help
make the world safe for the kind of democracy of which we consider
ourselves a fair sample; created a small army of millionaires and had
bestowed upon us about an equal number of knighthoods as well as a number
of peerages, and four years ago petitioned the King through Parliament to
abolish the practice; gave a first mortgage on the country to one great
transcontinental railway, and a second and a third to two more which we
have since nationalized into government ownership because the roads were
bankrupt for the present and built for the future, which is yet a long
way off; developed a cycle of quite remarkable big industries and
federalized banks which a large element of our heterogeneous democracy
now consider a menace to the nation; and on the prairies which, shortly
after Confederation, we bought for a few millions sterling from the
Hudson's Bay Company, a Liberal Government, never contemplated by the
Fathers of Confederation, carved out two new great Provinces which for
ten years have tried to kill the Tory Party which gave the Northwest its
birth, all Liberalism that does not go back to the furrow, and aims to
abolish even the moderately successful economic system by which we have
come to our present state of comparative prosperity.
If that is the kind of thing that Stead meant by "every nation going to
the devil in its own way" it must be conceded that we have lost no time
over the going. We are among the forward nations, even though we are
less radical than Australia. No young nation ever accomplished visibly
and materially so much in so brief a period. We had the enormous
scientific resources of the 20th century to give us momentum. Perhaps we
were a little too fast on the down grade. We still take some inspiration
from looking at the map to reflect that no other part of the British
Empire occupies so strategic a position as Canada. We note that Canada
is not only the natural interpreter between Britain and the United
States--which it took some of our far-seeing statesmen a long while to
discover--but that we are also a transformer between the power-house at
Downing Street and the one at Tokio; that we are fair on the highway of
traffic and travel between London and Yokohama; that we have room within
a reasonable time for as many people as are now living in Britain, and
that if we are not too awfully anxious about going to the devil we can
make that population one of the most potential in the world for its size,
not only in producing things to eat and wear and export, but in helping
to hold the British Commonwealth steady long enough to let the old thing
work out its big share of the world's salvation.
Such is the outlook. Meanwhile we have our innate defects, the first of
which arises from the vastness of geography and the littleness of
politicians. Little politics in Canada are pocketed away in sections.
Some of our native born are the most parochial. There are groups in
Canada as un-national as Eskimos who in some respects are our best
citizens because they owe nothing to, and expect nothing from, any
Government.
People shout about assimilation, not knowing to what pattern, if any,
foreign peoples should be assimilated. The missionary goes abroad and
extracts from the heathen even the nobilities of his own faith and leaves
him often the miserable animosities of a creed. Political and social
missionaries in Canada make the same mistake about foreigners. It is a
great thing to Canadianize a race. But we ought to begin by
Canadianizing some of our native-born.
Even our public men believe in political servitude. A man goes to Ottawa
burning with zeal to inaugurate political liberation. Six months or a
year produces sleeping-sickness. He is given a hyperdemic [Transcriber's
note: hypodermic?] of conformity. He gravitates into the formula of a
group. His message is muzzled. If not, it too often breaks loose in a
tirade on behalf of some section littler than even any of the groups in
Ottawa.
Big men do not, as is often said, go into Parliament. There is a great
reason. The wonder is that the few big men we elect stay there so long.
Government is supposed to be business. But the business takes a long
while to do--even badly. Ottawa is the place where the national
field-glasses too often get turned wrong end about.
We are seldom honest about public men. A man's own party praises, the
opposite party damns him. In an old nation this intellectual strabismus
is pardonable. In a young nation it is a form of political suicide. We
too often wait for a man to make a great speech before admitting
independent of party, that he is anything great as a man.
Because Canada is so vast, political leaders find it necessary to
enunciate one doctrine here, another one there. This is an old trick;
playing the lights on stage when the spot-light is reserved for the big
local issues. We are constantly besieged by "national policies". Many
of them have very little to do with national citizenship. Most of them
sketch out milleniums that are never realized. We are a people of
extremisms. When national prosperity is the objective we tolerate, and
even idolize, any man who is bold and big enough to capture the country
with his special-interest programme. Then the delirium is over, heyday
is done, and the nation wakes up to classify as public plunderers the
very men whom it once regarded as the economic saviours of the country.
Our faculty of national criticism is not as yet strongly developed.
Thank heaven, we are not cynical; but it is better to be a hopeful cynic
than a disgruntled idealist. Men will arise with specious programmes by
means of which they can hypnotize a group and aim at capturing the
country. Progress carries on by means of such men and such groups. But
the devil himself stands behind the stage bush to prod these zealots into
the limelight and the next moment to lead the claque in the gallery. We
are carried away by the act, afterwards find that we have been duped and
hold indignation meetings after the show is safely ten miles down the
line.
Like all other nations we have had our share of "the new time coming".
During the war we had all the old parties dead and buried along with
patronage and race cries and public graft. But while the preacher was
busy over the funeral rites a number of chief mourners were somewhere
"making hay". A nation's adversity is too often some man's opportunity.
In moneymaking this is even worse than in politics. It is too easy to
shout and to shed tears. We deplore the past, suspect the future and
work hard to make ourselves solid for the present.
Many men in Canada do not regard public life as public service. There is
little or no preparation for doing the nation's business. Men are
log-rolled into Parliament and pitchforked into Cabinets. The work they
are expected to do has little or no relation to the work for which nature
and experience intended them. It is regarded a simpler matter to
administer a great State department than to manage a big industry.
Ottawa is the natural objective of all those who "want" something. When
interests camp on the trail of Governments and of Parliament, the
interest of the nation is going to suffer--and it always has. We are
paying in taxes now for the lobbying that went on ten years ago. No
Government is ever considered so patriotic and humanly powerful that can
resist the inroad of "big interests".
Bigger interests arise. In a storm of newly patented virtue they declaim
against the "big" ones. They fail to admit that they merely want to
usurp instead of to magnify Government. The political machine of the
country is regarded as a part of the machine by which special interests
prosper. In its efforts to repudiate such a connection Governments
resort to the trick of clamouring on behalf of "the people".
Presently even the people lose faith in Government. They come to believe
only in class-conscious groups. No nation can be big whose parties are
small. No parties can be great whose platforms are for the good of a
class or the veneration of what "my grandfather" used to think.
Elections are eternally war. A general election has for a sure sign the
prediction on the part of the Opposition that the Government intend to
"put one over" in order to grab another lease of power. Experience has
taught us that the prediction is too often true. It does not teach us
that it is time to abandon the expectation or the practice. Men who in
party bondage have helped to win elections by redistribution after a
census, and to award patronage to the victors, arise years later in
Opposition to denounce such practices when carried on by the present
Government. The pot usually succeeds in calling the kettle black. Hence
a bad black eye to political sincerity.
The average parliamentarian knows very little about Canada; much about
his own Province, or his own constituency, or his own group. Politicians
do not even travel except on business. A country of vast and variegated
human interest, of wonderful charm even for scenery, without considering
people at all, is the home of a large number of people burning to do
national work who know little or nothing about the life of the nation,
historically or otherwise.
President Harding solemnly predicts that the United States will produce a
race of supermen. He does not say how. He merely observes the need. He
knows that his country has gone the pace that will take generations of
coming back before any superman nation can begin to be. In Canada we
have not gone so far that we cannot easily come back. But we have no
vision of any future for this nation except a larger instalment of what
we have been.
We talk about being a nation when we ignore the very disadvantages that
militate against true nationalism. We bluster about national sentiment
and spend our money on paying to have ourselves Americanized. When we
are tired trying to explain that, we fall back into dithyrambics on the
Old Flag and the great British Empire.
But if we are ever going to be anything but a national and polyglot
sandwich between the United States and Great Britain, it is time we paid
some respect to the innate democracy of the British idea by developing
our own national identity. Our strategic position in the Empire will be
worth no more to us than our great native resources, or our bilingual
nationalism, or our pioneering history, or all combined, unless we elect
to make the biggest and best we have dominate our national life. This is
a big country that must become a great nation if those who aim to lead it
will abstain from little ways. We need more poetry in our public
affairs. More imagination in Parliament. More vision in the
Administration. More faith in the country. Less sectionalizing
propaganda everywhere. If we rise to the measure of opportunity, we may
yet prove that when the Fathers of Confederation hung our national future
on a great compromise and a transcontinental railway they were not
talking in their sleep; and that when Empire statesmen look to our
leaders for counsel we shall not send unto them any man who represents a
class-conscious economic group instead of a nation.
It is true that Governments have always capitulated to groups. We have
sacrificed a great deal for the sake of protection when that was merely a
tariff to keep certain industries from obliteration. But a nation cannot
be forever built upon smoke-stacks and blue-books. We can better afford
to have continental free trade and spiritual freedom as a nation, than a
high tariff and bondage to an industrial-financial-transportation group.
But if we gobble the bait of free trade, and find ourselves on the hook
of economic and national domination by the United States, our last state
will surely be worse than our first.