(Monday, July 1, 9:30 a. m.)
=Dominion Day Program=
Dr. James W. Robertson, C.M.G., took the chair, on behalf of the Ottawa
local committee, and called the meeting to order.
The CHAIRMAN: Your president has in her genial and successful way
insisted that the acting chairman of the local committee should preside
on this occasion.
Of most men one might say when they are forty-five they are middle-aged
and mature. This is the forty-fifth anniversary of the birth of this
Dominion; and Canada is still but a youth, a sturdy, growing, promising
youth among the nations. She is a people of great heritages, of lofty
aspirations and of fine ideals, and she has in Sir Wilfrid Laurier a
son worthy of herself. He will speak to us this morning.
SIR WILFRID LAURIER:[4] Though I have no claim whatever to be here
on this present occasion, still if my presence on this platform can
further convince our American visitors how welcome they are amongst us,
I can assure them that I would have traveled many and many a long mile
to swell the greeting with the seal and hand of the Canadian government
and the Canadian people. Welcome you are, not only for the good work
in which you are engaged, not only for the intellectual labors which
are your daily vocation, but also because whenever you cross our
borders, and whenever the Canadian members of this association cross
your borders, you and they are real missionaries of peace, apostles of
civilization, and those visits tend further to improve our relations,
to dispel old prejudices and to make us appreciate the blessings of
the peace which hath prevailed between your country and my country for
nearly a hundred years.
[4] Printed only in part.
May I take advantage of the present opportunity to remind you of the
fact, which has been twice already brought to your attention, that
today is the national holiday of Canada. We celebrate our national
holiday on the first of July, you celebrate yours on the fourth of
July,--but the resemblance goes no further. The day you celebrate on
the fourth of July recalls the fact that your forefathers wrenched and
violently tore asunder the tie which had bound them to the motherland.
I think I can call upon your memory to confirm that history attests
that this step was not taken lightly, that it tore the heart strings of
many and many of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, but
that it was forced upon them by the vicious policy that was followed
toward the colonists by the British government.
Our history is a very different one. The day that we celebrate in
Canada recalls no violence. On the contrary we celebrate the day when
the authorities of England, King, Lords and Commons, delivered unto
us a charter of union, of liberty and of local independence. Thus at
the very start our courses were cast in different directions. You
are a republic, we are a monarchy. We have kept the old monarchy of
England. As to the merits of respective forms of government, republican
institutions or monarchical institutions, I would not say a word on
this or any other occasion, because this has always seemed to be
an idle speculation. We know that the form of government is after
all a matter of indifference; we know that there must be a virtue
in republicanism, and we Canadians are here to testify that in the
monarchy of England there is as ample liberty as there is in any part
of the world, not excepting even the American republic.
Proud as I am to say that you have your democratic institutions, we are
blessed with institutions more democratic, and we have what Abraham
Lincoln called the government of the people, by the people and for the
people. I do not mean to say by this, Ladies and Gentlemen, that the
people never make mistakes. I speak for my country, not for yours.
But speaking for my country, I would say that at that we must not be
surprised nor angry, because it is an attribute of mankind, after all,
to err.
Though, Ladies and Gentlemen, as I have told you, our lots have been
cast apart, though you are one country and we are another, still, after
all, we can say with some pride that we have been friends, and better
friends we ought to be. Men there are in this country, I am sorry to
say, who are rather afraid of you American people. They believe that
you have some hostile design upon us; and some of your men have perhaps
harbored that thought themselves. But if these views are scattered
amongst some of my countrymen, they have not at all scared me; I have
no fear at all of the American people. I am not afraid of contact with
you. I would not be afraid to trade with you, to sell to you and buy
from you, because I believe that after all, proud as you have reason
to be of your own nation, we Canadians are just as good as you are.
But, if we cannot trade, if we cannot sell and buy,--and I would not
enlarge on this, because I would perhaps trespass on politics,--if we
cannot trade and buy from one another, at least we can exchange ideas,
sentiments, principles, and this is the very thing which you have been
doing in Canada during this last week. To this nobody can object. Ideas
and principles can travel freely across the line, and I believe that
everybody would be all the better for this interchange. So I have no
fear whatever that there should be an absorption of this country by
your country. And may I say what is my own ideal?
It seems to me that there is a greater future for Canada, and for
the United States. You have your problems and we have enough of our
own problems. We can afford to share the continent and we can be,
you Americans and we Canadians, the pioneers of a new civilization,
a civilization representative of the twentieth century. We can give
to the world this example of friendship without hesitation and with
perfect confidence in one another. The bane of Europe today is
militarism. All the nations of Europe are distrustful of one another;
they spend one-half their income for war, in military preparation one
against the other. Thank heaven, on this continent, we never think of
war with one another. We have the longest frontier that separates two
nations, and I thank God there is not a fortress to be found upon it,
nor a gun nor a cannon to frown across it. This is the example which we
give to the rest of the world. It is certainly an achievement of which
we have every reason to be proud; and when you, Ladies and Gentlemen,
come over to our country, as you have, you are further instilling the
truth of that sentiment, and my last word to you will be, as the first.
Come again, come often, and the more often you come the more cordial
and warm will be the welcome.
President ELMENDORF: I am quite certain that this audience would be
unwilling that some reply should not come from itself. May I ask Mr. R.
R. Bowker, whom I see in the box, to reply for the audience?
Mr. BOWKER said, that as he rose to propose on the part of the United
States members of the American Library Association a vote of thanks, he
wished to express the equal gratification of our fellow members that
we have received the hospitality, so unbounded, of the administration
of Canada, and especially that we had been thus welcomed by the man
whose presence personifies and whose name is a synonym not only for
his own party but for United Canada. He said the United States members
took only one exception to what he had said, and that was that they
used the word "American" in a broader sense than he. The American
Library Association means, not the United States, not Canada, but
both. We have no United States library association. We may almost hope
that there shall be no Canada library association, but we hope that
Ontario, with its library association, will be the pioneer to lead its
sister provinces into the fellowship and affiliation in which our other
associations stand in the American library association.
The speaker said it was not only in the brilliant and eloquent pages of
Parkman that the history of the two sister nations was interwoven; that
a man from Woburn, Massachusetts, was the first to see what the site of
Ottawa meant; that our own Thwaites had brought anew to life the deeds
of the Jesuit fathers and early explorers, and that Miss Plummer had
personally conducted many thousands of boys and girls of the children's
rooms through Canada with her "Roy and Ray."
Mr. Bowker said he supposed we did not rightly recognize Canadian
writers in the United States libraries because they were so thoroughly
a part of English literature, and that it would be very grateful if
some one so good as Mr. Hardy, the secretary of the Ontario library
association, could before the close of the meetings give a bird's-eye
view of Canadian writers.
"It is a significant coincidence that on this very day there goes into
operation throughout the British Empire a law which, if not for the
first time, at least most explicitly, recognizes the relationship of
the several English nations to the motherland, for the new copyright
code which today goes into operation states in so many words that
the self-governing dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New
Zealand and South Africa may adopt the imperial act, or modify it to
meet their own judicial process, or legislate independently. It is
interesting to some of us that this recognition should be so explicitly
made in the field of letters."
In closing, the speaker proposed that we express our thanks to our
Canadian brethren, our hosts who have been so hospitable, by a rising
vote.
Amid hearty applause the entire audience arose.
The CHAIRMAN: Before it became necessary for Dr. Otto Klotz, who was
and is chairman of the local committee, to be absent from the city, I
had agreed to deliver an address to the convention on Conservation in
Canada. The time having come, on the program, for that event, I propose
now to tell you a little of what we in Canada are doing to conserve the
best we have.