We are all concerned for the good name of our community, for its
reputation and its character. Most of us are concerned for the welfare
of our nation, for its place of honor and influence and power among
the nations of the earth. Canada is one of the youngest among the
self governing peoples. It is only forty-five years since we became a
Dominion, and we begin only now to find ourselves as a nation. A people
who gain self-government become in reality a nation only when they are
animated by some dominant purpose to preserve their ideals by further
achievement. The preservation of whatever we have found to be worthy
in the past,--the good, the true, and the beautiful,--by using them
in everyday life for further accomplishment and attainment,--that is
conservation. There have been rotations of nations and of civilizations
on the face of the earth, as there have been rotations of crops on the
fields of the farm. This year's crop is for its own harvest and also
to prepare the land for the crop to follow it. The far foresight which
peers thoughtfully into eternity while planning for tomorrow is also a
part of conservation.
In common use the word "conservation" becomes a bland and comprehensive
expression into which we put all our scattered convictions and
aspirations and gropings after what is best for the largest number
of people for the longest stretch of time. It took on a new meaning
when Theodore Roosevelt used his megaphone on it. And because it is an
omnibus with room always for one more,--for one more idea, one more
suggestion, one more policy, it becomes mightily popular.
The first concern of conservation is necessarily with natural
resources, but it does give a significant purpose to all the activities
of a nation and of an individual. The large, inclusive aim of Canada
in conservation is that Canada shall be great in the character of
her people, great enough to match the matchless heritage that has
come to her in blood and ideals, in possessions and institutions, in
opportunities and obligations. Canada's contribution to humanity in a
large, uplifting way will be in the perfection by a composite people,
diverse in origin of race, language and religion,--the perfection by
such a people of the finest of all fine arts, the fine art of living
happily and prosperously together, while working with intelligent skill
and unfaltering will for ends believed to be for the common good.
These large ends include the improvement of the material and social
setting of every home, the refinement of the inherited quality of life
of every child and the reformation from generation to generation of
the habits, standards and ideals of the people. All to the end that we
may find satisfactions, large, broad and lasting, through invigorating
labor, social service and abiding good will amongst ourselves and also
extended to all our neighbors.
Let me give you a very brief glimpse, merely an indication, a
suggestion, here and there, of what we are trying to do. First of all,
a word on what we have in possessions to conserve; then a glimpse or
two of what we are doing with our estate; afterwards a glance at what
we are seeking for ourselves; and finally a look in on what we stand
for as a young people among other kindly and competing nations.
=On What We Have=
We have a great deal. Never before in the history of the race did
seven millions of people have such a heritage come into their free
possession. Half a continent wide and a whole continent long,--that
is our estate. We are happy in the setting of our national life. A
very brief survey of what it means to us and what it is in itself must
suffice this morning. Who knows it? I hear people speak of Canada as
a red patch on the map, as a stretch of prairies where wheat grows,
as the northern fringe of the glorious free republic of the United
States. These hardly shed a candle power of light on our estate. Half
a continent wide and one-sixth of the way around the globe! If Europe
were eleven in area, we are twelve, and much of it habitable, destined
to be the setting of fine homes of a robust people.
Let us take Canada in four areas, in thousand-mile stretches. We can
afford to speak of ourselves in those dimensions. A thousand miles in
from the Atlantic,--where else do you find a better place for homes
for a dominant people whose purpose it is to pull up by strength and
intelligence and justice and good will, and not to crush down and hold
back? Dominant because the human race can be at its best in physique,
in endurance, in tenacity, in capacity, in aspiration, where apple
trees grow in beauty and bounty and the summer air is full of the
fragrance of clover blossoms. Think back through your books, and over
the globe, and into the lives of the people. Recall the old stories,
the apple trees of Eden and the land flowing with milk and honey. After
all, physical setting means much for the glory of human life. This is a
fine stretch of a thousand miles for homes, of apple trees and clover
blossoms with plenty of running water, with skies decked in beauty by
clouds, with showers and sunshine in alternate abundance, and farm
houses with yards full of children rolling on the grass picking flowers
and climbing the apple trees. That is worth while,--to have a thousand
miles filling up with homes, willing for more to come and share their
joy.
Then we have a thousand miles of wilderness, a great reservoir north
of the Great Lakes. It tempts the adventurous to seek gold and silver;
great areas for trees, and lakes to refresh the thirsty land on both
sides by the genial droppings from the rains gathered from the wastes.
Then come a thousand miles of prairies, stretching out to the foothills
of the Rocky Mountains. It took a thousand times a thousand years
to make that place fit for our possession and habitation now. The
frugality of prodigal nature was storing in the soil plant food for
crops for thousands of years, not that men might ship wheat, but that
boys and girls should have the finest chance that the race had known
hitherto to be a strong, dominant, lovely and loving people. A thousand
miles of prairies! Why do your people flock over to those prairies? Not
for greed of money. I have been enough in the States to know that you
libel yourselves in one unkind way. You say the American worships the
almighty dollar. Chase the charge down and he wants the dollar for the
sake of a home, for the pleasure of conquest, for the worship of some
boy or girl, to give him and her a better footing and a better start.
The call of Canada is not merely from property and a chance to get
it. The call of Canada is the call of a wide chance for possessions,
for a piece of good land to own for oneself. It is also the call of
the land where law is respected, as well as obeyed. It is most loudly
and convincingly the call of a land with chances for children. That is
what pulls them here, the chances for children; and these newcomers are
amongst the foremost of those who see that the biggest and best and
best-sustained building in the place is the public school.
Then we have five hundred miles, half a thousand, going over the
mountains to the Pacific Ocean. It is a piece of the great Creator's
fine art in the rough, with the impressiveness of nature's majesty and
the instability which endures. Tucked in between the mountains are
fertile valleys with peaches and plums and wheat and all good things
to sustain the homes. A great asset is that five-hundred mile strip,
the mountains pregnant with coal and gold and silver, and the streams
teeming with fish from the inexhaustible feeding places of the north.
That is a glimpse, merely the head-lines, of our national home, our
real estate; and we believe the people will be quite a match for it. We
come to feel the responsibility for that now.
Only a word or two of detail. We have forests in vast areas, some of
them as yet unsurveyed, and a climate and soil which lets nature far
more than restore the lumberman's cut. Our forests are inexhaustible
in the abundance of their serving power for coming generations; now
that we have begun to conserve them by preventing fires, by providing
patrols, and also by diffusing knowledge, training and conviction
throughout the common schools. Then we have fisheries. Many of you
come up here and regale your friends for evenings afterwards by fish
stories. I speak of the great value to Canada of fish and fishing.
When I go to the coasts, how I glory in the conservation of life by
fishing! I fish a little. One of my pawky friends once gave me a book
called "Fishin' Jimmy." It had one sentence with which I comfort myself
when I feel disposed to fish when I should be otherwise diligently
employed. It was this, "Young man, the good Lord, when He needed
fellows to help Him for the biggest job ever taken up, picked out chaps
who caught fish." Think of Nova Scotia, the fishing smacks, the men
who are not afraid, those who go down to the deep in ships, they see
the wonders of the Lord while they do their duty for their families.
There is conservation of the quality of life by the un-boasting and
the uncomplaining, heroic commonplaces of daily toil. With quiet
tenacity, against conditions of discomfort which cannot be escaped, and
carelessness of personal ease such men teach us how to live. Then we
have waterways, and water powers, not merely to illuminate houses and
run cars, but to enlarge leisure by having our heaviest tasks done by
man's further alliance with the electric current. Then we have minerals
and lands. Each of these merits more than a discourse for itself. I
feel the incompleteness, the insufficiency, of my statements of our
resources and our efforts towards conservation. However, just a word
about lands, good land and fertile land.
Take an example, one only. Seager Wheeler lives north of Regina. How
our hearts go out in sympathy to those people who suffer from nature's
inhuman manifestation of her strength. (A reference to the Regina
cyclone of the day before.) I have not learned to look up through
nature's devastations to nature's God, but I have learned to look
through human life to man's God,--Whose tender mercies are over all
His other works. Seager Wheeler lives north of Regina. Out at the
Experimental Farm, where we were on Saturday, Dr. Saunders, patiently,
quietly, modestly, brought together a strain of wheat from Calcutta
and a strain of wheat from the North-West. A new child is born unto
us in Wheatland. Seager Wheeler gets some of that wheat and begins
the process of selection on his own farm, "the best out of the best
for the best." Last autumn I was in New York at the back-to-the-land
exposition. A thousand dollar prize in gold was there for the man who
would bring the best bushel of wheat from anywhere on the continent.
The judges were expert men from the United States, and Seager Wheeler
from the middle of our North-West plains won the thousand dollar prize
for his bushel of wheat from that part of our land. More than that,
I have a photograph of the plot from which this bushel of wheat was
taken, and it measured up 80 2-3 bushels to the acre. No wonder we
think well of our land, and you folks want to get some of it.
One other sentence only, otherwise I should be beguiled into talking
far too long about our lands. In these days, dangerous in their clamors
for bigness and swiftness and luxury, one needs to remind himself that
satisfactions do not come from these things, but from honest labor
whereby one conserves the strength and beauty of some part of nature
and man, and develops power and joy in another unit of nature and
man, making the earth and man rejoice together. Truly a nation's life
consisteth not in the abundance of the things it possesseth.
=On What We Are Doing=
We in Canada are happy in the occupations of the people, as well as in
the setting of our lives. What has occupation to do with conservation?
Occupation conserves the best that humanity has achieved in human
beings themselves. Not books? It would be a loss if all the books were
taken from us,--it would be a loss somewhat modified by the advantages.
But whosoever will offend one of these little ones in whom is conserved
all the achievements and attainments of the race to this day, it were
better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck. The menace
of books is that they sometimes crush down and crush out the aspiration
of young life for joy in constructive, creative, co-operative labor,
through merely selfish, silent reading for gratification. We are
happy in the occupations of our people that minister to greatness
in character. A new country like ours needs the constructing and
conquering qualities, more than the sedentary, absorbing, remembering
capacities. The farmer follows one of the conquering, constructive
occupations, gathering wealth out of the otherwise chaos. His labor
creates wealth and conserves the health and virility of the people.
What a grudge I have against the modern factory that, in making things,
debases men. I do my thinking aloud in a meeting like this. Therefore
I do not flatter. I will warrant we should not have women, as I have
seen them, working in factories, with poor air and little sunshine amid
the infernal rattle of machinery, if we believed in our heart of hearts
that things were for homes and that good homes for all the people was
the dominant object of a strong nation. Why should I have cloth in my
house because it is cheap--when it is transfused by the blood of women
in Leeds? Why should I want a coat on my back that carries with it the
stain of tears from children who have had no chance? Why should I walk
easily in boots, factory-made in order that they may be a dollar a pair
cheaper, when I have seen women atrophied by the monotonous poverty
of their job who should have been mothering a family and nursing the
aspirations of young people? We do not want to have things, things,
things as our idols and our end in life.
The fundamental occupations which engage the large majority of our
people are farming, making homes and teaching and training the young.
The farm, the rural home and the rural school together provide the
opportunities and means of culture in forms which children and grown
people can turn into power--power of knowledge, of action and of
character. Farming is much more than moving soil, sowing grain,
destroying weeds and harvesting crops. It is taking care of part of
the face of Mother Earth as a home for her children. Making homes is
much more than building houses and providing furniture, food, clothing
and things. It is creating a temple, not made with hands, as a place
of culture for the Divine in us. Those who live by agriculture are not
all of the earth earthy, and the rural home is a fine school for the
soul. Teaching and training the young is much more than instructing
children in the arts of reading, writing and reckoning--those flexible,
useful tools of the intellect. Much of the time of the school has been
consumed in these tasks; but now we come to a happier day when those
arts can be acquired joyfully in less than a year and a half, instead
of painfully, reluctantly and with difficulty as spread over six years.
The main portion of the school time will soon be devoted to caring for
the health, the habits and the standards of the pupils while watching
and directing the development of their powers of body, mind and spirit.
These three fundamental mothering occupations in Canada nourish and
sustain all the others, such as commerce, manufacturing, transportation
and the professions. By means of them, followed as well as they can be
by an educated and cultured people, the country will be kept prosperous
and fertile. It can be made beautiful only by radiant homes, whence
youth will go forth from generation to generation to refine life by
their characters, to exalt it by their ideals and to improve its
conditions by intelligent labor.
I must say a word or two as to whence we got the impetus, the stimulus,
towards conservation. Intelligent, conscious, planned and organized
effort for conservation came to us from Washington. We are the
Washington of the North in more ways than one, and I think I express,
if I may venture to do so, the hope and conviction of my friend Sir
Wilfrid Laurier when I say that, a hundred years hence and less, the
Washington of the North will be more than abreast of the Washington
of the South because of the influence, the moulding influence, of
climate and homes and schools such as we in this country will have.
But the Washington of the South had a great gathering in 1908, when
the Governors of all the States and others were assembled to consider
conservation. I read the report of the proceedings with some care. Then
I turned more than once to read, right after it, an old classic about a
gathering in the time of King Ahasuerus, the gathering of the governors
of 127 provinces. And I laid down the Bible with the conviction that
that Ahasuerus assembly was no higher in its essence and in its fruits
than a pow-wow debauch of Indian chiefs on the plains. Take the setting
and the spirit of the Ahasuerus crowd--self-seeking, careless of human
rights, neglectful of children's claims. That story was worth recording
as a great exhibition of monstrous selfishness, the thing itself--worth
avoiding, worth opposing, worth smiting to the death every time it
rears its ugly greedy head. On the other hand, consider Washington. The
governors of sovereign states come together, for what? Not to consider
how they might enrich themselves at the expense of the weak and those
in their care, but how they might conserve for all the people, the
property of all the people, for the benefit of all the people, for
the longest stretch of time. That was a great gathering. It will go
down in history as marking a new epoch in human activity and endeavor.
And whatever may be said amid the transient controversies of party
politics, the name of Theodore Roosevelt will stand out illustrious
for leadership in a new effort for conservation that saves, not merely
forests and material resources, but that saves moral earnestness among
the people. I have no sympathy, myself, with your own harsh criticism
of these political conventions you are holding now in the States. Not
being a politician, I can speak of politics without fear. May I tell
you what my thinking has been? Perhaps only twice before did the United
States ever get such service, such an awakening--when you had the
struggle for liberty, and, afterwards, the war for freedom. What means
the present commotion which bursts through conventional conventions
of polite speech? Is it not that you shall be saved from a supine
sense of satisfaction with having only things--from the loss of great
concepts of justice and right aflame in moral earnestness? I rejoice
with you that we are indebted to Washington for impetus and stimulus
in moral earnestness regarding forests and other resources. That is
Gifford Pinchot's contribution--not to make lumber cheap, but to make
the land fertile and prosperous, that boys and girls may be beautiful
and strong and glad. Worth while is the moral earnestness that uses
materials only as the mechanism of its efforts for the improvement of
life.
Then Canadians attended officially another meeting in Washington in
1909, came back and Parliament instituted a Commission of Conservation.
That Commission has been at work for three years seeking to serve our
people by showing how they could improve themselves as well as their
circumstances through effort to conserve their resources.
On the Provincial experimental farm in Wellington County, Ont.,
Professor Zavitz works. He took thin, light grains from a variety of
oats, and sowed those by themselves; and, from the same variety, he
took plump, heavy, dark grains, and sowed these by themselves. For
twelve years he followed that plan on the same soil, under the same
climate, with the same management. At the end of twelve years the crop
from this plump seed rose by twenty-six bushels more to the acre and
ten and a half pounds more to the bushel than the crop from the poor
seed. That was conservation secured by intelligent application and good
management. You can do that with life as well as with seed and with
land. The long distance aim as well as the local object of conservation
is to make Canada a better country to live in and a more beautiful
country to love; and to make Canadians a people of greater vigor, finer
texture and nobler character.
=On What We Are Seeking=
We in Canada are a composite sample of life. We have come to us
Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Gallic, Teutonic, Slavonic and others. All these
streams of blood flow over Canada and mingle in us. It is not any
longer with us merely a toleration of an individual or of an idea
from Russia--or the States--but an appreciation of the person and the
idea, to make them serve our people better. There is conservation in
that. The best we have inherited is the quality of life. Our more
immediate ancestors loved liberty, prized intelligence and cherished
justice. These they had won by courage, by struggle, by patience and by
privation. They left them to us to be improved by education. Concepts
such as these are what count in the great issues of life.
Let me without any offense or bad taste be personal and speak of one
of my ancestors. He has been dead a long time. I didn't know him. But
not infrequently I can feel the thrill and the efforts at domination
of his convictions and his habits. I remember a dog biting me. I could
have strangled the creature with my hands. I did not learn that in
school, but I had the instinct in me from that old ancestor. I can
think of him in a cave, living a bare coarse life. But he conserved the
chance for the babies; and the lion and the wolf and the bear could not
stand against the club and the fire which he used for the protection
of his wife and children. Coarse! Of course he was. A thing of paws
and claws and jaws! But he conserved his concepts of duty, his ideals
of protection for the young and the weak. His concepts and the labors
and struggles they involved by and by refined his body. Then, ages
afterwards, 20,000 or 30,000 years afterwards, we had Lord Lister. Two
hundred and fifty thousand women saved annually through the service
of his refined brain and his trained hands, and his large concepts of
duty. And we had Florence Nightingale; and you had Abraham Lincoln.
And we all have everybody and anybody that conserves concepts of joy
and glory through duty discharged by constructive, contributing labor,
social service and abiding good will. In these and others innumerable
we have a heritage, not made with hands.
Time fails me even to name all our other heritages which are not in
material resources. There are customs, institutions, laws, manners,
ideas, traditions, standards, ideals, art, songs, language and books.
Books are more than material things. They are material humanized into
food for the mind and spirit as soil and air may be glorified into
apples and flowers for the senses. Sometimes produced with immense
pains, they bring infinite joys. The Kingdom hath come to us for such a
time as this when a new day dawns for happiness and well-being on earth.
Some of the means under modern conditions through which further
advances in the formation and conservation of character are to be
looked for are,--first those which lead young people to the achievement
of joy through the processes of labor as distinguished from its wages
or other rewards. Every child who is given a fair chance can manage
that. In this a little child may lead us. Secondly, those which produce
the pleasure of working together for some end believed to be good for
all. Will not school pupils and older students work themselves into
social efficiency, by co-operating in productive labor, as well as
play themselves into ability by means of team games? Both together are
better than twice as much of either alone. Thirdly, those which yield
gladness through creative work whereby each individual strives to
give expression to his own concepts of utility and beauty in concrete
things as well as in words and other symbols. The insistence, by
school and college, upon passive receptiveness for prolonged periods
may have disciplined the mind for the perception of symbols, and
the understanding of theories and rules. But has not the heaping of
instruction upon enforced passivity led to an atrophy of the love of
constructive creative labor? Immobility in classes all day long is
not goodness. That sort of thing is the one persisting attribute of
the dead or the nearly moribund. Every man who actively conserves
these constructive, co-operative, creative powers, and achieves joy
and satisfaction through their exercise, saves himself and becomes a
saving factor in his community. In doing these things he transfuses the
routine of life by a spirit of trained intelligence, cultured ability
and habitual good will. The use of books and book-information are a
helpful aid to the growth of mental power, the development of moral
ideas and the progress of education. Books furnish some of the food and
stimulus to thought. But when these are not turned into service through
action, they become so much cloying debris upon vitality.
I have happily seen enough in the last few years to bring me to the
conclusion, that, in less than ten years on this continent, all
children from rural homes will come to the schools at 6 or 7 years of
age able to speak better than they speak now, and able to write and
read and to figure up to division. They will come to school able to do
all that, having played themselves into ability. We have been on wrong
lines in making a child take up a book at six, and so far as schooling
is concerned, stay under the domination of a book until he is sixteen.
Then he has been liberated into a laboratory, or into life, and says,
"Thank the Lord that book business is done!" That is not wise, that is
not safe. How the book has menaced humanity in recent years, on all
sides, by its insistence that reading is the end of education, the main
means and object of culture, instead of being merely a contributing
means toward the larger end of living. You people concerned with books
must take the bread of life in your hands and minister to life, not
under the guise of book-learning, but for the formation of habits and
standards and fine ideals.
Put into the language of everyday life the main steps in every complete
educational experience are: observing, thinking, feeling and managing
towards and into some form of expression. It appears to me that the
closer in point of time the steps are taken together, the greater the
growth of power and the surer the formation of habits. Frequency of
experience is what forms habits and not repetitions of instructions or
information. In so far as these experiences can have close relation
to the threefold activities demanded by life, so much the better for
the culture of the student, even if not so complimentary to a subject
or its professor. I mean the activities which we explain as those of
body, mind and spirit in the individual's capacity as an earner, a
member of society and a trustee in the scheme of life. No doubt this
runs counter to the common notion that culture--even real culture as a
process and as a result--develops and implies a certain aloofness from
the practical work done by men and women to earn their living, and a
sweet, or sour, sense of superiority to utilitarian questions of bread
and butter. But we must not forget that invigorating toil--invigorating
bodily toil--is the only known road to health, strength and happiness.
Nowadays culture is becoming a term almost as elusive as education
itself. Agriculture was doubtless the root, the root word as well as
the fundamental process, of human culture. The man on the farm gets
some light on its intrinsic nature from his occupation. To him culture
stands for crops, the best in quality and the largest in quantity that
can be obtained, for the suppression of weeds, insects and disease,
and for the increase of beauty and fertility. Culture has no origin
in idleness, indolence or sloth. These make for the corrosion of all
the vigors of the physical and mental and moral nature. Culture means
plowing and harrowing and sowing and hoeing. It means labor and sorrow
as well as play and flowers. It means the ripping of the iron share as
well as the genial affection of the sun. Culture is far deeper than the
polite polish on the skin of manners and speech. It is not gained by
the mere learning of languages, living or dead, or the acquisition of
knowledge, scientific or superstitious, in the poetic meaning of that
word. It is the residuum, the leftover, such as it is, in character--in
body, in mind and in spirit--after every completed educational
experience. From actual practice comes skill in the finest of all fine
arts, the fine art of living happily together while working for some
good end. Alike in school and college, on farm and in factory, in
shop and office, in home duties and public affairs, that kind of life
develops a quick sense of responsibility, it establishes good standards
close by which are understood, it nourishes conscience and strengthens
the will-energy towards further culture, better work and happier
living. These things we seek to conserve, using our material resources
for the enrichment of the quality of life we have inherited, in order
to pass it on undiminished and unimpaired.
=On What We Stand For=
This end of an educated people, cultured in character, which itself is
only a means towards the largest end, is worth striving for and worth
living for. All life is an unceasing struggle. The point is to choose
the right objects and means. In the past, humanity has been winning
all along the line with an occasional setback such as threatens the
present. Its warfare is ever against ignorance, helplessness, poverty,
disease, vice and ill-wills. Education is to train individuals for that
warfare. Its endeavors are most successful when the experiences which
it provides for each individual are in themselves a vital part of the
hard campaign. It must ever vary its strategy and tactics and weapons,
as the field of operations is moved forward. Times change and we change
with them. The need of the times is education to qualify us all to
achieve satisfaction through labor and service and good will.
Finally, I present to you the more excellent graces of conservation as
earnestness, cheerfulness and the habit of cherishing and following
high ideals. At first these are rather traits of character in embryo
than fixed attitudes or habits of mind. The particular and specific
disciplines of life and of good books are to correct softness, to
promote gentleness and to develop a capacity for enduring and enjoying
hardness as a good soldier of truth, beauty and goodness in everyday
life. In reality, each individual disciplines himself in liberty, by
self-government, by diligence, by rational obedience to authority and
by co-operation. The discipline which develops character and power is
administered from within; external regulations are like the finger
posts to indicate the open path and also the place where trespassing
is forbidden. In the choice and in the action is discipline. "Choose
ye this day whom ye will serve" is at the parting of the ways every
morning, and is seldom displayed in prominence at the dramatic crises
of life. Habits are grown in quiet ways, like the shapes of trees and
the budding and ripening of fruit. They become the destiny "which
shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." The librarian and every
other citizen who lives and moves and has his being in an atmosphere
of earnestness, cheerfulness and high ideals, is ready for his best
work. Such men and women go through life with open minds, with broad
sympathies, and appreciative respect for all the worthy achievements
and attainments of men and women, of boys and girls. Their patriotism,
their humanity, in brief, their conservation of character, finds its
best accomplishment in making and leaving a better place, with a better
path, for better children, to carry the torch of life onward and
upward, clearer and stronger, because of what they have been and done.
From one of yourselves (Ella Wheeler Wilcox) we have beautifully
expressed one of the great dominating purposes which I think animates
all Canada today:
"Build on resolve and not upon regret
The structure of thy future: do not grope
Among the shadows of old sins, but let
The light of truth shine on the path of hope
And dissipate the darkness: waste no tears
Upon the blotted record of lost years;
But turn the leaf, and smile, oh smile, to see
The fair white pages that remain for thee."
At the conclusion of Dr. Robertson's address a brief paper was read by
Sir James Grant on some of the literary products of Canada. Following
this paper Professor John Macnaughton, of McGill university, delivered
an address on "The value of literature." He protested vigorously
against the present day tendency toward pure utilitarianism in
education and pleaded for a large place for the great and ennobling
literature of the past in our educational systems.
* * * * *
The CHAIRMAN: I have the pleasure of asking Sir Wilfrid Laurier to
serve the Canadian libraries and librarians in presenting a little gift
to the president.
SIR WILFRID LAURIER: Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am entrusted
with a very pleasant duty. The Canadian members of the American Library
Association are desirous of presenting to its president some expression
of their respect and esteem, and they have chosen to convey it in the
shape of a gavel which they want to present to you, Madam President. It
is of Canadian wood and Canadian silver, and I hope you will carry it
with you as a token adding pleasure to your sojourn here, pleasant at
all events for all of us, and, I hope, for you also.
President ELMENDORF: Sir Wilfrid. Mr. Chairman and Canadian friends:
This beautiful gift to the association is made, I am told, of Canadian
wood inlaid with Canadian silver. Of course Canadian wood means the
wood of the maple and how does that wonderful close fiber come into
being? The maple leaf reaches upward into the free air and there
it gathers sunshine and the gases of the atmosphere and combining,
converting and solidifying these impalpable things into fiber stores
them away as this beautiful wood.
What is literature and how does it come into being? By means of the
printed leaf, out of human life, are gathered individual knowledge,
experience and emotion and combined and converted these individual
contributions pass as wisdom into the race mind there to be stored
forever to
"Help such men as need."
You have thus given us fit symbol indeed of our profession.
Just one thought more. I come from the border line where there is much
hope that some permanent memorial of the hundred beautiful years of
peace may be built. In the same spirit, I hope that this gavel may be
the only weapon ever raised to enforce order between Canadians and
Americans.
Mr. BOWKER: Let us remember "kindness in another's trouble" and that
even a closer bond than the common work in our profession, is the bond
of sympathy in time of loss.
I move, in view of the partial destruction of the public library at
Regina and the great catastrophe that has come to her people, that
the president of the American Library Association be authorized and
requested to send the sympathy of this conference to the public library
and the people of Regina.
The motion was agreed to unanimously, and the message ordered sent.
Adjourned.