Nationhood Within the Empire

PRESIDENT EAYRS introduced the speaker, who said

Mr. President-gentlemen-you hear a great deal, these days, of the inexhaustible resources of this Dominion. I have no doubt they are very great; just how great, I, not being versed in such matters, must leave to others to estimate and to ascertain.

Great, too, are the resources of such stretches of land as the Atacama desert or the islands off the Pacific coast of South America whence guano is shipped to all quarters of the globe. Great, in dim antiquity, seemed the resources of Spain to the ancient Romans. There is a tradition that the same Romans coveted Britain because its soil held tin. No doubt many of the old Britons grew very rich through the trade. We read in Tacitus that, with the Roman trade, such "alluring vices"-his name for luxuries-as the porch in front of the house, the bath with hot and cold water, and the pride and pomp of the formal dinner table found their way into the barbarous colony. But the canny old philosopher adds, "This sort of thing they, in their ignorance, called culture; whereas it was merely part of their slavery."

Is wealth, or, the same thing under another name, a great material civilization, at any time or in any place a thing to boast of?

True civilizations have always grown out of a spiritual soil, not a material one; and spiritually no nation was ever prepared to make a profitable use of a great material civilization until it was also ready to scoff at the so-called blessings which such a civilization had to bestow.

If a great material civilization was bestowed-as was the case with all colonial countries-upon a people that was spiritually unprepared for it, it could have only one effect, and that a coarsening one which necessarily prevented the deeper nature of that people from maturing its finest blossoms. It has been that way in ancient Spain. It did not produce a true civilization of its own. Is that what we covet for Canada?

But Canada has been aspiring to nationhood. Is Canada going to be content with the part which Spain or Sicily played in the Roman Empire?

Material resources are not going to give us a right to be proud of ourselves. The true importance of nations as well as of individuals can never be measured by economic standards. We cannot claim to be great because we are rich.

Let me, at the outset, state it as my fundamental belief that we, in the present, cannot be truly great except through what posterity will call so. With nations as with individuals "fame is the recompense not of the living but the dead".

Yet, when I look into the still short past of this our country, I find a few things which the people of Canada have done and of which they have a right to be proud; but they are not the things that are commonly mentioned.

Thus there lives, in the far east of this country, a distinct race, those of French origin. They were a conquered race once; they are a free race today. When they were flooded and almost drowned out by the Anglo-Saxon influx, they became a testimony to the world that a nation may be conquered and yet remain a nation by the strength of their inner cohesion. Who would say today that French Canada, though a group separate within and distinguished from the rest of the Dominion is any the less an integral part of that Dominion than any one of the other eight provinces? It is the highest praise both for French Canada and for the principles dominant in the British Empire that this unique situation has become a fact; within an Anglo-Saxon federation there lives an alien race not only willing but eager to uphold a union which at one time was forced upon it. That race has proved itself in adversity. We can only honour it on that account; in honouring it, we honour ourselves.

It has been said that Canada can never be a nation so long as it is a "dependency" within an empire. The best repudiation of that is what I have just said about French Quebec.

If next, from Quebec, we glance at the rest of the Dominion, we find a situation not dissimilar but applying to the whole.

South of our borders lives a mighty nation which is reaching out with its tentacles over the globe-with a view towards the Americanisation, as it is commonly called, of that globe; a nation proud of its wealth and power and proud of its great material civilization. But all over the world, even in the Latin republics of the western continents, we find a certain disquietude at the growth of its influence. All over the world that influence is, by thoughtful minds, considered as dangerous, as a shallowing of ancient standards, as a reorientation of men's minds and desires towards things material rather than spiritual.

The very word Americanisation is a challenge to us; for we, too, though living in Canada, live in America. Are we going to allow ourselves to be identified with that tendency of our neighbours to the south which bids fair to recast the values of life for an awe-struck world? Gentlemen, the fight is on between the ancient ideals of Europe and those of this new America which is asserting itself from day to day. There are those who have found a name for the process: The Drift of the Nations. The centre of gravity of the white world, they assert, is shifting. If it is, what is the meaning, what the direction of that change?

Civilization, in times gone-by, has meant a moral and spiritual trend; it is beginning, with us, to mean an economic urge; and thereby it is losing the only meaning it can have which is worthy of man. It goes without saying that in a great nation like that to our south there are many minds who clearly see the point at issue and who are fighting by our sides. But if we view the trend of the hour by-and-large, we cannot but come to the conclusion that, in that nation, the great Anglo-Saxon tradition as it came from Europe is in danger of going into eclipse. That tradition, itself part of the European tradition, a tradition old and grey-haired, perhaps, and certainly restrained and reticent, yet for all that still fiery-hearted, is a compound of the greatest religious urge which the world has seen, that of Judah, and the greatest artistic urge which the world has seen, that of Greece. Its God is the god of goodness and truth; its dream that of beauty; its law a retracing of that divine law born within us which cares for nothing but what is right; its aim, the realization of man's fullest potentialities as a creature formed in the image of God-that is, of the highest perfection which the human mind can conceive.

What bearing has all this on my topic? This, that from it I derive one of the most hopeful signs for our own Dominion.

Canada and the United States are of pretty much the same age.

But Canada, with her neighbour and brother growing faster and faster, has thus slowly grown up within that neighbour's shadow. It has had to stand the pressure of capital: one-eighth of the industrial enterprises within our borders, they tell me, are owned by American capital. It has stood the pressure of the example given by the shallow ease of the life led by the industrial masses across the border. It has stood the influx of millions upon millions of books which insinuate among us American ideas all the more subtly and effectively since they do so indirectly. It has stood the flood of American magazines which trumpet forth the new gospel of economic success more crudely perhaps, but also with a more brassy voice which immature minds find it hard

to resist; and as a consequence it has lost vast numbers of its young.

I come to the point at last. But in spite of all that the Canadian travelling in the United States is still recognized as a Canadian. They call us slow; let us glory in that epithet. A few months ago a cultured and learned European en tour in the east, in a conversation I had with him, scoffed at the idea of Canada's nationhood. What, he asked, have you done to lift you out from the mass of second-rate nations? We have done this, I replied; we have lived for centuries in the shadow of a more powerful brother, lured and driven to imitate him. We have withstood the influence of example and pressure and almost compulsion. What but annexation is missing in that domination exerted by a great nation over a smaller one. Suppose annexation came. Would it mean absorption? If we can trust the testimony of the past, it would not. We would still be a separate group within a huge whole, a group with its own individual character; just as within our borders Quebec is a unit, not hostile to, but differentiated from the rest.

Such is our achievement. Shall we rest on our laurels? A ,war is on; we can never rest.

What, then, is the essence of nationhood? Individuality of the nation's civilization.

If, however, nationhood manifests itself in individuality or characteristic distinction, the question arises, in what field of human endeavour does such a distinction show? A nation's characteristic national criteria cannot be looked for in material things. We must look for them in the things of the spirit. What are they?

We often hear the word spiritual used in a way which shows that there is much confusion as to its meaning. Yet the very good word proclaims that meaning with no ambiguous sound. It tells of the old dualism between body and mind, body and soul, body and heart. Material things concern the body, spiritual things concern mind, soul and heart.

Consequently, the so-called higher activities of man are commonly divided into three branches: religion, science, art; and we call the three eternal values for which man strives Goodness, Truth, Beauty. There was a time when religion alone fulfilled the three needs; it gave us, not only a system of ethics, but a cosmogony as well, and a subject for contemplation which embodied that perfection which we vaguely call beauty. That fact should remind us of a fundamental unity underlying the three activities. They are fundamentally one, even though they represent the three facets of a single crystal.

They satisfy one fundamental need of mankind, and that an emotional one. We wish to feel in accord with a great tendency or direction of development which we seem to observe in nature and in history. We wish to bring our intuitions into harmony with what we see, searching for that accurate truth which we feel must be one and must offer no contradiction. We wish to find in all things that at which we would look again and again, searching for that beauty which consists in perfection of design.

But the strange and, to us, incomprehensible thing is that religion-itself a birth of the human heart-demands of us a belief in things which we cannot grasp with our minds; that science, true science, confronts us on all sides with an enormous "We don't know and shall never know!" tracing out for us the limits of our ignorance rather than of our knowledge; and that perfection in things human cannot be attained, so that beauty is an ideal rather to be striven for than a goal to be achieved. These three antinomies are fundamental conditions of human life; and the unity of the three branches of man's higher activities as they are commonly called is therefore fundamentally a tragic one. It spells failure, and at the end of failure waits death.

All religion, all science, all art lead us on to that realization, and to a generally tragic reaction of the human soul to the fundamental conditions of man's life on earth.

No modern optimism, gentlemen, no labour-saving devices, no boast of natural resources and wealth will help us to be blind if we care to look. Should any one doubt, let him read the Bible. Let him read Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare. And when he has learned to cull the essentials from the inessentials, let him read such mirthless laughter as Aristophanes' comedies, or Moliere, or Congreve or Shaw.

It should be easy now to define the essential characteristic of nationhood. Nationhood must depend on a new or distinctive shade in the generally tragic reaction of the human soul to the fundamental conditions of man's life on earth.

In the general reaction to life and the universe of the people of Canada, and more especially of the older people, and again, more especially of the older people in our west, I discover, than, a continuation of that old, European tradition of which I have spoken, as distinguished from the new-born American tradition which has not yet found its way to the fundamentals.

But I also discover something which subtly diverges from that European tradition.

Yet, before I try to define these two things, I wish to wind up my central argument.

That Canada is one day going to be the economic centre of the British Empire may well be. Those who know more about such things than I do assert it; but it is nothing to boast of. We did not lay down the clay of its plains which bears its wheat-fields; we did not raise up its mountains nor wear them down to the point where they reveal their hidden treasures. We can boast only of what we have done ourselves. We can boast of the fact that we have stood out against the enormous pressure exerted upon us by a more powerful sister-nation; and that we still represent an individuality in the American family. If we are worthy and able to hold on to and make truly ours what was handed down to us, then, perhaps, in the distant, and yet, as the lives of nations go, not too distant future, Canada stands a chance of counting as one of the spiritual units which will go to make up a greater British Empire. And that is all we can say at the present.

It remains for me to define, or, perhaps, to illustrate rather what I have found in certain strata of the ever-shifting population of our west.

It consists in the unification of such a spiritual reaction to life and the world as I have spoken of. History teaches us that throughout mankind a national movement of such a spiritual experience-we might call it a unified, national movement of art and thought, or of art and religion has, in the past, proved to be the only thing which has ever justified the existence of any nation on earth. Material civilizations rise and fall; and the wind takes care of their fame. Spiritual civilizations endure. For an example, look at Judah and at Greece.

It is the spiritual content of a civilization which makes it endure for after ages. Greece and Judah are a reality today even though, as political units they have fallen into the dust. Just as the spiritual achievement of individual men is the only thing that remains when they lie under the sod. The reason is that spiritual achievement furthers mankind on its way-on that way which we must infer to be the way of a trend hidden in events, whether that trend be enforced by a divine will or inherent in a process which we have come to call evolution.

These men and women of the Canadian west where, I believe, they form larger groups than elsewhere, groups composed of all nationalities, are distinctly opposed to what we call the proud march of our great material civilization.

In an age gone insane with transportation and speedan age forgetting eternal things in the hunt for material things-an age reaching out, not for happiness, but for comfort and pleasure, and for that ease of life which, by the very conditions of man's existence on earth, is denied us-in such an age they stand unmoved-like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob--like the British yeomen of old-like the present-day, mid-European peasant-concerned with eternally valid things, things valid no matter where lifeis lived, no matter when-concerned with the problem of right living rather than with the problem of acquiring wealth--concerned with Goodness, Truth, Beauty-the goodness of the home, germ and breeding-place of the greatness of nations; the truth of their own reaction to life and the world, a reaction which is largely that of the Bible; and the beauty of that universe in which, for every pair of lovers, the evening and the morning still make the first day.

Many of them can neither read nor write. What does it matter ?

For in their perhaps dull and inarticulate way they strive for a very great thing; and if they heard me define it here in my own words, they would perhaps stand amazed and deny that they know what I am talking about. And yet it is there; and the thing they strive for is threefold. They strive for a final evaluation of life in terms of that eternity which is always present to them; they strive for a recognition of man's true place in nature, defined by the fact that he was endowed with the gift of reason; and they strive for a determination of the balance, so far attained, within themselves and their own lives, between man's beasthood and man's godhead.

By doing so, they prepare the soil from which new thought, new art can spring. And as, in this broad country of ours, old men and women from all quarters of the globe bend over dog-eared and frayed copies of the Bible and other cherished books, with muttering lip and the finger following the line, they are giving birth--they rather than the busy merchant or owner of forges--they rather than the smooth, imitative poet of our magazines-they rather than the glib writer of patriotic leading articles in our papers-to the things and thoughts that develop nationhood.

Let me add one more thing. In their eyes, as they read or speak, I have found a thing which I have never found in the eyes of European peasants. I don't know what it is; a new hopefulness perhaps. I don't know whence it comes; but it must be bred by something peculiar to Canada; whether, as some have asserted, that something be the wider spaces of our plains, the greater height of our mountains, the vaster extent of our indented shore-lines or what. I have sometimes thought that perhaps it arises from the fact that here they stand on soil which they can own; for I take it to be a desire still inherent in man as borne of woman to own that bit of land whence, with tentative mind, he reaches out into the dark mysteries that surround us.

In that reaching out he strives for that distinctive shade in the generally tragic reaction of the human soul to the fundamental conditions of man's life on earth which I have defined as individuality in a people's civilization. On that individuality, I have said, depends true nationhood. With that, gentlemen, I will rest my case.

Mr. Hector Charlesworth voiced the thanks of the Club to the speaker.