Special Luncheon Meeting

THE RT. HON. MR. MEIGHEN, President of the Canadian Club, introduced His Excellency, who spoke as follows: I must admit I arise before this great assemblage with some sense of guilt. Both great institutions which are represented around these tables today were good enough to offer me hospitality almost from the very moment that His Majesty the King asked me to come to Canada as Governor-General, and both institutions renewed their invitations most cordially when I arrived at Ottawa. I had not forgotten this and as I listened to the remarks which fell just now from Mr. Meighen, his most kindly words of welcome, and as I listened to the very cordial way in which you responded to Mr. Meighen's remarks I could not help feeling that it might appear ungrateful in me to have allowed seven months to elapse before availing myself of your invitations. I have not done so, allow me to assure you, from any lack of appreciation, but as it happened circumstances made it difficult for me to be in Toronto during the summer, circumstances which no one regretted more than I did after the very pleasant week I spent here last Whitsuntide.

Now I am here I do not mind admitting that I am not altogether sorry to have those months of Canadian experience behind me. I have obtained a few more months of experience of Canada. My family have done the same. My elder son has already had the opportunity of traversing the Dominion from sea to sea. My younger son, even more fortunate than his brother, has had his whole life's experience confined to the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. None the less gentlemen, the task that is set to the Governor-General upon these occasions is not easy. It is not easy for any Governor-General in his first year of office in this Dominion to respond adequately to such a welcome as your two clubs have always given to the King's representative when he comes to Toronto, and it is not made any easier for him when he thinks of the high standard which has been set by the distinguished line of his predecessors. However, gentlemen, I take courage from the experience of Abraham Lincoln. I remember, as you will, that he confessed to having some alarm when he was for the first time under fire, until he observed the curious behavior of those who were shooting at him and noticed that they were every bit as afraid as he. After that he felt much better and I feel better from the reflection that no doubt Lord Willingdon, Lord Byng, or even to go back into the past to that master of wit and eloquence, Lord Dufferin, that all of these may have experienced also a certain diffidence when they first went into action over the top of a Toronto luncheon table.

Before I left London, a friend of mine with a great knowledge of this Dominion gave me his views of various great cities, and when he came to Toronto he prefaced his remarks, I remember, by saying, "There are two things they understand in Toronto-the British Empire and a good horse. I could not help being reminded of this description a few days ago when I was casting my eye down the London Times and was reading the account of the reelection of the present Speaker of the British House of Commons at Westminster. His proposer recommended him on the ground that he was one of the best judges of Shorthorns in the country and went on quite naturally to add that he was very well fitted to preside over the House of Commons. This delightful observation, as Sir John Simon hastened to point out, is like some echo of the ancient Greek who said: "A good judge of cattle and metaphorically a good judge of character." Mr. Tony Weller, as Sir John Simon reminds us, recommended two friends of his as the wisest legal advisors to be found on the ground that "they were the very best judges of a horse you ever knowed." He went on, "The man who can form an accurate judgment of an animal -can form an accurate judgment of almost anything." You will now appreciate the extent of the compliment paid to you by the friend that I have quoted. That he was literally accurate goes almost without saying. Also I know it to be true, from what I have seen of the Woodbine, what I have seen of your Winter Fair, and what I have seen of your jumping teams at Olympia. But I am also glad to accept the description as meaning that in Toronto you can form an accurate judgment of anything. And I am equally confident that you have a very profound and" what is even more important today, an up-to-date understanding of the British Empire.

Now that expression "up-to-date" requires some explanation and an attempt to make such an explanation will be the substance of the few remarks that I will venture to submit to you this afternoon. In speaking of the British Empire some people are apt to speak as though it were a hard and fast principle, an abstract proposition, and to say according to their views it is a good thing or it is a bad thing, as they might say of prohibition, bi-metalism, or whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, or any of the thousand and one abstract problems that men discuss so heatedly. They look on the British Empire as a fixed political theory--crystallized and immutable, incapable of evolution or adaptation. I notice they sometimes jump to the conclusion even in high literary circles, that the days of the British Empire are numbered. If their premises were correct their conclusions might be justified, but surely their very initial conception of the Empire is wrong. In all history, since the days when clans, tribes and kingdoms first came into being, no association of human beings has ever been of a less rigid political abstraction than the British Empire. It is, I think, far more comparable to a living organism, so readily has it always adapted itself to ever changing needs of an evolutionary world; and in nothing has that elasticity, that healthy adaptability been more visible than in the relations between the Mother country and the great Dominions overseas. Within our own memory these relations have undergone profound development, keeping pace with the remarkable growth of the Dominions themselves, and the process goes steadily on; in the United Kingdom the British Parliament is actually occupied with yet another phase of it at the present time. And what has been the result? Has this widening of political responsibility brought with it a corresponding lessening of the hidden ties that first bound the Empire together? I see no reason why this should happen. In nature the yearly growth of a tree,, the constant thickening of its stem and the increasing spread of its branches do not denote decay at the root. On the contrary they are only possible when the roots are strong and healthy. And so too with the Imperial mechanism; the very fact that its several members are attaining a stage of development undreamed of a few generations ago is surely proof that the whole is sound. Belief in the British Empire must be grounded on a true conception of what the Empire is today, not on a dogmatic, hide-bound recollection of what it was yesterday, nor on any falsely built analogies from other Empires of the past. Those Empires fell because they were static. The British Empire lives because it is dynamic, because it is instilled with life force.

Those who so readily condemn Imperialism are as a rule speaking of a political stage that most Empires never survive but which ours has succeeded in outgrowing. It is in fact a remarkable feature of many institutions in human history that the gradual discarding of the scaffolding within, with which they were originally built up, has resulted not in the weakening of the fabric but in its consolidation. The finest examples that occur to one are those of the Monarchy and the family. As regards the family I think it is now generally accepted that the stern, infallible parental authority, in whose shadow some of-us here today grew up, is now a thing of the past. The fathers, wise fathers at any rate, no longer abrogate to themselves the undisputed control of their children's destinies in the way that they did less than a generation ago. The early Victorian father, who as you have just seen delineated by Mr. Rudolph Bessier in the "Barretts of Wimpole street," put down his foot emphatically on anything he did not entirely approve, is as extinct as the dodo. But though we do grumble superficially, at any rate, at the independent, almost untamable spirit in children, I think most of us agree that we get on better with our children than was the case fifty years ago. If the old fashioned conception of family law, dating as it did from the days of barbarism, has been allowed to sink into abeyance, the spirit of family life so far from weakening has gained in strength. The father who is a friend to his son finds perhaps parodoxically that he has more influence on his son's life than he would if he were a Draconian law-giver. And likewise I suggest to you in the evolution of the monarchy, that a statesman, say of the 17th century in Europe, would find it impossible to believe that it could survive and flourish with three centuries of rabid democracy, such as we have seen. Yet we who owe allegiance to the British Crown today pay that allegiance more whole-heartedly than ever our forefathers did. For we know that constitutional developments' however they may have affected the purely legal aspect of the crown, have left it emphatically stronger, essentially more powerful for good, than before. And we know too that. at no period of our British history has the wearer of the Imperial crown been more truly the leader of his people than His Majesty is today.

But if, as I have tried to show, the outward form of the British Empire has undergone evolutionary change to bring it into harmony with the constant march of civilization, there is corresponding change in the responsibilities and duties of its members. In the old days the obligations of the citizens of the old fashioned Empire--stake for example that of Rome--were quite simple; they admitted of little argument. In Rome you did what Rome told you, and if you did not you very soon heard about it. In the early stages of our own Imperial development, the British settlers who went overseas had little leisure to think of much else than the struggle against the forces of nature or against their savage neighbors. Their only material links with the Motherland were ships, that arrived at long intervals and after a time sailed away, taking with them, I should perhaps add, such taxes as the officers of the crown had been successful in collecting; they had practically no links with their fellow members of the Empire across the great oceans, and certainly no common interest. What a wonderful change a few generations have brought! What an extraordinary difference in the constitution of our British Empire today! I do not think that I can better contrast the difference than by quoting the terms of the final resolution of the conference of 1926. Some of you may remember it. "The Dominions", so runs the report, " are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or of their external affairs, but united by common allegiance to the crown, freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations." That is our present charter and I say to you that it is a fine charter and a splendid deed of partnership. But remember, such a partnership admits of no sleeping partners. The articles of association of the Empire have been brought up to date and so too have the responsibilities of all the members of the firm.

Modern business conditions permit of no dead heads and it is no less true that in any modern association of nations each nation must pull its own weight. The strength of a chain, as we all know, is the weakest link. If the chain of the British Empire is to stand the strain which all the troubles this post war world is bound to put upon it, each individual link must be as strong, as truly tempered as its fellows. The question must follow "how can such strength be attained?" After all, there can be no formula as to that. The several nations of the Empire are no longer cast in the same mold, even though the stuff that goes to their making is still fundamentally the same. The function of Canada, Australia, or New Zealand are all separate, and all distinct in our great partnership, but every one vital to its endurance and prosperity. These several functions cannot be defined in any single phrase. One can only say it is the paramount duty of each partner to make the best possible use of its own potentialities, of its own native genius, of its own material resources, and to evolve thereby the best type of citizen native to its own soil. Those are the responsibilities which, to my mind, are inseparable frown the right to partnership in our Empire. The duty of each nation, as indicated in biblical phrase, is to not wrap its national talents in a napkin.

If it were to fall to me to testify that Canada had a high sense of duty I should have no hesitation in doing so. But may I remind you that your talents, using once more the word from the bible, are many and diverse; the resources of nature, the hidden treasures of the mine, soil, forests-these are some of them; industrial energy, the determination of your people, are others. But there are still other talents which a nation must not neglect if she would attain her fullest stature, and chief among them perhaps is the talent of culture. It is not necessary for me to remind you that every nation in history that has earned the title of great has infallibly been associated with some notable contribution to the general culture of the world. The name of Greece,, to take the most historic instance, is inseparably linked with the drama, sculpture, and the philosophy that was her special glory. The most permanent contribution made by the Roman Empire was her system of laws, which has been the foundation of almost every other legal system. And it may well be that as the centuries go by England may be chiefly remembered as the birth place of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Newton. These are merely commonplaces. I merely mention them to enforce my point that Canada, if she is going to do justice to herself and to the Empire, must continue to foster her own cultural development, and let me be quite clear,, I do not mean she must merely keep touch with the culture of other nations. I mean that she must water the cultural plant in her own garden so that Canadian science and literature, art, music and drama may thrive as vigorously as those more material activities which are equally a part of the equipment of a great nation. I mentioned Canadian drama but before I sit down I should just like to make one remark upon that subject, for it is one that has always interested me. A great many people think that the drama is simply an entertainment. They are entirely wrong. The drama is an art, and just as the feelings and characteristics of a people are expressed in their singing, in their dancing, painting, sculpture and so on, so they can be expressed in drama. Drama in Great Britain existed and flourished years before there were professional actors or theatres run on commercial lines. Drama began on the village greens, the yards of the taverns, in cathedrals and in the churches. It arose as a spiritual and not a convivial feature of communal life.

York, for example, is, I think, the original godfather of Toronto, and it was one of the cities most famous 'in the 15th century for these plays. Through the centuries since, the drama lost her place as a part of national life. The days of the commercial theatres arose with the box office as their god. For the last two centuries the question of what is wrong with the theatre has been heard almost without intermission, and it is only in the present century in any part of the world that drama, which sprang from the people, gave a first sign that history was about to repeat itself. In Canada at any rate it has been apparent in the Little Theatre movement which has grown up and which has spread from end to end of the Dominion. Now what I should like to see is this movement extended. I should like to see a Canadian Drama League, Dominion wide, culminating perhaps in some great annual Dominion dramatic festival. On artistic grounds and even more on educational grounds and even most on national grounds, I throw out this suggestion for your consideration. For I believe such a movement would promote good fellowship and create a feeling of national solidarity. To be successful it would have from the outset the support of your great universities and educational institutions. I have not the slightest intention of inflicting my further ideas on you in this speech this afternoon. I have already trespassed on your indulgence but I do so because Toronto is not only a home of Imperialism, it is also a home of culture; and so I put the suggestion, contained in my last remarks, to you for your consideration as the time goes on, in the sure confidence that in the words of Mr. Tony Weller, in Toronto you can form an accurate judgment of anything.

Mr. Stapells, President of the Empire Club: It is my privilege to tender to His Excellency the thanks of these two clubs for his address. Your Excellency did the Empire Club the very great honour of just becoming its honourary president. Your graciousness is something which we will dearly cherish. It seems to me that with His Excellency's words ringing in our ears, this is an occasion upon which we might well pledge anew our loyalty to His Majesty our King; His Majesty's constant thought for the welfare and solidarity of the Empire has been evidenced once more by the selection of His Excellency to take his place amongst those distinguished governors who have so acceptably represented His Majesty here. His Excellency's constructive public utterances of which today's is no mean example offer us ample proof of His Majesty's wisdom. His Excellency is worthy of our respect, and our gratitude goes out to him today for his presence and his address.