Canada's Heritage of British Traditions

CANADA'S HERITAGE OF BRITISH TRADITIONS AN ADDRESS BY THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF WINDSOR, DR. A. V. BAILLIE, C.V.O., F.R.S.A. (Links of Empire Series) March 7th, 1927

The Dean was introduced by the President, Col Fraser, and was received enthusiastically by the audience. He spoke as follows

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN,--I started from England with a very modest estimate of my capacity for public speaking. I am rapidly becoming convinced that public speaking is a thing that is turned on like a barrel organ whenever it is required, if you get sufficient practice. I have not yet spoken at breakfast, but otherwise-(sentence drowned in applause.) Now, gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure to be present here today, because a club of this sort is naturally a very congenial atmosphere to anyone from the Old Country, who is looking at the life of this continent with interest and regard. You are those who definitely value connection with the Old Country. (Hear, hear, and applause.) Now we have seen a great deal throughout the whole continent, and the interest-I may say the enthusiasm that has followed us has been very remarkable. People have told us in all sorts of places that they never remember anything that stirred the place, which ever it was, as much as this has done. Now that is a sign that there is in this country a real love for and affection for the Old Country; because, though we have a really quite adequate consciousness of our own virtus--(Laughter)--we do not beelieve that this enthusiasm is simply caused by them. We believe it has come from the fact that we represent in people's minds, through Westminster and Windsor, those things which are connected with the Old Country in England, and which are obviously dear to a very large part of the population of this northern part of America. That, of course, is a very happy feeling to us at home. And, naturally, I have also been trying to think what is the special advantage to you here in Canada of that connection.

I do not know anything about politics. I used to think that I might possibly come day understand something about it, but I have outgrown the idea. (Applause and laughter). I have no doubt there are very strong political reasons for the union; that is not my affair. But where I think the real value is, is that it preserves the tradition of English life as a living tradition in your national life. All these things out of which you have sprung, that long story of development with its triumphs and its glories and its mistakes, is part of your inheritance, and I believe that that is of very great value to everybody. I do not know if you have ever noticed it, that if you ask anybody which are the two countries which seem to have least power of understanding other countries and their outlook, the two countries always mentioned are France and the States. Now you will notice that both those countries severed their connection with the past in comparatively modern times. If you travel in France where there are great remains of antiquity, you will never find those remains of antiquity still living things associated with the life of today. The ancient buildings and all the things, are tabulated museum pieces, part of a dead past, but the actual life of today in France, its sentiments, its thoughts, its real developments, dates from the Revolution and Napoleon. It is extraordinary how little the previous France consciously affects the minds of people or the thought of people in France. In the same way in the States, Anglo-Saxons of America like to have a sentimental feeling about cathedrals and ancient buildings in England, and to say that they have a link with them through their fathers, but in practice, if you go through the States you will find that all national consciousness begins at the Independence. Now that seems to me to point to a very real fact, that if you lose contact with your past, it tends to narrow your outlook and prevent your having real sympathy and understanding of other people outside. I believe it is so in individual life; I believe the people who are broadest in their sympathy, and largest in their understanding are people who are fully conscious of what they came out of, of their past, of their family, of their associations, of all the things that have made them. And the people who cut that off, and, so to speak, start life on their own, become narrow, less able to feel and understand bonds of sympathy with other people around them. Now if you here, rather cut off from Europe, with only one near neighbor, had not the background of English, and, I may say, Scottish, life and history behind you, if you thought of yourselves simply as Canadians, you might be, and you would be, an extremely efficient and an extremely active people, very likely you would make a great prosperous country, but I feel absolutely certain that the experience of the world shows that you would become narrow, in your outlook, more self-centred in your view of life, and that in becoming so you would lose much which makes life most valuable and most interesting. (Applause). As it is, you have personal links, you have associations; if you go back, you feel, that it is going home. A banker in Edmonton said to

me the other day, "I am a Newfoundland man, I know ' families who have been in Newfoundland for nearly:, three hundred years, and still if they talk of going to England they talk of going home." I believe that is an intensely valuable thing; and there is no reason that it should limit the independence or the development of Canada. Only a fool would wish to limit that. Everyone who is interested in our race must glory in the signs of independence, if the independence is not a breaking of the ties of sympathy, and associations of affection, and a remembrance of the past. We are very much in the state in which lots of us who are parents have been through, or are going through. There was a time when we had to control our children, and train them and discipline them. The difficult stage is the age when you have got to gradually free them and yourself from that kind of connection and substitute for it freedom of intercourse and freedom of development for the children. If you can succeed, then they will get, and do get, the strength that comes from independence of

mind in the development of their own life, and you will get enriched by the fuller life they live and the richer understanding which they gain in their minds.-(Applause)-and the association into which you enter. When you have attained that, it is one of the best associations that fathers and sons can attain, and the father, instead of missing his power of regulating the

life of his son, takes infinite pride in seeing his son trying to regulate his own, and trying to make a life for himself. He is ready, he is there if his son wants advice, he is there if he wants sympathy, he is there if he wants anything, but if he is wise he does not act, he does not try to regulate, he waits till the son comes to him. Now we are as a nation going through that. Our children in all parts of the world are getting to their full manhood. They are getting to the time when more and more they have got to be independent in the management of their own affairs and the development of their own life. Through that period the important things is to retain the ties of affection and the ties of sympathy, so that the free community of nations may be a thing that lives

and is real; not by artificial ties that politicians make, but by the deeper ties of mutual understanding and sense of the common possession of a great heritage of the past. (Applause). You are already very distinct in your Canadian personality as a nation. You are not as distinct from England as you are from your neighbors over the way. From the very first time I crossed the border from the States I was struck to an extent I could not have believed with the complete

difference of the mental atmosphere of Canada from that of the States. (Hear, hear, and applause). And I am more struck this time. But you, though, are developing, and will develop and must develop an individuality of your own, and, what is more, that ought to be a fuller, richer thing than the mere British part of you. You are getting in other races; you are only doing what England herself did at the beginning. England was not the development-of a single-race, but the gradual welding into one of races who all brought their different characteristics to the common stock, and who, as time went on, the sense of common nationality forgot their separate origins in the name of Englishmen. And yet they contributed; and they brought the difference of their gifts. The Saxons were a great people but they had not great gifts of government. The Normans had great gifts of government. They tended to tyranize in other countries but they were directed by the inherent sense of freedom in the Saxon stock. Every race brought its own part, and bit by bit they became one great nation, richer for all the elements that came into it. You have the chance of the same thing. Then you have another chance, it seems to me, of infinite importance. I do not believe that any race continues to develop great minds, which becomes dominated entirely or mainly by town thought. All the great supply of great minds in nations have come from the background of the soil of the country. (Applause). Nearly all the nations of the world are becoming town nations to an increasing

degree and in that losing this particular element and getting more commonplace of mind. You, if you develop rightly, must have an immense agricultural

population who should have real self-respect, as the men who are carrying out one of the finest and greatest industries of the world. And with that as a background to your active town life,-to the populations that grow with the growth of your mines, fisheries, lumber camps, and so on, to all the different elements that go to make Canada, you ought to be able to rear people which will

once more stand out as a nation of great minds and great leaders, and, if you do, your influence in the world in the future, as other nations are losing that particular quality, will be a marvelous influence, and an influence which will be and should, be, if you will remember the traditions of your own country,--an instrument of enormous value to the whole world. I have become almost obsessed in my enthusiasm about Canada and its future. (Applause). I dare say I shall get a certain amount of cooling down after I get back home,-(Laughter)-but I hope not too much, because I want to remain with Canada as the chief interest of my life. I am no longer young, it is no use now diffusing my interest over many things, and I feel I should like to do all I can for the rest of my life,-to do what is possible, to help in what I believe is one of the most splendid things that can be done. I believe we have that to give: in your association with the Old Country, that certainty of tradition, that gradual development of institutions, that long record of give and take between man and man, all the things that have made England interesting, all those things can be and should be of value to you if you keep them in your memory while you are developing the new conditions and the new activities and the new possibilities of your great life in this great continent. I thank you very much for giving me attention, and I hope that it will not be the last time when I will have the opportunity of meeting many of the citizens of Toronto. (Hear, hear, and applause).

The thanks of the Club were tendered to the Speaker by THE MOST REVEREND DR. WORRELL, the Archbishop of Nova Scotia, who also was a guest of the Club on this occasion.