Canadian Empire Builders

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,--After such an introduction I must ask you to allow me a minute or two to get settled down and accustom myself to being introduced in poetry. I have been introduced in various ways, but this is the first time that the muse has celebrated me, and it is only one of many embarrassments I have met since coming to Toronto. To begin with, I was late in getting here, but of course you know that the farmer always has to do his chores, and you never know just how long they will take. The President has scattered my ideas, and I will have to fumble around to see if I can find anything.

I will not be so disingenuous as to say that I am not accustomed to appearing on the public platform or speaking, but with all sincerity I may say that on this occasion I have a different audience; I feel that this time I have wandered a long way from "Pastures Green" and "The Red Cow," and feel somewhat lonesome for a moment or two. I have met one embarrassment after another since coming here. To begin with, on the street a friend came along and, holding me suddenly, he said, "What on earth are you doing in Toronto? " I told him that I had come to address the Empire Club, and he shook his head and said, "Oh, yes, they are going to throw you to the lions." Well, Mr. President, when I come here and see so many lions about me, I think perhaps the best I can do is to promise not to bite your lion.

Your President has told you of my qualifications for addressing such a club as this, and perhaps you will absolve me from boasting if I assure you that I have still another qualification, for I may say without boasting that I have had some special opportunities for studying the Empire. As a matter of fact, I have been dead broke in all the great centres of Anglo-Saxon civilization. This has given me an opportunity to study Anglo-Saxon civilization from the bottom up, instead of from the top down, and I assure you there is a great difference-differences of the kind told of in Kipling's verse

The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point goes.

I have felt a good many tooth-points. I know that the usual way of studying the Empire is with a return ticket in your pocket, and in such a case as that I might quote the other two lines of the poem

The butterfly beside the road, Preaches contentment to that toad.

But at such a time as this I feel it would ill befit me to take up much time in joking when there is so much that is tragic in progress. But while I feel this, I do not feel that there is anything I could say to you that would increase your patriotism or your wishes to make sacrifices for the Empire, or to do your duty more fully than you are doing. For that reason I have ventured to give some thought to other things that may be of importance later on, the outskirts of imperial questions that we may fully begin to deal with now, because the public opinion by which these questions will be settled is being formed at the present moment; and in this connection I am going to report to you the results of my personal observations.

We see things differently sometimes in the City from the way in which they are seen in the country; and it may surprise you to learn that at the present time the influence that is shaping opinion most rapidly is not the press or the platform or the pulpit--by that I mean the metropolitan press, the great dailies,--but the sceptre of power has really passed to the little country weekly; but even more than that, the people of the country are being influenced by the letters that are received from the boys at the Front, or on their way to the Front. Those letters are coming by the thousands, I think I may safely say hundreds of thousands; they are penetrating to every community of the country; they are read keenly by the friends and relatives of the boys and also by their neighbours, and many of them are published in the little local papers. Now, these letters have no purpose back of them beyond giving the impressions of the boys in those European countries; the impressions they find in coming in contact with the Old-World civilization. And something is happening that I feel, and hope to show you, is entirely in accord with the genius of the Canadian people. We are having a great force developed which is entirely leaderless. Nobody could have planned it; nobody foresaw it; but it simply amounted to this, that at the present moment we are having a democratic conference regarding the affairs of the Empire. Our boys who are in the Old World are meeting their fellows, and the impressions they receive they transmit to us, and the result is that a public opinion is forming rapidly and becoming very important. So that while we are all interested in the approaching Imperial Conference, and while we all look forward to the accomplishment of great things at that Conference, it is well not to overlook the fact that the public opinion by which the action of that conference must stand or fall is now being formed by the democratic conference of the boys at the Front. Having that in mind, I have little fear for the future of Canada. I believe that no matter what theories may be developed in one way or another, the great mass of the people are putting forth their power spontaneously as a democracy, and that the final adjustment will be based upon that.

Now, the subject to which I wish to call your attention specially today, is one that has been very close to my heart since I was a boy. I was brought up on the farm on which I live. I have spent most of my life on that farm, even though I have roamed abroad, I have lived the life of the people, and have been in contact with them. Why shouldn't I? I am entirely one of them, and in studying the lives of the men and women who laid the foundations of Canada, I have been forced to a certain conclusion which I should like to lay before you; and I shall venture, even in the presence of, historians, to say that from my point of view the history of Canada has not yet been written, that possibly it never can be written; because the history of Canada reminds me very much of the story of the city that was saved by one poor man, and his name was forgotten. The foundations of Canada were laid by wise, poor men, and their names are forgotten. It is true that from the beginning we have had Governments with leaders and great men, but the real work of making Canada a part of the Empire was the work that was done by the plain people; and, the more I study the work of those plain people, the more I am forced to feel that I am contemplating one great result of the movements of history; that here was something as worthy of an epic as anything that ever captivated the attention of a poet. In the new world there was a wilderness which was valueless as far as civilization was concerned, but from different parts of the world people began to come to this wilderness-the United Empire Loyalists from the United States, the poor from many English, Irish and Scotch parishes. They carried in their hand all that they had with them in order to enable them to face the wilderness, and as I look at their work I feel that Canada's position is different from that of other parts of the Empire. We are told by those who have studied the matter that in the old world there never was any work of clearing up the land, that the land was cleared during the progress of the centuries by the nibbling of the flocks, that the shepherds pastured their flocks in the clefts and such spaces, and then, during the heat of the day, they would drive them into the woods and gradually the sheep nibbled the young growth so that in time, as the land wore away, new growth came in because the old was destroyed. But here in Canada it was different. Men and women had to face incredible hardships to make the land valuable for the use of humanity. As I look at it, Canada has been added to the Empire acre by acre, just as a building is erected brick by brick. Our courageous forefathers came here with only the axe and the torch, and each with incredible toil added a piece to the British Empire.

While I may not have made myself sufficiently clear on that, I think if you give it some consideration you will see that the point is true, and that those men and women in their way and in their degree were just as truly Empire builders as Clive or Rhodes, for the work they did they deserve gratitude. As I think of them, I am led to feel that perhaps I would not be going too far if I said that instead of being leaderless, merely moved by the unrest that sent them out to the wilderness to build new homes, those people were just as truly God-led as were the Israelites of old; and those of you who can remember the pioneer days, or those parts of the country where pioneer conditions prevailed until recent times, will remember the fires with which they cleared up the land. As I think of them, I feel that I would not be going too far if I adopted the older symbolism, and said that those men and women who came to Canada had their pillar of smoke by day, and their pillar of fire by night, just as truly as had the Israelites of old.

But when I think of those men I also think of some of the stories about them, and I should like to tell you one pioneer story that has always appealed to me; it will give you some idea of the kind of men they had in those days. It is the story of Neil McAlpine of Fingal, one of that fine old type of Scotchmen of whom I trust some still survive. It appears that before coming to this country he was engaged in business as a merchant in Scotland, and it was his habit once a year to send a boat to Glasgow for supplies. On one occasion, after the boat was loaded, Neil decided to go home across the country and he let the captain take the boat, but by mistake he carried the clearance papers in his pocket. As the captain was going home a storm arose, so he put into port, but because he did not have the clearance papers he was forced to put out to sea again. The waves broke over the vessel, so that the cargo was practically destroyed. McAlpine was very much bothered about this, as it meant a great financial loss, but one day he met a friend, who discussed it, and he said, "Why, I think if you brought suit, you could recover from the Government, because -there is a higher law than that of clearance papers, namely, the recognized right of a vessel to put into port in a storm." McAlpine took legal advice and brought suit, and in time the papers were served as "McAlpine vs. the King," and McAlpine won and was paid damages; and years afterwards, when he was here in Canada, if he got into a dispute with anyone and they threatened him with the law, the old man would shrug his shoulders and say, " Hoot, don't you know that I Jawed with the King, and I winned on him, too?" And I would just like to say in passing that I am glad to find we are not so much given to going to law here in Canada as they were used to in those earlier days. I can remember many good farmers who used to work hard and save their money all summer so that they could go to law all winter. It was the only real pastime they had.

McAlpine was something of a heroic figure and if you go now up to that Talbot settlement, you will still find old people there who date events from the year in which McAlpine "saved the settlement." What I wish to tell you is a story of how he saved the settlement. On one occasion they had a severe frost that destroyed all the wheat. McAlpine, being a man of some means, had not sold his wheat during the previous two years, the price not being satisfactory, and when this year came when they had no wheat, McAlpine had in his granaries 3,000 bushels, and he ,used to talk to his family about the foresight he, had shown in saving his wheat in this way. But one day he was in St. Thomas and he got word that the miller wanted to see him. He went to the miller, who said, "I hear you have got a lot of wheat? " McAlpine said he had. The miller then said he would pay so and so for it, mentioning some very unusual price. McAlpine stopped and began to figure a little, and he realized that that price was much higher than the miller could possibly get in return if he ground the wheat into flour, so he asked him what he was going to do with the wheat. The miller said, " I am going to sell it to the settlers for seed grain." Then for the first time it dawned on McAlpine what his wheat meant to that settlement; he saw that it might be used to take blood money from the struggling people who were trying to gain a foothold in their new homes; and as he told it afterwards, he said that the cold sweat came out on him as he thought of it, the, horror of it. So he hurried home, and the next day being the Sabbath, and he being a good Presbyterian elder, he went to church early and stood by the gate and, as the people came in, he would lean over to each one and whisper, "You can get seed grain at my place bushel for bushel; you take your bushel now, and you pay me-back a bushel when you have the harvest." He was not going to have profit made on his wheat. He told this to everyone who attended the Presbyterian Church; but when he got home in the afternoon, he remembered that although Presbyterians were plentiful, there were others in the settlement-Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists, Methodists-and so he put each of his sons on horseback and sent them to one of each of the other churches, and at the tire of evening service one of McAlpine's sons stood at each church and whispered to the people as they were going in, "You can get seed grain from my father, bushel for bushel; you take your bushel now and bring back the bushel at the harvest." On Monday morning the people gathered with ox teams and all sorts of conveyances to get the seed grain. They would pass the house and go back to the granary where the grain was stored and McAlpine would stand at the door and hold up his cane-he was a great tall man, over six feet-and he would say, "Remember, now, bushel for bushel"; and they would go back to the barn and the boys would fill the bags for them with the grain, and when they were going out the old man would ask how many bushels; they would tell him and he would write it down in the book. That procession kept passing by for three days, until all the wheat was gone, and all the settlers had their seed grain.

Now I want to come to a later date and tell you the story as it was told me by his grandson, Dr. Hugh McCallum. On one occasion Dr. McCallum was down at Shedden at a consultation on a stormy evening and, after he got back to the railway station, he was walking up and down waiting for the train when he suddenly saw a little withered old man keeping pace with him and looking up at him. Finally, the good-natured doctor stopped and looked at him and said, "Well, my good man, is there anything I can do for you?" The old man shook his head, looked at him and said, " If I didn't know he was dead, I would think this was Captain Storms"--" Captain Storms" was the name they had in the settlement for Neil McAlpine. Dr. McCallum said, " Well, they tell me I resemble him very much; I am his grandson; you mean Neil McAlpine, don't you? " The old man said, "Yes, you are the dead spit of him." Then it suddenly occurred to the doctor that he could get the story from one who had been there at the very time when Neil McAlpine saved the settlement, and he asked the man if he remembered that time. "Indeed I do that," said the man. So the doctor invited him to sit by the stove in the station, and the old man told him the story. He said, " We had come out from Ireland just the year before, and there was a large family of us, all young children, and all my father had been able to do was to clear the little piece of land and put in turnips, and we lived on turnips all winter. We had boiled turnips three times a day. But when the news went out that the seed grain could be had at McAlpines, my father went with the others to get the seed grain, and when he came back at night he had a bag of flour that Neil McAlpine had given to him, and he had a jug of buttermilk and a jug of molasses that Neil McAlpine's wife had given so that my mother could make scones for us; and as soon as possible my mother began to cook the scones; and that night I ate so many that at four o'clock in the morning I was so sick that they gave me a dose of castor oil. Oh, yes, I remember the time when McAlpine saved the settlement." The old man went on, "Next day the priest came to see us, and he had been out for months through other parts of the settlement where the people were just as poor as we were, and it was weeks since he had tasted bread, and my mother was a proud woman when she was able to put down the scones before the father. When he saw them on the table he said, 'Woman, woman, where did you get the wheaten bread?' And my mother told him it was from Neil McAlpine; and the priest crossed himself as he drew up to the table and he said, 'God bless that old heretic, Neil McAlpine.' And before he stopped he ate seven scones." Dr. McCallum said to the old man, "But your people were Catholics, weren't they?" "Yes," said the man, "We were all Catholics." The doctor said, "But Neil McAlpine was a Presbyterian." The old man drew himself up and he said, " On Sunday he was a Presbyterian, but on week days he was a neighbour."

That, gentlemen, was a type of the empire-builders that we had in Canada. I could duplicate the story with many others--perhaps not as good stories--that I have gathered during the years; but perhaps I have done enough if I have called your attention to the work done by our forefathers. I have found it necessary to do this because on various occasions I have been asked to address the soldiers before they went to the Front. At first, I found myself at some difficulty because the army was made up so largely of the British born, but still there were many of our Canadian boys in those armies, and at first I hardly knew what I should .say to them. They were going out to face battle without a history, one might think. I need not say to the English boys how glorious their history was-all the world knew it; it was the same by the Scotch, the Irish, the Welsh. But our Canadian boys-what should I say to them? Then I remembered that long battle by which the wilderness was overcome, and I tried to tell them what they had to be proud of. I tried to give them something of the emotion I have felt myself, because in the course of human events, it became possible for me to buy that part of Canada which my father cleared and added to the British Empire. When the sale was completed and the documents of record were handed to me, I found among them an old piece of parchment with great seals on it and faded writing, and I looked and found that it was the original royal patent which my father had secured when he took up the land; and I confess to you that I looked at that document with a feeling of awe; I realized that the piece of land which I owned had been described in that document for the first time since the world began. It had been wilderness before my father took it, and as I looked at that document I realized that my father did not simply get his land from the British Government, but that he took it from the hand of God Himself. Gentlemen, I tell you that when I look at that document, I am as proud of it as if I had an ancestor whose name was written in the Doomsday Book. I told this to the soldier boys, and told them that I felt they could go out and face battle shoulder to shoulder with the men from any part of the Empire and feel that they, too, had a glorious history.

Our fathers toiled, but in the glorious fight

The God of nations led them by the hand,

With pillared smoke by day and fire by night

They wrought like heroes in their prcmised land.

The wilderness was conquered by their might,

They made for God the marvel that He planned

A land of homes where toil could make men free,

The final masterpiece of Destiny.

How can I rest when they will not be still?

When every wind is vocal and their sighs

Breathe to my ear from every funeral hill

And through each field where one forgotten lies?

They haunt my steps and burden me until

I plead with hands outstretched and streaming eyes

"I am not worthy! Let my lips be dumb!

The mighty song and singer yet shall come! "

The well-greaved Greeks and Priam's savage brood

Were not more worthy of immortal song

Than these in homespun, who alone withstood

Hunger and Fear to make our Freedom strong;

But till the singer comes, at least the good

They wrought we must from age to age prolong;

Learning from them, let this our watchword be

Free from all tyrants from yourselves be free!

Prof. Wrong moved the vote of thanks, which was seconded by Dr. McLaren.