THE UNITED ST/VrfiS 
 AND' CANADA 
 
 GEORGE M,WI^OKG 
 
Class f' \cXC 
 
 Rook W^5 
 Copyright N^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2010 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/unitedstatescana01wron 
 
THE UNITED STATES 
 AND CANADA 
 
 A POLITICAL STUDY 
 
 By 
 
 GEORGE M. WRONG 
 
 Professor of Hietory in the University of Toronto 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1921, by 
 GEORGE M. WRONG 
 
 JUL -2 '2.1 A 
 
 Ci.A614892 " ^ 
 
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 
 
 GEORGE SLOCUM BENNETT FOUNDATION 
 
 LECTURES 
 
 For the Promotion of a Better Under- 
 standing of National Problems end 
 of a More Perfect Realization of 
 the Responsibilities of Citizenship 
 
 SECOND SERIES— 1919-1920 
 

CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 Preface 11 
 
 Lecture I 
 The Dominance of the English-speaking 
 Peoples in America 13 
 
 Lecture II 
 The Creation of Two English-speaking 
 States in America 39 
 
 Lecture III 
 The Growth of Federalism in North 
 America 65 
 
 Lecture IV 
 Likenesses and Contrasts in the Federal 
 Systems of the United States and Canada 85 
 
 Lecture V 
 The Place of Canada in the British Com- 
 monwealth 124 
 
 Lecture VI 
 The Future 154 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 George Slocum Bennett, a graduate of 
 Wesley an University in the class of 1864, 
 showed his lifelong interest in the training of 
 youth for the privileges and duties of citi- 
 zenship by long periods of service as a mem- 
 ber of the board of education of his home 
 city, and as member of the boards of trustees 
 of Wyoming Seminary and Wesley an Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 It was fitting, therefore, that, when the 
 gifts made by himself and family to Wes- 
 leyan University were combined to form a 
 fund whose income should be used "in de- 
 fraying the expenses of providing for visit- 
 ing lecturers, preachers, and other speakers 
 supplemental to the college faculty," it 
 should have been decided that the primary 
 purpose should be to provide each year a 
 
 7 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 course of lectures, by a distinguished 
 speaker, "for the promotion of a better un- 
 derstanding of national problems and of a 
 more perfect realization of the responsibili- 
 ties of citizenship," and to provide for the 
 publication of such lectures so that they 
 might reach a larger public than the audi- 
 ence to which they should, in the first in- 
 stance, be addressed. 
 
 To give the second course of lectures on 
 this foundation, the joint committee for its 
 administration, appointed by the board of 
 trustees and by the faculty, selected George 
 Mackinnon Wrong, professor of history in 
 the University of Toronto. This choice was 
 made in hearty recognition of the closer sym- 
 pathy which had drawn the two sister nations 
 of English speech on this continent to one 
 another in the comradeship of arms, of ideals, 
 and of losses in the World War.. It was also 
 made in appreciation not merely of Profes- 
 sor Wrong's high scholarship as an historian, 
 but also of the fine spirit in which he has 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 ever exemplified his conviction that the Eng- 
 lish-speaking peoples, especially on this con- 
 tinent, should live together in friendship and 
 work together for the advancement in the 
 world of liberty, self-government, and peace. 
 William Arnold Shanklin, 
 Reuben Nelson Bennett, 
 Albeet Wheelee Johnston, 
 Frank Edgar Farley, 
 George Matthew Dutcher, 
 
 Committee. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Lectures to a university audience should, 
 of course, express the detached mind of a 
 searcher after truth, and I have tried to 
 maintain this attitude and to refrain from 
 either praise or blame in discussing both the 
 present and the past. My aim has been to 
 explain, in no recondite or learned way, 
 some of the things in which the United States 
 and Canada are alike and also different. 
 
 Canada reads much more about the United 
 States than the United States reads about 
 Canada, just as Scotland reads more about 
 England than England reads about Scot- 
 land. This condition is inevitable when a 
 nation with a small population lies side by 
 side with a greater neighbor speaking the 
 same language. To the thought of the peo- 
 ple of the United States, numbering a hun- 
 dred millions, Canada, with its eight mil- 
 lions, does not loom large ; while the opposite 
 condition is found in Canada. Many of the 
 books and the newspapers which Canadians 
 11 
 
12 PREFACE 
 
 read are impregnated with American 
 thought, while Canada exercises practically 
 no influence upon her neighbor. 
 
 It is chiefly due to this lack of reciprocity 
 in thought that occasionally, in quarters gen- 
 erally well informed, discussions arise as to 
 whether, to cancel her debt, Great Britain 
 might not sell Canada to the United States. 
 Such a proposal causes a pained smile on the 
 faces of people on both sides of the frontier 
 who really understand. England might as 
 well propose to sell Scotland to France or 
 Germany. Sometimes too a desire is ex- 
 pressed to help to liberate Canada. The only 
 answer to such suggestions is to try to reach 
 a better understanding of the relations of 
 the two peoples and it was to aid, however 
 slightly, in effecting this that these lectures 
 were given. 
 
 I am greatly indebted to Professor George 
 M. Dutcher, vice-president of Wesley an 
 University, for many personal kindnesses 
 and to my friend Professor W. Bennett 
 Munro, of Harvard University, for helpful 
 criticism. 
 
 University of Toeonto. G. M. W. 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE DOMINANCE OF THE ENG- 
 LISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 Eras of excitement and passion are invari- 
 ably followed by disillusion and reaction, and 
 the days after the Great War have seen this 
 inevitable result. Over the beautiful portal 
 of a churchyard in England were written the 
 words, *'This is none other than the Gate of 
 Heaven." In a stormy season the custodian 
 put on the gatepost the notice that "owing 
 to the inclemency of the weather this gate is 
 closed until further notice." This is our state 
 of mind at the present time. During the 
 days of peace the political weather has 
 proved inclement and a good many people 
 are wondering whether the sun will ever 
 shine again. The joy of battle is exhilarat- 
 ing, even if the fight is exhausting. When 
 peace with victory was still beyond reach we 
 desired it with a great longing. Now it has 
 come. The old stimulus is gone and not yet 
 13 
 
14 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 have we been able to concentrate our 
 thoughts upon that goal in the future which 
 will inspire us to combined effort. Faintheart 
 is tempted to be weary and depressed. 
 
 It is probably true that the war would not 
 have taken place if during the last ten years 
 the English-speaking peoples had shown that 
 they were united. Wisdom after the event 
 is not of a very exacting or penetrating kind, 
 and we need not lay too much emphasis upon 
 what might have been. Clearly, however, if 
 the vast array of power which is represented 
 by the United States and the British Com- 
 monwealth had been used during the last ten 
 years to say that there should be no war, its 
 word might well have proved effective even 
 to restrain Germany's lust for world power. 
 In fact, as we know, Germany did not be- 
 Keve that the nations within the British Com- 
 monwealth would unite to check her; and it 
 would have required something very definite 
 and precise to make her believe that the 
 United States could be counted upon to act 
 with them. It remains true, however, that 
 voices speaking in English might have pre- 
 served the world which existed before 1914. 
 
AND CANADA 15 
 
 It may, indeed, be well that that world, 
 sick as now we see it to have been, should go. 
 Not always is it true that in the sunlight we 
 see the truth most clearly. It is in the dark- 
 ness of the night that the stars glow and the 
 moon shines with a beauty which may not be 
 seen at midday. In the darkness of sorrow 
 and sacrifice men learn to know the mysteries 
 of their own hearts. This appears to be an 
 ultimate law of life, and it is vain to question 
 the constitution of a world in which we our- 
 selves play so feeble a part. The long dark- 
 ness of more than four years of war revealed 
 to us things which we did not see in the sun- 
 shine. Both evil and good have been made 
 manifest — good perhaps more than evil, for 
 the war brought out a heroism and a readi- 
 ness for sacrifice in the heart of the common 
 man which we had either never known or had 
 forgotten. 
 
 Whatever might have been done before 
 tIi/5 war, now at least we confront a realized 
 situation unprecedented in character. As a 
 result of the war the strongest nations left 
 in the western world are the English-speak- 
 ing nations. Possibly more even than Ger- 
 
16 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 many is France exhausted, with a grim strip 
 of ruin three hundred and fifty miles long 
 forming her northeastern frontier. Desola- 
 tion reigns where once were fertile fields, 
 prosperous villages, and ancient and beauti- 
 ful towns and cities. Lille is maimed; Arras, 
 Cambrai, and a dozen other cities are heaps 
 of ruins; and hundreds of thousands of the 
 best manhood of France he under the white 
 crosses that mark the resting places of her 
 multitudinous dead. Italy is impoverished; 
 Austria and Hungary are prostrate ; and of 
 all the states of continental Europe it is per- 
 haps true that defeated Germany can look 
 forward to the future with the greatest as- 
 surance. Were it not for the vigor and 
 resources of the English-speaking world, we 
 might see again what has happened before, 
 that the vanquished, in the moment of his 
 defeat, is the real conqueror. Long ago the 
 energy of the English mastered the conquer- 
 ing Norman who ruled in England, just as 
 Rome in her defeat became the schoolmaster 
 of her barbarian masters and turned them 
 into her servants. 
 
 The United States has now one hundred 
 
AND CANADA 17 
 
 and five million people. As yet of some of 
 the new-comers English is not the language 
 of daily life, but it will certainly be the lan- 
 guage of their children and of their children's 
 children. Within the British Commonwealth 
 there are some sixty-five million people who 
 speak EngMsh. It is thus the tongue of one 
 hundred and seventy million people, nearly 
 two-thirds of them in the single contiguous 
 area of the United States. Never before 
 has the world seen such a condition — nearly 
 two hundred million people who speak and 
 write and think in English, who can exchange 
 without misunderstanding the niceties of 
 thought in a language simple in structure, 
 with a great range in its vocabulary, and a 
 literaturf' in patent and variety Hurpassirg 
 any other m existence. The v/ar iias brought 
 the unlooked-for result that two great con- 
 quering peoples with this wonderful speech 
 are, if they choose so to be, the masters of the 
 destinies of the world. 
 
 Goethe was wont to say that, had his native 
 tongue been English, he would hardly have 
 ventured to write poetry, since the long line 
 of Enghsh poets had expressed already what 
 
18 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 would have come to his mind. A people with 
 a noble hterature at their command have a 
 great advantage among the nations. A gen- 
 eration without a hterature from the past 
 and limited by its own thought is indeed 
 poor. Society is too complex for us to esti- 
 mate the effect upon the hfe of to-day of the 
 background of thought from a nation's past, 
 but it is undoubtedly very great. It is true, 
 of course, that only a few read any books but 
 those of the present ; but it is also true that 
 in these very books is summed up the influ- 
 ence on the mind of the writers of all the 
 past. Shakespeare and Milton speak 
 through even the mediocre author of to-day. 
 By schoolbook and newspaper, by quotation 
 and proverb, the minds of great writers have 
 helped to form present-day thought. A na- 
 tion is what it reads more truly, perhaps, than 
 it is what it eats. 
 
 When two peoples speak in the same lan- 
 guage, this common influence must tend to 
 make them alike. What is said in New York 
 on one day may be circulated in the same 
 form in London on the day following, and 
 will carry with it whatever strength its in- 
 
AND CANADA 19 
 
 herent truth commands. It falls upon soil 
 already prepared by a long succession of sim- 
 ilar happenings in the past. To every point 
 where the English tongue is spoken the 
 thought may be carried. Be it radical or 
 conservative, it conveys its message, and the 
 men who read it tend to grow together in 
 mental outlook. Counteracting influences 
 there are, of course; contrasts of tradition 
 and environment which involve differing em- 
 phasis upon the same thoughts ; but the com- 
 mon language is a mighty power for similar- 
 ity of outlook. The people who read both 
 Emerson and Mill, by so much tend to come 
 together; and when the people are those of 
 the far-flung states of the British Common- 
 wealth and the American Union the influ- 
 ence soon becomes world-wide. 
 
 In some such way we may believe was 
 Greek thought carried from one Greek- 
 speaking community to another. The chief 
 endowment which the Greeks took from the 
 home land was that of its language and its 
 Hterature. The insight and the vivacity of 
 the Greek mind working in the scene of the 
 coasts and islands of the eastern Mediter- 
 
20 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ranean were suited to the creation of small 
 states, with no political tie other than the 
 Greek spirit. Greece produced Plato and 
 Aristotle, men who pondered deeply, in an 
 environment compact enough to be under- 
 stood, the problems of human hfe and espe- 
 cially those of the organization of man in 
 society. The Republic of Plato and the 
 Politics of Aristotle are treatises on man liv- 
 ing under the influence of political ties with 
 his fellows. Expressed in the vigorous and 
 lucid language of Greece, they were carried 
 far. They survived the ruin of the Roman 
 Empire, they were debated with awe and rev- 
 erence by the later philosophy of the Middle 
 Ages, and they play still their vital part in 
 the discussions of our own day. Such was 
 the triumph of a literatm^e in a language 
 fitted for the expression of rich thought. 
 
 We can hardly doubt that English is the 
 successor of Greek as the chief tongue of 
 political theory. The most vital thought in 
 modern political society comes from sources 
 in the English tongue. The eternal glory 
 of England in the world of poHtics is that 
 the island state, secure in its frontiers, was 
 
AND CANADA 21 
 
 able, first of European nations, to shake off 
 the sway of the despot and to secure for its 
 people real political power. It was England 
 who gave to the world representative institu- 
 tions, that type of political society in which 
 authority is yielded to persons chosen by the 
 people ruled, to control Liid in time to admin- 
 ister their government. It was England's 
 daughter who added to this the principle 
 which has borne the test of experience, that 
 free states, while retaining their local liber- 
 ties, might unite for common purposes and 
 carry representative institutions into a union 
 of states in a wider nation. Successful fed- 
 eralism is the achievement of America. The 
 principle made only dim gropings in politi- 
 cal society until the thirteen colonies brought 
 it into the full light of the world. 
 
 Language is the expression of the spirit 
 of a people and in a subtle way carries with 
 it some suggestion of their outlook on na- 
 tional hfe. The phases of society which a 
 writer chooses to emphasize reveal some 
 measure of its moral tone, its intellectual out- 
 look and its political condition. Fogazzaro's 
 Saint, haunted by the problems of asceticism. 
 
22 THE UXITED STATES 
 
 shows us the attitude of the clerical mind of 
 Italy with which that of England has, we 
 see at once, very little in common. Victor 
 Hugo reveals, half unconsciously to himself, 
 the crude and unstable despotism of the Sec- 
 ond Empire in France which he assailed. 
 Dickens lays bare the mind of the bourgeoisie 
 and the lower orders in England. It is said 
 that translations of the works of Dickens are 
 popular in China and the explanation is of- 
 fered that it is because of a subtle affinity of 
 English with Chinese political thought, the 
 dislike of militarism and absolutism, and 
 with this a certain humorous decency con- 
 genial to Chinese readers. English is at least 
 simple and direct. One of its greatest re- 
 cent triumphs is the use of the word "tank" 
 to describe a complicated mechanism of mod- 
 ern war. It is impossible to imagine the 
 English calling a great avenue the "Champs 
 Elysees" or naming a thoroughfare the 
 "Street of the Twentieth of September." 
 
 There is no better evidence of the virihty 
 of the Enghsh speech than its changes in 
 America. The language was matured in the 
 settled environment of England, and it ex- 
 
AND CANADA 23 
 
 presses the social relations of a graded soci- 
 ety". The owner of land let to tenants is still 
 the landlord, though for the most part there 
 is little left in the relation which is lordly. 
 In Northumberland the women who work in 
 the fields are still called bondagers, but no 
 trace remains of such a relation in their de- 
 meanor nor in their money wage of four shil- 
 lings a day. On the other hand the free, new 
 life of western America knows nothing of 
 lords or bondage and has no need for such 
 terms. It matures for the use of a changed 
 society a language which, at any rate, never 
 lacks vigor and is Enghsh in structure if 
 hardly so in vocabulary. The educated 
 classes in New England cultivate a precision 
 of speech more exacting in its standards than 
 is the language of the same class in the 
 mother land. In all fields alike the English 
 tongue is the medium. The most violent as- 
 sailant of England, to make himself under- 
 stood with effect, must in the greater part 
 of the world denounce her in her own lan- 
 guage. 
 
 Perhaps the most pregnant fact in modern 
 political life is that the Enghsh-speaking 
 
24 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 peoples have become dominant in North 
 America. Colmnbus was the servant of 
 Spain, and she was resolved to have the 
 greater part of both North and South Amer- 
 ica for herself and to permit no neighbors. 
 Her claim to rule alone meant that any tri- 
 imiph of a rival would be to her own com- 
 plete exclusion. Spain asked the protec- 
 tion of the church for her rights, and Eng- 
 land, when she defied the church, aimed to 
 make herself a terror to Spain in America. 
 England's ships haunted the Spanish Main. 
 In 1607 bhc pL'intrd her foot in Virginia and 
 there remained. She too was resolved to 
 have no neighbor, and when Catholic France 
 occupied the valley of the Saint Lawrence, 
 it was the fixed resolve of English policy for 
 a hundred and fifty years to drive her out. 
 I have sometimes wondered what would to- 
 day be the condition of society in New Eng- 
 land had Spain or France, and not Eng- 
 land, finally held its coasts. There may be 
 some doubt as to whether man is stronger 
 than his environment ; as to whether, no mat- 
 ter what the race, nature would not have 
 determined the physical type. But it is 
 
AND CANADA 25 
 
 quite certain that England gave to her col- 
 onies something that has made this land to- 
 day mentally different from what France or 
 Spain would have made it. The language, 
 the reUgion, the manners of the masses, the 
 education of a New England town, would 
 have been other than they are had Spain or 
 France planted here a new society. Be- 
 cause the English race secured final pos- 
 session the traditions which go with English 
 rule and English speech here took root, and 
 the very spires of the churches proclaim to 
 the air that the English seed has grown to 
 a great tree. 
 
 America brought her own special gifts to 
 the civilization of the world. Old things and 
 new America offered to Europe. There 
 were the coveted gold and silver of her mines 
 to increase stores in Europe which had, so 
 far as we know, received but slight additions 
 since the days of the Roman Empire. While 
 this was not in reality America's most pre- 
 cious store of wealth, it was the most allur- 
 ing; and Spain, the first discoverer, spent her 
 energies in search for the precious metals. 
 She had no labor to export from Spain, and 
 
26 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 so she enslaved the helpless natives to do her 
 work, and she thought she was growing rich 
 because her ships carried across the sea car- 
 goes of metal which in themselves would 
 save no starving man. England was more 
 fortunate. Her first seamen, such as Drake 
 and Hawkins, thought, indeed, that to rob 
 Spain's treasure ships was to touch the main- 
 springs of well-being. The real sources of 
 wealth are to be found, however, in those 
 things which feed and clothe the human body 
 and stir to its best efforts the human mind. 
 The English settled where there was no gold, 
 but where nature invited to the hard toil 
 which develops character and to the adven- 
 turous efforts of those who go down to the 
 sea in ships. Spain found her wealth ready- 
 made in gold. England had to produce 
 hers, and perhaps that is why the English 
 speech is dominant to-day in North America. 
 Three staples of commerce new to Eu- 
 rope America gave to the world — tobacco, 
 Indian corn, and the potato. Without them 
 our present-day civilization would indeed be 
 poorer. Columbus found the natives of the 
 West Indies smoking and chewing tobacco 
 
AND CANADA 27 
 
 — a habit which was quickly carried to re- 
 mote parts of the earth. The effect upon so- 
 ciety of a single natural product is sometimes 
 far-reaching. It was upon tobacco that was 
 founded Virginia, the first Enghsh colony 
 in North America, and from this cultivation 
 of tobacco and later of cotton came the en- 
 slaving by the English of the Negro, which 
 has resulted in so appalling a racial problem 
 of to-day. Indian corn, or maize, a native 
 American product, is now one of the most 
 important articles of food. It is the great 
 crop of the warm, dry, rich soil of the Mis- 
 sissippi valley, and it is also the chief source 
 of human food in great regions of South 
 Africa and Austraha. The stalk of the plant 
 furnishes, besides, an amazingly rich food 
 for cattle. The potato, which Sir Walter 
 Raleigh took from America to Ireland, has 
 played since that day its striking part in 
 human history. It too became a staple food. 
 The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 
 1846 caused famine and rebelHon and minis- 
 tered to hot racial passions which still burn. 
 It caused also the first great migration of 
 Irish to America. Not less in her natural 
 
28 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 products than in her pohtical institutions has 
 America spread far-reaching influences over 
 the world. 
 
 The real struggle for North America lay 
 between France and England. France was 
 happy in her first stroke, for, as early as in 
 1534, nearly a hundred years before the 
 founding of Massachusetts, she was explor- 
 ing in the valley of the Saint Lawrence. No 
 doubt the climate was harsh, and by so much 
 was France handicapped. But harsh also 
 was the cHmate of New England, and it had 
 no river hke the Saint Lawrence reaching 
 far into the interior. There are four great 
 rivers in North America draining vast areas. 
 The Mississippi hes now wholly within the 
 United States and became important only 
 when an English-speaking people held both 
 its banks. The Mackenzie and the Saskatch- 
 ewan, Canadian rivers in the far north, both 
 flow through inhospitable regions, as yet but 
 .scantily affected by the labor of man. The 
 fourth great river, the Saint Lawrence, is 
 the river of North America which has played 
 the most striking part in its history. In all 
 the world there is no other river and lake 
 
AND CANADA 29 
 
 system so fruitful in its rewards to man's 
 effort. It is the only great river of North 
 America flowing into the Atlantic. It 
 drains Great Lakes which are among the 
 wonders of the world. Populous cities have 
 grown up on the shores of the inland seas 
 where the volume of fresh waters gather for 
 that tm^bulent journey to the ocean in which 
 they thunder over the cataract of Niagara. 
 ^Vhere else can be found such masses of 
 human beings on a single river and lake sys- 
 tem? Here are Milwaukee, Chicago, De- 
 troit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Mon- 
 treal, Quebec, and many other centers of 
 wealth and influence. And at the portal, 
 from the middle of the sixteenth century, 
 stood France on guard for the ownership of 
 a continent. By way of the waters of the 
 Saint Lawrence she reached the flood of 
 the Mississippi and claimed that too as her 
 own. In the cities lying at the mouth of both 
 rivers, in Quebec and in New Orleans, her 
 language is still to be heard in the streets, 
 the influence of her culture is apparent, 
 though her political authority is gone. 
 
 America was brought into touch with the 
 
30 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 thought of Europe just when Europe itself 
 was experiencing perhaps the greatest up- 
 heaval in all its history. In 1492, when 
 Columbus was penetrating into the unknown 
 across the stormy Atlantic, Erasmus, a 
 young man of twenty-six, was wrestling 
 with grim poverty at Paris and spending the 
 uncomfortable hours in searching another 
 unknown, the unknown of man's past strug- 
 gles to emancipate his own mind. If Colum- 
 bus discovered America, Erasmus helped to 
 rediscover antiquity and to open its treasures 
 to an eager world. Two years after the first 
 voyage of Columbus a conquering French 
 army marched across the Alps into Italy and 
 began that mastery by the alien conqueror 
 which if, for the time, it ruined Italy, helped 
 to expand the minds of the invaders. At the 
 same time far away in the north a peasant 
 boy with a quick mind and an inquiring faith 
 was growing into the maturity which made 
 Martin Luther a disturbing but vital force 
 in the life of the age. Germany and France 
 and England were shaken by the explosion 
 of new forces, and just when the fight was 
 keenest in Europe Jacques Cartier was 
 
AND CANADA 31 
 
 raising on the Saint Lawrence the fleurs-de- 
 lis of France. 
 
 It was a great era. Its controversies 
 haunt still our society and have played their 
 part in the hardening processes which have 
 formed our modern national and racial types. 
 There were those who believed that its re- 
 vived interest in art and learning and reli- 
 gion meant the dawn of a golden age. Thus 
 it is that in all periods of high emotion men 
 have consoled themselves for the imperfec- 
 tions of the present by the promise of the 
 future. The day of disillusion came quickly. 
 Before the end of the century Montaigne 
 had described human life in its true tints of 
 gray and brown, with high lights of radiant 
 sunshine and also deep shadows of suffering 
 and sorrow. By the beginning of the sev- 
 enteenth century America was to Europe a 
 solid reality, only half known, it is true, but 
 already the scene in which national and reli- 
 gious passions had aroused the fiercest activ- 
 ities of war. Europe was torn by the bitter 
 antagonisms of Catholic and Protestant. 
 Spain and Portugal had succeeded in hold- 
 ing all of South America and some of North 
 
32 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 America for the Catholic faith alone. Eng- 
 lish Protestants who founded Virginia in 
 1607 were in a sense between the two jaws 
 of the Catholic nut-cracker with France in 
 the Saint Lawrence valley and Spain in 
 Mexico. By this time, however, Spain was 
 weak for aggressive purposes and the strug- 
 gle for North America lay between Catholic 
 France and Protestant England. 
 
 As a colonizing power in America France 
 showed what marks some of her best minds to 
 this day, her passionate belief in a religious 
 system based upon authority and her love 
 of romantic adventure. In genius for trade 
 France has never greatly excelled. The Eng- 
 lish, seeking overseas new means of living 
 or new foundations of society which should 
 not involve acceptance of the dogmas of the 
 Church of England, were severely practical 
 as colonizers. They tilled the soil, they built 
 ships and sailed away to trade in other lands, 
 they trafficked with the natives for furs ; and 
 wherever they settled they made themselves 
 masters. There was little of the glow of 
 romance in their prosaic doings. This, on 
 the other hand, stirred many of the French, 
 
AND CANADA 33 
 
 men in some cases scions of noble houses, who 
 chafed at the slow activities of the farm or 
 the shop. The life of the forest fascinated 
 them. They became coureurs de hois, run- 
 ners of the woods. Past their doors at Que- 
 bec arid Montreal flowed the great tide of the 
 Saint Lawrence coming from out Jthe far 
 interior. Little wonder that the mystery of 
 its sources haunted them. Step by step they 
 explored the interior. They discovered one 
 by one the Great Lakes; they reached the 
 Mississippi and followed it to its outlet. On 
 into the farther west they pushed. They 
 reached the prairies, they saw the Rocky 
 Mountains. 
 
 The French are a virile race. No other 
 breed, except perhaps the Jew, cHngs to its 
 own ideals and mode of life with such un- 
 conquerable tenacity. To the French, pride 
 in the civilization of France and love for the 
 land of France are mastering passions. In 
 Europe through long ages they had fought 
 the English and in America they had no 
 other thought than to fight them until one 
 should master the other. The English were 
 of like mind. Hardly had they found them- 
 
34 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 selves in Virginia when they learned tb^tthe 
 French, long known to be on the Saint Law- 
 rence, had actually dared in 1605 to found 
 farther south a strugghng colony, Port 
 Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, where now 
 stands the httle town of Annapolis, in Nova 
 , Scotia. Such audacity was too much, and 
 in 1613, though France and England were 
 not openly at war, an expedition from Vir- 
 ginia destroyed this budding settlement. 
 The Saint Lawrence was not to be secure 
 for the French. In 1629 the Enghsh ap- 
 peared at Quebec and captured this infant 
 capital of New France. For a century and 
 a half the struggle of one power to drive out 
 the other hardly ceased. The English fitted 
 out expedition after expedition against Que- 
 bec, and at Quebec Frontenac, the governor, 
 planned serious efforts to root out the Eng- 
 lish from both the banks of the Hudson and 
 from New England and to make Louis XIV 
 master of New York and Boston. Of liv- 
 ing peacefully side by side as good neighbors 
 neither nation had any serious thought. One 
 race, one language, one flag must be supreme 
 everywhere in North America. On this both 
 
AND CANADA 35 
 
 sides were determined. War followed war. 
 Peace was only a truce. And at last, in 1760, 
 the British triumphed. To them France sw' 
 rendered Canada and abandoned her long 
 struggle for empire in America. 
 
 Thus it was that the British acquired all 
 of America north of the Gulf of Mexic;^ 
 which at that time was known to the world. 
 Three types of possession had come together 
 under one sovereignty. In the far north was 
 the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company. 
 It had acquired a generous inheritance, for 
 King Charles II, by what right we shall not 
 too curiously question, had given it all the 
 lands bordering on the waters flowing into 
 Hudson Bay, which meant the whole vast 
 prairie land of the present Canadian West 
 stretching away almost illimitably to the 
 foothills of the Rocky Mountains. That was 
 an empire in itself; yet was it httle accounted 
 of in the day of final conquest. Britain had 
 always claimed it, and since 1713 France had 
 yielded the claim. Next to this were the 
 former possessions of the French, that vast 
 New France in which the Bishop of Quebec 
 had at one time been spiritual lord both at 
 
36 THE UXITED STATES 
 
 the mouth of the Saint Lawrence and at the 
 mouth of the Mississippi. To these two ter- 
 ritories must be added as still under British 
 rule those fine, strong colonies which were 
 so soon to form the United States. Never 
 before had nation such a heritage. In all the 
 world elsewhere there are no such areas of 
 rich land as this realm included. It had 
 possibihties in agriculture, beyond the vision 
 of the most sanguine dreamer. It had wealth 
 in iron and coal, the two great staples of 
 industrial hfe. It had stores of gold and 
 silver barely equaled in any other part of 
 the world. In its wild Hfe it had the richest 
 supply of furs in the world and in its chill 
 waters the finest quahty of fish. In secur- 
 ing Xorth America Britain had won indeed 
 a triumph and to her sons and daughters 
 that great land remains still in possession. 
 
 The Seven Years' War placed England 
 on a pinnacle of glory. Pitt declared that 
 when peace was made France should be so 
 humbled and crushed that never again should 
 she be able to raise a hand against her an- 
 cient enemy. The EngHsh t^-pe had pre- 
 vailed, and there were few voices to whisper 
 
AND CANADA 37 
 
 that in human affairs overwhehning victory 
 has itself sometimes been the presage of com- 
 ing defeat. Macedon and Rome and Spain 
 might all have taught the lesson. England 
 then had what has been called the most envi- 
 able of the aristocracies in history. Her 
 great nobles had vast landed estates. They 
 lived in regal palaces, waited upon by count- 
 less servants. Even half a century later 
 Home Tooke, dining alone with the Marquis 
 of Lansdowne, counted thirty attendants in 
 the room. The great man traveled on the 
 highways with a pomp that to-day would 
 seem extravagant for a monarch. If, as 
 Emerson said, twenty thousand Norman 
 thieves landed in England in 1066 to con- 
 quer the country, their descendants had be- 
 come a stately nobility, with courtly man- 
 ners and the regard for nice decorum which 
 we find expressed in the pages of Lord 
 Chesterfield. Boswell, with the provincial 
 accent of the Scot, was assured by the pa- 
 tronizing Dr. Johnson that with care he 
 might almost be taken for an Englishman. 
 No trader entered the charmed circle of high 
 society. This was not lacking in virility, for 
 
38 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 the names of many of the officers who fought 
 and died on the battle field in Europe, in 
 America, and in India are drawn from this 
 high circle. It was in truth for the most part 
 men of this class who had led in the long fight 
 which had made the greater part of North 
 America British and forever English- 
 speaking. 
 
AND CANADA 39 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE CREATION OF TWO ENG- 
 LISH-SPEAKING STATES 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 Victory brings to nations pride and often 
 a touch of arrogance, and this effect the com- 
 plete victory of the Seven Years' War, 
 crowned in 1763 by a triumphant peace, 
 brought to Britain. New sources of wealth 
 had been tapped in India, and London be- 
 came more than ever a cosmopoHtan center. 
 England rewarded the men who had brought 
 her success. Pitt soon became Earl of Chat- 
 ham; Amherst, the commander-in-chief in 
 America, was made a peer : the name, Mon- 
 treal, of his seat in the country is a reminder 
 to this day of his American campaigns. 
 France, on the other hand, punished her fail- 
 ures. Lally, who had finally lost India, was 
 done to death on the scaffold by judicial 
 murder for no other reason than that he had 
 failed. The civihan leaders in Canada were 
 sent to the Bastille, and some of them were 
 punished by heavy fines. There was bitter- 
 
40 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ness in the soul of the French and exultation 
 in that of the British. They had fought 
 France ever since the brave days of the Black 
 Prince, four hundred years earlier, and, at 
 last, seemed to have her under their feet. 
 Britain was still in thought an island with a 
 self-complacency which tended to make her 
 impervious to the spiritual reahties of the 
 outside world. In this hour of victory she 
 ate, she drank, and she was merry. No other 
 age in England had seen equal ostentation 
 of wealth and building, such costly terraces 
 and gardens, such outlay in collecting treas- 
 lu-es of art. Why not? Were there not con- 
 tinents tributary to Britain? 
 
 The pomp and luxury of English hf e are, 
 however, only half the story. We do not 
 think wisely when we underestimate the 
 eighteenth century in England. In that age 
 is to be found the fruitful seed of most of 
 the great movements of our own time. Even 
 democracy, which has brought to us such 
 complex problems, found its champions when 
 London shouted for "Wilkes and Liberty." 
 Toward the colonies overseas there was the 
 most benevolent spirit. Both Wesley and 
 
AND CANADA 41 
 
 Whitefield carried to America their spir- 
 itual message. The people of America 
 were, it seemed to the English, under 
 the guardianship of the motherland which, 
 for her part, felt for them as a parent 
 feels for a child. The attitude of London 
 to Boston or Philadelphia was that of finan- 
 cial New York at the present time to a grow- 
 ing town in Dakota or Montana. London 
 should give the note. If the colonies held to 
 it, they were right; if they failed to do so, 
 by so much were they wrong. The colonies 
 might not even have a bishop. That would be 
 to confer upon them a spiritual independence 
 for which as yet they were thought hardly 
 fit. When they were grown up, if they de- 
 sired it — and many of them feared the influ- 
 ence of a masterful prelate — they should no 
 longer be under the necessity of sending 
 across the sea for ordination the young men 
 who entered the ministry of the Church of 
 England. Virginia was the oldest of the 
 colonies, and not yet in Virginia was George 
 Washington able to secure the quahty of 
 clothes which he needed, and his supply came 
 regularly from England. The manufactures 
 
42 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 of America were of no great moment. Eng- 
 land was the home of manufacture. Of 
 course the trading classes in England played 
 no serious part in politics. That was hardly 
 their affair. Let them look after their fac- 
 tories and shops, said the political leaders. 
 The landed classes had always governed and 
 had they not made England great? Si 
 quaeris monumentum, circumspice. 
 
 War, as so well we know in our own age, 
 produces upon political thought an effect 
 profoundly disturbing. The man who goes 
 into battle has faced ultimate realities and 
 tested values. He is offering his life, and 
 no man can do more. In this respect the 
 private is the equal of the field marshal. War 
 involves a close partnership and an ultimate 
 equahty of those who fight together. In the 
 nineteenth century little Piedmont with its 
 tiny army joined Britain and France in the 
 Crimean War, and Piedmont's prime minis- 
 ter, Cavour, sat with the envoys of the great 
 powers when the time came to discuss peace. 
 In the Seven Years' War the American col- 
 onies had put their own fighting men into the 
 field on a scale imequaled during any previ- 
 
AND CANADA 43 
 
 ous war in America. The officers of the reg- 
 ular British army considered these colonial 
 forces as auxiliaries, in much the same way, 
 as now they regard Indian regiments, use- 
 ful if controlled and directed by regular offi- 
 cers, but without the traditions and the train- 
 ing to give them any value if fighting on their 
 own account. This attitude is always irri- 
 tating to those who find themselves either 
 despised or patronized, and it was especially 
 irritating after the colonial forces had given 
 manly cooperation in a great war. This irri- 
 tation was one of the causes of the American 
 Revolution. 
 
 The British tended to look upon the col- 
 onies as their property. A continent had 
 come under British control. The people 
 whose ancestors had long dwelt in America 
 thought the continent was theirs and had 
 among themselves jealous rivalries as to its 
 ownership. Virginia and Massachusetts 
 wished to reach out westward as far as the 
 Mississippi; New York and New Hamp- 
 shire were quarreling about boundaries. 
 Life in America was vivid in its vigorous 
 hopes and its alluring possibilities. The 
 
44. THE UXITED STATES 
 
 motherland had always been far away and 
 across the sea came from her only faint 
 echoes of the word of authority. She was 
 inferior in that her masses had little poHtical 
 power beyond the indirect one of pubhc opin- 
 ion misupported by votes and expressed 
 often in riotous passion rather than in rea- 
 son, as witness the clamor in London for 
 Wilkes and Lord George Gordon. Boston 
 too had its mobs, but they read newspapers 
 and had been trained in politics by their 
 right to vote. England was superior in that 
 she had a class of statesmen versed in the 
 larger problems of national policy and 
 learned in the long traditions of political 
 thought from Plato to Burke. In a real sense 
 Chatham and Burke and Fox saw the world 
 and saw it whole. There was cosmopoHtan 
 thinking in England on pohtical questions in 
 a sense that makes Samuel Adams and Pat- 
 rick Henry appear provmcial. The history 
 of all mankind was open to Burke when he 
 pondered a problem of state. The tragedy 
 was that the people who, as he said, usually 
 come to think right on public questions had 
 no power which could respond to his appeals. 
 
AND CANADA 45 
 
 We need not wonder that, facing new re- 
 sponsibilities, the outcome of victory, and 
 bearing new burdens, the debts of war, the 
 British leaders wished, above all, security for 
 the future. It was a part of their world 
 outlook that they felt themselves as fully 
 responsible for the men of their own race in 
 America as they did for the dependent 
 people in India. To this day Britain admits 
 the principle that she guards the safety of 
 every foot of British territory in no matter 
 what part of the world. The American col- 
 onies were her charge, as in time of danger 
 they were ready enough to claim. It was 
 certain that defeated France would try to 
 recover her lost territories in America. She 
 had influence among the natives, and her 
 agents were assuring them that the king of 
 France was still their father and leader. The 
 war had scarcely ended when, in 1764, there 
 were plots, risings, hideous massacres on the 
 western frontiers of the English colonies. 
 Britain asked them to help with their own 
 defense. They were disunited, heated by 
 their own rivalries, and suspicious with their 
 own jealousies. They hesitated, delayed, and 
 
46 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 did nothing. Then Britain, regarding the 
 men of Massachusetts and Virginia as her 
 own sons, in the same sense as she regarded 
 the men of Devon and Cornwall, told them 
 their duty, and, since they had not themselves 
 met her appeal, she undertook to tax them. 
 At once was it seen that they were English- 
 men with a difference. They were Enghsh 
 as Hampden was Enghsh in refusing to pay 
 taxes imposed without their consent. But 
 in a real sense they were not English, for 
 they sent no members to the Parliament 
 in London and considered the httle legis- 
 lature of each colony as the seat of final 
 authority. 
 
 In the struggle which followed each side 
 fell back upon abstract right and each had 
 for its support some real measure of reason. 
 It was right that the colonists, with a conti- 
 nent just won for their own secure future, 
 should pay ; it was also right that they should 
 not pay except by their own free action. 
 They were not children to be coerced by a 
 parent. Enghsh Tory opinion considered 
 the colonists ingrates ; while colonial opinion 
 regarded George III as a would-be tyrant 
 
AND CANADA 47 
 
 and his ministers as craven tools of their 
 master. It is not easy to understand the 
 Enghsh political system. To our time, in- 
 deed, no one can read it correctly who does 
 not feel the silent, secret pressure of the 
 forces under a constitutional monarchy by 
 which is adjusted from day to day the bal- 
 ance between ancient forms and traditions 
 Sand the reality of power exercised by the rep- 
 resentatives of the people. George III made 
 his ministers his tools, and for a time, brief 
 enough but by so much too long, was master 
 of the government of England. 
 
 No passions are more extreme than those 
 of a class which has built up rights on privi- 
 lege and then finds its claim to power denied. 
 Dr. Samuel Johnson was in his heart a good, 
 just, and reasonable man, who did not know 
 that when he spoke of the colonies in terms 
 of extravagant contempt he was merely echo- 
 ing the tone of wealth and arbitrary power in 
 which he himself had no share. These people 
 in America had dared to say that they could 
 think and fight for themselves, and this 
 seemed as ridiculous as if Hampshire should 
 defy England. Only the pressure of Amer- 
 
48 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ican resistance and success made the great 
 landowners who really governed England 
 even think of what was happening in Amer- 
 ica. Never in domestic affairs had party 
 feehng been more bitter or pohtical intrigue 
 more active. In such things America was an 
 unwelcome intruder. England, after all, was 
 in Europe, and it was issues nearer home 
 which interested English statesmen when 
 they gave their minds to politics. They had, 
 however, many other things to occupy them ; 
 building and ornamentation, sports and 
 farming. Even the Whigs did not see at 
 first what the quarrel in America meant. 
 And in the backgroimd was an ignorant and 
 intriguing young ruler with a worn-out the- 
 ory of kingship in his mind and a perverse 
 and restless activity of thought which made 
 it literally necessary to get up very early in 
 the morning to be ahead of him. He was in 
 reahty Carolus Primus Eedivivus in a world 
 which had outgrown the Stuart conception of 
 monarchy. 
 
 When a claim to authority which has long 
 seemed, if not dead, at least harmless, once 
 again becomes menacing, it is likely to arouse 
 
AND CANADA 49 
 
 both alarm and anger. The colonies had 
 thought that what is sometimes called the 
 omnipotence of Parliament was only a the- 
 ory, inoperative as far as they were con- 
 cerned; but now Parliament claimed the 
 right to tax Lhem independently of their o^¥n 
 legislatures. This stirred alarm to such a 
 point that the colonies saw in every action of 
 Britain affecting them some sinister design 
 against their liberties. The Quebec Act, 
 passed in 1774, was in reality a quite harm- 
 less measure intended to provide for good 
 government and content in the regions lately 
 taken from France. It granted the con- 
 quered people the right to retain the French 
 civil law and the full liberties of their reli- 
 gious system. This liberality to a helpless 
 people is, however, denounced in the Dec- 
 laration of Independence as only a beginning 
 of an effort to impose French despotism on 
 all the colonies and to revive the horrors of 
 the Inquisition against the Protestants of 
 the New World. No colonial leader pointed 
 out the humor of such designs imputed to the 
 bigoted Protestant George III. Alarms so 
 fantastic .were fortified by the anger of 
 
50 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 wounded pride. The Virginian, Washing- 
 ton, regarded himself as the pohtical equal 
 of any man living, and was filled with con- 
 temptuous rage at any limitation of his dig- 
 nity as a free man. The cosmopolitan Frank- 
 lin was as bitter as Washington, and both 
 showed a stern hatred of those among their 
 countrymen who seemed willing to admit the 
 claims made on behalf of the king. To the 
 outraged American sense of pohtical dignity 
 the Tory Loyalists were the scum of the 
 earth, unfit to live. Neither side in the strug- 
 gle was wholly united. The Enghsh Whig 
 praised the rebellious colonists as the truest 
 patriots ; the Tory in America was always a 
 factor checking those in arms against the 
 king. 
 
 Each side had one dominant thought — 
 that of preserving a far-spreading political 
 union. The continued unity of the British 
 Empire is a political ideal for which many 
 thousands of brave men would to-day be 
 willing to die. At the present moment of 
 victory after a long war it would prove a 
 terrible blow to Britain's position if the Brit- 
 ish nations which have united against a com- 
 
AND CANADA 51 
 
 mon enemy should themselves fall apart. As 
 intense was the desire after the victory 
 crowned by peace in 1763 to hold together all 
 the lands which were British. In America 
 there was another ideal of unity, at first not 
 irreconcilable with the desu-e to remain Brit- 
 ish. This ideal was that America should be 
 united, that protests against the policy of the 
 motherland should include all that was Brit- 
 ish in America and be continental in charac- 
 ter. The Congress was from the first called 
 Continental, Washington had a desire al- 
 most passionate to include Canada and Nova 
 Scotia with the thirteen other colonies. One 
 of his first problems after taking up the com- 
 mand in July, 1775, concerned the steps to 
 be taken to effect this end and the twofold 
 invasion of Canada followed. Both the Brit- 
 ish and the American ideal failed of realiza- 
 tion. The British union was broken up. 
 The American continental union was never 
 created. Of the first the great republic of 
 the United States stretching from ocean to 
 ocean is the result; of the second monarchi- 
 cal Canada, stretching, too, from Atlantic to 
 Pacific, is to-day the impressive outcome. 
 
52 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 The continent was to be English-speaking, 
 but it was not to be one politically. 
 
 Small seeds produce great fruits, and it 
 was seemingly but a small thing which kept 
 Canada out of the American Union. The 
 American inyaders in 1775 were in posses- 
 sion of all of settled Canada on the Saint 
 Lawrence which lay west of Quebec. In the 
 whole of Canada (including civilians and sol- 
 diers alike) dwelt less than two thousand 
 British. There were, perhaps, eighty thou- 
 sand French. But they felt no deep devotion 
 Lo the British crown. Two things held Can- 
 ada to its British allegiance: one was a few 
 British soldiers in the fortress of Quebec un- 
 der a leader. General Carleton, who hurled 
 a contemptuous defiance at his "rebel" as- 
 jjailants; tjhe other was the suspicion of the 
 Roman CathoHc leaders of the Protestant 
 md Puritan English, who even in Congress 
 had denounced their church as a bloody tyr- 
 army. If the masses in Canada were not 
 alert on this point, the church itself watched 
 and proved impervious even to the seduc- 
 tions of a master of diplomacy like Franklin 
 when he went on a mission to Montreal. The 
 
AND CANADA 53 
 
 British fleet gave the final decision by timely 
 arrival at Quebec in the spring of 1776, and 
 then Britain remained firmly entrenched in 
 North America. It is one of the amusing 
 paradoxes of history that because Canada 
 liad been French it was destined in the hour 
 of danger to remain British when nearlv all 
 that was of British creation in America 
 broke from the old allegiance. 
 
 A new type of citizen now appeared in 
 Canada. Ever since the blustering days in 
 March, 1770, when many hundreds of weep- 
 ing exiles had crowded on ships in Boston 
 harbor m flight before the impending sur- 
 render of the city to Washington, there had 
 been a stream of exiles into the lands which 
 now form Canada. They were sad at leav- 
 ing homes which they or their ancestors had 
 created in the English colonies, and they 
 were angry on account of the causes of their 
 exile. Some of them were educated ; the best 
 blood of Massachusetts and New York — and 
 it was in many cases the best blood of Eng- 
 land too — ^flowed in their veins. Some of 
 them were rough and ignorant. Because 
 they had held to their British allegiance they 
 
54 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 had lost their property ; they themselves had 
 been social outcasts, the victims of outrage 
 by clamorous mobs ; they had been obliged to 
 take the long and weary path to exile; and 
 now they were forced to hew out new homes 
 for themselves in a land of stiff forests and 
 wintry snows. Some of them would have 
 been glad if each stroke of the axe to make 
 their clearings might have been a stroke at 
 the neck of a hated "rebel" who had profited 
 by driving out his loyalist neighbor. It was 
 in this spirit that English-speaking Canada 
 was begun. If the colonies were bitter 
 against England, Canada was bitter against 
 the colonies. In the heat of these emotions 
 were founded the two English-speaking 
 states of to-day. 
 
 At the heart of each of them was an idea 
 which seemed irreconcilably opposed to the 
 thought of the other. In the minds of the 
 founders of the American republic was 
 deeply rooted the conception that they were 
 bringing forth a political creation, "con- 
 ceived," as Abraham Lincoln said, "in lib- 
 erty," of import for all mankind, and mark- 
 ing the dawn of a new day. They were 
 
AND CANADA 55 
 
 proud that this system was not a survival 
 from the past, but a new thing. Some of 
 them felt like doing what the revolutionists 
 in France did a few years later, marking the 
 era by making the date of its beginning day 
 one of year one of an epoch of new hopes and 
 new achievements for human life. It was 
 because this thing was so fresh and so sacred 
 that the fathers of the American Constitu- 
 tion debated earnestly about safeguards and 
 checks and balances. They feared lest de- 
 signing selfishness might mar the sacred edi- 
 fice which they reared. They desired that 
 to the oppressed of all mankind a new door 
 of hope should remain open for the pursuit 
 of liberty and happiness. America was itself 
 new, a continent ahnost untouched. Prov- 
 idence seemed to have reserved it for this 
 last and greatest achievement. 
 
 The traveler of to-day who visits the great 
 cataract of Niagara and follows the majestic 
 river to its discharge in Lake Ontario will 
 see at its mouth the symbols of two great his- 
 torical movements. The river is the frontier 
 between the United States and Canada and 
 on the right bank is a fort over the white 
 
56 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 walls of which, in a pleasant setting of green 
 trees, floats the Stars and Stripes; while 
 across the river on the left bank is a mihtary 
 camp where floats the Union Jack. Here on 
 the Canadian side in 1792, five years after 
 the Constitution of the United States had 
 been drawn up, was brought into being a new 
 state based on unbroken British tradition. 
 The creation of the new Canada had been 
 much debated across the sea in Great Britain. 
 Pitt and Burke and Fox had taken part in 
 the discussion. Xo longer was Canada only 
 French and Cathohc. Xo longer could it 
 be ruled under the despotic principles of 
 mihtary conquest. Fifty or sixty thousand 
 Loyahsts had taken refuge in British Xorth 
 America and must be given the pohtical hb- 
 erties of Enghshmen. Xor could these be 
 denied to their French fellow- citizens in Can- 
 ada. Accordingly, we now have what had 
 been New France divided into two colonies. 
 One was to have a legislature to sit at Que- 
 bec, the other was also to have a legislature 
 with Niagara, and later Toronto, as its capi- 
 tal. To Xiagara in 1792 came the first gov- 
 ernor to set up the new government. He 
 
AND CAXADA 57 
 
 was Colonel Simcoe, a member of the Brit- 
 ish Parliament, a Devonshire squire, but 
 above all a soldier. He had served in Amer- 
 ica during the American Revolution and was 
 one of the gallant band of officers with Corn- 
 walhs when in 1781 he surrendered at York- 
 town. To Simcoe the American republican 
 system was anathema. He clung passion- 
 ately to the old loyalties and here he was in 
 1792 the leader in an effort to reconsecrate 
 and continue them in North America. Far 
 away in that other Canadian capital, Que- 
 bec, Sir Guy Carleton, now Lord Dorches- 
 ter, who had commanded at New York until 
 the last Loyahst had been secure in his pro- 
 tection, was directing another government 
 for the French province. It is typical of 
 the attitude of Canada toward the new re- 
 pubhc that two prominent soldiers who had 
 fought against the American Revolution 
 should have presided over the political crea- 
 tion of the new Canada, One capital was 
 soon shifted from Niagara to Toronto, and 
 to this day there and at Quebec laws are 
 made and justice is administered in the name 
 of King George. 
 
58 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 The eighteenth century had little experi- 
 ence of republics and no great love for them. 
 Switzerland was the only stable republic in 
 Europe, and it was a loose federation of 
 small states, safe in their obscurity, until, a 
 little later, they should happen to stand 
 across the path of a soldier like Napoleon, 
 who would then use them as he pleased. The 
 Venetian republic had a long and .notable 
 history, but it was in the control of a privi- 
 leged oligarchy and its days were numbered. 
 That a republic could not endure was a 
 staple of Europe's political thinking. Thus, 
 to many, the United States by becoming a 
 republic was taking an easy path to destruc- 
 tion. It was monarchy which could hold and 
 save Canada in a system intended, as Simcoe 
 said, to be the very image and transcript of 
 that of Great Britain. Those were days of 
 Tory rule in England, and, in spite of Whig 
 protests, Canada was to be modeled on the 
 Tory ideal. Religion, if only it were Prot- 
 estant, should be endowed by the state. 
 There was to be a landed aristocracy, and the 
 squire was to be the leader in rural commu- 
 nities as he was in England. There was to 
 
AND CANADA 59 
 
 be a second chamber in the legislature, 
 where in due course the members of a Cana- 
 dian peerage should sit by right of birth and 
 rank. Stubborn conditions will not, how- 
 ever, lend themselves to making one political 
 society the exact copy of another. They for- 
 bade that Canada should have squires and 
 peers. Neither are to be found in the Legis- 
 lature which still sits at Toronto, and there 
 is not even a second chamber. A House of 
 Lords was in truth no necessary accompani- 
 ment of the British ideal. What was vital, 
 the continuance of unbroken tradition, linked 
 with the institution of monarchy, remains, 
 and one may hazard the opinion that to this 
 day it is as strong among the legislators who 
 sit in Toronto as it is among those who sit 
 in London. 
 
 If the traveler to Niagara had happened 
 to drop in upon Simcoe on the morning of 
 September 17, 1792, he would have found a 
 stirring scene. There were clearings along 
 the river and already a goodly number of 
 settlers ; but, for the most part, the eye would 
 fall upon dark masses of forest, already be- 
 ginning to show the tints of autumn. \ Sim- 
 
60 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 coe had issued a proclamation inviting set- 
 tlers to come into his province — but on one 
 condition : they must take oath to support to 
 the utmost of their power the authority of 
 King and Parliament. There were already 
 more than ten thousand people in the prov- 
 ince, an election had taken place for mem- 
 bers of the legislature, and now on this day 
 Simcoe, as representing the king, was about 
 to open the first session with pomp as nearly 
 regal as he could make it. He could, in truth, 
 as far as military parade went, make a brave 
 show. He had soldiers enough; there was 
 abundance of red coats and pipe clay; and 
 Simcoe could array himself and his men in 
 imiforms as fitting as those at Westminster 
 for the opening of Parliament. On the banks 
 of the wonderful river stood the rude Free- 
 masons' hall where met for the time the 
 Houses of Parliament. Cannon boomed out 
 the royal salute. The two Houses gathered 
 in the Upper Chamber, and Simcoe read the 
 Speech from the Throne to the assembled 
 legislators. There were, it is true, only nine 
 members of the Upper House, which he 
 hoped some day might be a House of Lords, 
 
AND CANADA 61 
 
 and sixteen of the Lower House. They were 
 plain farmers and storekeepers from homes 
 rough enough, but they knew what they were 
 about. One of the first things they did was 
 to enact that English law should run in the 
 province, and then they proceeded to pro- 
 vide a courthouse for each district and with it 
 a jail for offenders. Slavery had already 
 a footing in the country. Indians had sold 
 captive negroes to the settlers, who found 
 their labor valuable. But slavery was 
 quickly ended. The old traditions of Eng- 
 land and England's \s.w still stood firmly 
 intrenched in North America. 
 
 It was a far cry from Simcoe's littb capi- 
 tal to that of hi§ fellow soldier Washington. 
 In this same year, 1792, Washington was 
 elected for his second term as President of 
 the United States. The two English-speak- 
 ing countries thus started each in its new 
 course at about the same time. Washington 
 administered a Constitution which, as its cre- 
 ators fondly hoped, contained the best from 
 every system. It has endured, and under it 
 at the present time are governed nearly twice 
 as many Enghsh-speaking people as are to 
 
62 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 be found in the whole British Empire. The 
 belief of Europe that a republic could not 
 endure has been falsified. It has borne the 
 sternest test that a political system can en- 
 dure — ^that of civil war. At times every con- 
 stitution seems to lumber heavily and the 
 American Constitution is no exception. 
 Montesquieu had said that "when the leg- 
 islative and executive powers are united in 
 the same person . . . there can be no liberty," 
 and the f ramers of the Constitution accepted 
 his teaching that "power should be a check 
 to power." The result has been that at times 
 in the history of the United States one power 
 has checked another to the detriment of the 
 real interests of the nation. Congress has 
 thwarted and defied the head of the execu- 
 tive government, and the head of the execu- 
 tive government has thwarted and defied 
 Congress, until there has been thought of 
 turning to that parliamentary government 
 which in the British system makes the legis- 
 lative authority supreme over the executive. 
 In the British system, however, there hai^ 
 been a similar defect taking a different form. 
 During generations the hereditary House of 
 
AND CANADA 63 
 
 Lords has thwarted the will of the elected 
 House of Commons and paralyzed the au- 
 thority of the representatives of the people. 
 No political system can claim exemption 
 from defects or a monopoly of advantages. 
 In Canada the working of the traditional 
 British system was far from smooth. The 
 governor sent out from Great Britain long 
 claimed that a colony was unlike the mother- 
 land, since, in a colony, the final exercise of 
 executive authority rested with the appointed 
 governor, who was under no compulsion to 
 adopt the responsible government operating 
 in England. The issue was fought out in 
 long and troubled controversy. In 1837 and 
 1838 there was armed rebellion in support of 
 full responsible government. Not until 1849 
 was the principle established that the Cana- 
 dian Legislature could make and unmake at 
 its discretion the ministries carrying on the 
 government. The prime minister then ap- 
 peared in Canadian politics, as long since he 
 had appeared in English politics, and since 
 the middle of the nineteenth century two 
 Enghsh-speaking peoples have Hved side by 
 side in North America, one a repubhc with a 
 
64 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 new type of government, the other existing 
 under the traditions of the old British mon- 
 archy with changes, in effect, though rarely 
 in form, which make it the expression of po- 
 litical forces operating in their most recent 
 developments in a democratic society. 
 
AND CANADA 65 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE GROWTH OF FEDERALISM 
 IN NORTH AMERICA 
 
 In face of any new illustrations of the 
 unity of the man of to-day with his own past 
 some will murmur that history repeats itself 
 and that there is nothing new under the sun. 
 This is true of man's spirit in tTie same sense 
 that it is true of external nature. All the ele- 
 ments are there, but they are capable of vary- 
 ing combinations. It is in these combinations 
 that the unexpected is to be found. When 
 some vision is outlined of what human soci- 
 ety may become in the future a certain type 
 of cynic is apt to dismiss the prospect with 
 the remark that "human nature does not 
 change." Indeed it does not any more than 
 nature herself changes. In her remain al- 
 ways the elements found in mother earth, the 
 sun, the wind, the rain, and the changing 
 seasons. But, even under the control of 
 pigmy man, these forces may be combined 
 and re-combined, without change in their 
 
66 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ultimate quality, until here is a desert, like 
 that at the present moment of a strip of 
 France, three hundred and fifty miles long, 
 and elsewhere a smiling garden, a noble 
 building, or a picture gallery. Human na- 
 ture does not change. It, like external na- 
 ture, is under the laws of its own being. But 
 the combinations of its energies change 
 under the control of man's own will. In his 
 hands are the issues of justice and injustice, 
 of war and peace, of ultimate decency or of 
 ultimate brutality. 
 
 Pascal outlined the course of human his- 
 tory in his saying that "all mankind in the 
 course of the ages is as one man who exists 
 forever and who is eternally learning." The 
 child is father of the man, but the man is not 
 the child. He has passed into another phase 
 of life, the expression of all his past. To 
 his enduring quaUties of character have been 
 added experience, knowledge — if you hke, 
 disillusion. He looks out upon the world 
 with a calmer deliberation, a more penetrat- 
 ing insight. It is a commonplace to say that 
 it is we, and not our forefathers, who are the 
 true ancients, for we survey the longer ex- 
 
AND CANADA 67 
 
 panse of human action. Out of the past of 
 man's needs and aspirations is being eternally 
 evolved in society some new thing. In poli- 
 tics the English-speaking people in particu- 
 lar are incessantly creating fresh apphcations 
 of old principles. We shall find in the Poli- 
 tics of Aristotle some of the most far-reach- 
 ing principles affecting man as a political 
 animal. The amazing insight of the Greek 
 thinker laid bare for all time the sources in 
 man of all the tangled web of self-interest, 
 intrigue, idealism, and sacrifice which we call 
 politics. He saw these operating in little 
 states, based on the principle of slavery. He 
 could not foresee that on the hillsides of Ju- 
 dasa would be preached by a sad-faced 
 teacher a doctrine of man's brotherhood 
 which should in time exorcise the spirit of 
 slavery from the hearts of those who accepted 
 his teaching. He could not foresee that when 
 England gave the world the idea of repre- 
 sentative government the large state would 
 dome into being composed of freemen who 
 should choose representatives to make laws 
 and levy taxes. He could not foresee new 
 conditions in a New World out of which 
 
68 THE UXITED STATES 
 
 should come vast states governed under fed- 
 eral institutions like in some ways, and yet 
 unlike what Greece herself had produced. 
 
 The most striking phase of modern poKti- 
 cal society is found in the wide extent of the 
 individual state combiued with government 
 on the basis of representative uistitutions. It 
 is not easy to explain why the big state has 
 seemed to become necessary. The individual 
 may certainly be as happy in the small state 
 as in the large one. In the small state he 
 counts for more and is in some respects freer, 
 for the smaller community can give consid- 
 eration to personal needs in a way impossible 
 in the great one; it is, for instance, noticed 
 in the United States that federal law is exe- 
 cuted with more unvarTing" ri^or than is 
 state law. Perhaps we owe the large state 
 of our time to the facility of iatercourse 
 which is possible in modern society. In 
 earher times in Europe ( and the same is true 
 to this day in the backward parts of the 
 world) communities only a few miles apart 
 had little in common and felt no need of 
 union. Printing has brought the easy circu- 
 lation of ideas, so that men who never see 
 
AND CANADA 69 
 
 each other learn to agree or to differ on 
 questions that arise. Out of such reflection 
 comes poHtical action on a broader scale than 
 was possible in the days of isolation. With 
 common ideas come movement, inquiry, and 
 travel. The Wars of the Roses, just at the 
 time when printing was discovered, began 
 the shattering of the isolation of Enghsh f eu- 
 dahsm, and out of this came the centrahzed 
 Tudor monarchy, an authority unquestion- 
 ably supreme over the whole land. Henry 
 VIII boasted in his pride that no other mon- 
 arch dare look him in the face. One great 
 state made others necessary. Soon Richeheu 
 made France a centralized monarchy, and 
 from that age the evolution of the great state 
 has been the most absorbing factor in poli- 
 tics. Representative institutions have helped 
 to make the large state, since under them the 
 electors need not, as in the Greek repubhc, 
 come together in one place to vote, but could 
 send from each locahty men chosen to act 
 for them. 
 
 When the thirteen colonies were changed 
 by their political independence into thirteen 
 sovereign states it was certain that, if they 
 
70 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 obeyed the spirit of the time, they would 
 form some kind of political union. Among 
 the thirteen were bitter jealousies and rival- 
 ries, but over all lesser interests was domi- 
 nant the need of the big state. Complete 
 amalgamation was neither possible nor desir- 
 able. The states were of differing types. 
 Even in New England, Connecticut was un- 
 like Massachusetts. When John Adams, of 
 Massachusetts, first visited New York and 
 Philadelphia he was as alert to note differ- 
 ences as is a Parisian in London. Georgia, 
 lying hundreds of miles away, in days, too, 
 when roads and bridges were either bad or 
 lacking, and travel was slow, had, like Vir- 
 ginia, a different type of society, with negro 
 slavery at the basis of the system. Thus it 
 was that out of differences and distance, out 
 of war and the danger of war, out of a com- 
 bined particularism and cosmopolitanism 
 came in America the necessity of federal 
 union, if it was to be union at all. Under 
 such a system the big state and the little state 
 might be only different aspects of one whole. 
 From the new conditions of hfe in America 
 was evolved a new type of pohtical society. 
 
AND CANADA 71 
 
 which was to prove of absorbing interest to 
 all mankind and to be copied in Europe, 
 Australia, and Africa, as well as in all parts 
 of the two continents of America. 
 
 Federal government involves division of 
 power between a central government and a 
 state or provincial government. This is per- 
 haps its most obvious feature, but it is not 
 the whole story. If, in some aspects, the 
 whole controls the parts in a federal system, 
 the parts must, in their turn, control the 
 whole. The British Commonwealth, leaving 
 out of sight the self-governing Dominions, 
 is made up of states, such as the great Em- 
 pire of India and large colonies like Jamaica, 
 which have their legislatures and a consider- 
 able measure of self-government, and are at 
 the same time under a central authority, but 
 the Commonwealth is not a federation, for 
 these parts have no share in this central au- 
 thority. In a real federation like the United 
 States, while the government at Washington 
 legislates for Connecticut and Idaho, these 
 in their turn elect representatives who play 
 their due part in carrying on the government 
 at Washington. Under the terms of a writ- 
 
72 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ten agreement, called a constitution, the 
 division of power is definitely marked. A 
 federation, it has been said, is made, not born. 
 It is not, like the mass of law and custom 
 composing the so-called British constitution, 
 a growth, which can shift from day to day 
 the incidence of authority, unbound by any 
 implied contract. Federalism is the result 
 of definite agreement. Each party to the 
 agreement has allotted to it definite powers 
 and the legal right, defensible in the law 
 courts, to retain these powers unimpaired. 
 A federal system is a work of art, created 
 and completed in the consciousness of its 
 significance. 
 
 The framers of the American federation 
 had one happy circumstance which made 
 their task easier. All of them had had a. 
 considerable training in self-government, all 
 had the same British tradition in political 
 thought^ and all sjpoke the same language. 
 They could readily understand each other. 
 Institutions do not work themselves. Those 
 which conform to the highest ideals and are 
 in theory perfect will work only if in the 
 hands of men with instincts and training in 
 
AND CANADA 73 
 
 harmony with the purpose of the system cre- 
 ated. Radicals of to-day are apt to complain 
 that the American system was created by 
 men who had an exaggerated respect for the 
 rights of property. It may be so; but this, 
 at least, should be remembered, that, in spite 
 of acute and even angry differences, they 
 set up a new system which everyone was 
 obliged to respect and to obey. It had fierce 
 critics, but the critics were themselves trained 
 in pohtical action. For three-quarters of a 
 century it endured with no severe shock to 
 its stability. It may be said with truth that 
 it is the only new system imposed in an era 
 of revolution, with no sword drawn in civil 
 strife in protest against its creation. Later 
 the sword was drawn, and then not because 
 the system was inherently unfair but because 
 a great human problem, that of slavery, had 
 reached the point when it had to be settled 
 forever. It was elemental injustice in an 
 earlier age to the black man which threatened 
 the ruin of the work done by the founders 
 of the republic. Never did Nemesis work 
 with more tragic efPect. 
 
 The seeds of federahsm, which had grown 
 
74 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 to so stable a result by the end of the eight- 
 eenth century, were destined to scatter far. 
 The process proved slow. Soon after the 
 young republic was created it was put in 
 countenance by the appearance of the sister 
 French republic. The cry of this repubUc 
 was not for federalism. France had long 
 consisted of more than a score of provinces 
 so little united in spirit that they even raised 
 tariffs against each other. Now the demand 
 was for "France one and indivisible." The 
 Girondin party spoke vaguely of some kind 
 of federal union, but this only served to em- 
 bitter their terrible Jacobin enemies, who 
 gloried in the supremacy of Paris over an 
 indivisible France ; and the Girondin leaders 
 paid on the scaffold the dread penalty of 
 their proposals for a federal system. Yet 
 was federalism in the air. In due course 
 Napoleon, the military despot, came to the 
 final ruin which was really involved in his 
 assaults on liberty, and then a new Europe 
 was to be stabilized. It was the idea of fed- 
 eralism which for the time solved the age- 
 long problem of union and cooperation of 
 the German states, to the extent, at least, of 
 
AND CANADA 75 
 
 keeping them from making war on each 
 other. The Germanic Confederation of 1815 
 was loose and unreal enough and its shad- 
 owy character has excited derision among 
 critics. But it is well to remember that it 
 served its useful purpose of keeping the 
 peace among the German peoples, and, for 
 half a century, whatever their conflicts with 
 other races, they did not draw the sword 
 against each other. When they did, the first 
 act of Prussia, triumphant over Austria, was 
 to create a new and this time a real and 
 potent federation of North Germany which 
 a few years later became that gigantic and 
 powerful union known to the world as the 
 German Empire. 
 
 The federalism of Germany was unlike the 
 federalism of the United States chiefly, per- 
 haps, in that it consisted of a number of les- 
 ser states grouped round one great state 
 more powerful than all the others combined. 
 In such conditions it is not easy to provide 
 for the equality of standing of the separate 
 units in the great whole. This did not exist 
 in Germany, in sharp contrast with what we 
 find in the United States, where Nevada, with 
 
76 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 less than a hundred thousand people, is the 
 equal in the American Senate, which has be- 
 come the more powerful of the two Houses 
 of Congress, to New York with, perhaps, 
 ten million people. Federal institutions, 
 which are necessarily based on written law, 
 depend upon the will of each of the parties 
 to accept and carry out the terms of a con- 
 tract. We know to-day that while the state 
 constitutions in the United States have in 
 many cases undergone radical revision and 
 far-reaching change, that of the United 
 States has had but nineteen amendments in 
 more than a century and a quarter. The 
 states have been loyal to the terms of their 
 contract. A dominant mihtary power, how- 
 ever, hke that of Prussia, was certain in a 
 federal union to use the coercive influence of 
 its own authority and thus to taint the 
 sources of federalism. It was not in the soil 
 of an armed Europe nor in that of the mili- 
 tarist South American states that the seed 
 of federalism took the deepest root, but in 
 the British Coromonwealth. It became the 
 pupil of the United States, and has brought 
 forth fruit of which its teacher need not be 
 
AND CANADA 77 
 
 ashamed. And the first pupil to take the 
 lesson to heart was Canada. 
 
 During the nineteenth century had grown 
 up on the northern borders of the United 
 States six British colonies, each of them with 
 its own marked characteristics. Nova Sco- 
 tia was proud to have been a British land 
 long before Canada became British. In 
 Nova Scotia had floated the British flag ever 
 since, in 1710, a raid from New England 
 across the Bay of Fundy had been success- 
 ful, and what had been the French fort of 
 Port Boyal had become the British fort of 
 Annapolis, named in honor of the dull and 
 obstinate but good queen who then reigned. 
 At the time of the American Revolution a 
 new colony. New Brunswick, had been 
 carved out of Acadia, of which Nova Scotia 
 was a part, and which had been ceded by 
 France under the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. 
 Hither and to Nova Scotia had come some 
 of the best blood of New England to live un- 
 d'er the British flag. Newfoundland and 
 Prince Edward Island, though alike in that 
 each lay apart from the mainland, across a 
 strip of sea, were wholly different in type. 
 
78 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 Newfoundland was a colony chiefly of fish- 
 ermen. Prince Edward Island a colony 
 chiefly of farmers. Their population was 
 small, but each of the colonies had its legisla- 
 ture, its civic pride, and its obstinate sense 
 of independence. Farther north and stretch- 
 ing along the majestic Saint Lawrence west- 
 ward far beyond the boundary of the last of 
 the Great Lakes was Canada. The two divi- 
 sions created in 1791 had in 1841 been 
 brought together into an uneasy and un- 
 happy union. They were in type almost 
 wholly separate. One was prevailingly 
 French and Cathohc, the other prevailingly 
 EngHsh and Protestant, composed, indeed, 
 largely of Loyalist elements from the United 
 States. Here was the raw material for a 
 new federation, material, indeed, more in- 
 tractable than that of the thirteen colonies. 
 It had happily no negro problem, but it had 
 the difficulty which lurks in the background 
 of all Canadian questions — the French and 
 Catholic standing over against the English 
 and Protestant, and each of them powerful 
 enough at times to check and thwart the 
 other. By a strange fortune branches of the 
 
AND CANADA 79 
 
 two most civilized peoples of Europe, age- 
 long enemies, had come to live together in the 
 same state in North America. 
 
 Whatever their differences these people 
 were alike in one respect : all were devoted to 
 the traditions of monarchy. There were 
 none who talked of setting up a republic. 
 The monarchy of Queen Victoria was not 
 the monarchy of George III. Even George 
 III had been forced to obey ministers who 
 had behind them a majority in the House of 
 Commons. But with the obstinacy, which he 
 called firnmess, he fretted, protested, and 
 threatened, he intrigued to keep together a 
 body of "The King's Friends" who would 
 obey his will; and always his private virtues 
 and his imbalanced and, in truth, insane 
 temper were factors to be reckoned with by 
 his ministers. It is probably true that the 
 sex of Victoria led to the complete abandon- 
 ment by the crown of any claim to direct 
 British policy. Man is a masterful animal 
 and does not like direction, in public affairs 
 at least, by the female of the species. Un- 
 der a queen the British people ruled them- 
 selves through a Cabinet of their own mak- 
 
80 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ing. By 1850, except in respect to foreign 
 affairs, the Canadians did the same. There 
 was no longer any ground of friction between 
 the two peoples. They were happy in com- 
 mon traditions. Probably Canada was the 
 more vigorous in its expressions of devotion 
 to the crown. It had, too, confidence in Brit- 
 ish statesmen. Pitt had broken the degrad- 
 ing prevalence of corruption in British poli- 
 tics. The buying and selling of seats in 
 Parhament had ended. No doubt voters 
 were still bought, but it was by indii^ect and 
 not grossly direct methods. To the worlds to 
 Canada at least, by 1860, Britain stood as a 
 marvel of political purity, inciting to rever- 
 ence and imitation. 
 
 Thus it was that, in 1864, when the six 
 British provinces sent delegates to Quebec 
 to consider the problem of political union, 
 they were proud to put in the forefront of 
 their ideals that they desired to frame a con- 
 stitution similar in principle to that of the 
 United Kingdom. On the face of it they 
 were doing nothing of the kind. They had 
 the dominant thought of creating a federa- 
 tion, while the United Kingdom expressed in 
 
AND CANADA 81 
 
 its name the idea of complete political union 
 under a single legislature. The thought of 
 any other type of union had never seriously 
 appealed to the British mind. When in 1707 
 England and S (jot land had been united, it 
 is debatable whether it would not have been 
 wise to create a federal state rather tlian a 
 United Kingdom. The day was to come 
 for another union, that with Ireland, and 
 had Scotland preserved in 1707 a local legis- 
 lature, controlling, as every American State 
 and every Canadian province now controls, 
 measures which touch education and reli- 
 gion, the precedent might have proved val- 
 uable. The Kirk of Scotland would have 
 remained established by authority of the Par- 
 liament of Scotland; Edinburgh would have 
 remained a real capital, a center of political 
 power, and would not have become merely 
 a provincial city. Above all, the example of 
 vScotland would have been a powerful argu- 
 ment for leaving to Ireland authority touch- 
 ing education and religion, the lack of which 
 has been a cause of her dire unrest. The 
 British, however, were not federally minded. 
 By 1864 the Canadians were; and yet they 
 
82 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 proclaimed their desire to create as nearly 
 as possible a copy of the United Kingdom. 
 
 They created a federation. But in the 
 horn* of decision some of the six colonies drew 
 back. Newfoundland preferred, and con- 
 tinues to prefer, her isolation. For a time 
 Prince Edward Island adopted the same 
 course, but after a few years found the 
 larger wisdom. For the absence of New- 
 foundland there was the abounding com- 
 pensation of including in the Canadian union 
 the far-spreading empire of the prairie coun- 
 try west of the Great Lakes and also the 
 mountains and valleys, the sea-coast and the 
 islands, of British Columbia, the latter an 
 achievement which added softness of climate 
 to the rigor of the eastern provinces. Just 
 as the United States secured quickly its 
 fruitful western area beyond the Missis- 
 sippi, when once stable federal government 
 had been created, so did Canada, when real 
 political power was intrenched at Ottawa, 
 reach out from the Great Lakes to the 
 Pacific. 
 
 The new Canadian federalism showed 
 deep-seated but not wholly obvious contrasts 
 
AND CANADA 83 
 
 with that of the United States. On the sur- 
 face, indeed, there was striking similarity. 
 The provinces in Canada had powers less 
 extensive than those of the States but simi- 
 lar to them. The House of Commons in 
 Canada, like the House of Representatives 
 in the United States, expressed the prin- 
 ciple of representation from each division in 
 proportion to its population, while the Ca- 
 nadian like the American Senate embodied 
 the idea of safeguarding the interests of 
 smaller units by giving them representation 
 without regard to disparity of numbers. 
 The contrasts were, however, real. In the 
 Canadian federal constitution there was little 
 detail, little definition. Power was divided 
 between federal and provincial legislatures, 
 organs of government were created and, in 
 large measure, that was all. There were no 
 prohibitions in regard to confiscating prop- 
 erty, to establishing a state church, and to 
 the many other things forbidden in the con- 
 stitution of the United States. There was no 
 system of checks and balances. Fictions in 
 respect to the authority of the sovereign were 
 maintained. The queen was, in word, sup- 
 
84 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 posed to govern, and an untutored reader of 
 the constitution might imagine that Canada 
 was still subject to the direct exercise of the 
 royal authority. There was no mention of 
 prime minister or cabinet and yet prime min- 
 ister and cabinet were the pivots of the whole 
 system. The official head of the state was 
 without authority; yet in the sovereign and 
 his representative centered the pomp and cir- 
 cumstance of government. Little wonder 
 that the American people, living under a 
 constitution in which powers are strictly 
 defined with an effort at completeness, 
 should, to this day, find difficulty in under- 
 standing the federal system of their northern 
 neighbors. In one system words have their 
 due meaning; in the other it is necessary al- 
 ways to explain that many of them do not 
 mean what they seem to say. It is the differ- 
 ence between a new creation and a system 
 based on tradition. 
 
AND CANADA 85 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 LIKENESSES AND CONTRASTS 
 
 IN THE FEDERAL SYSTEMS 
 
 OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 AND CANADA 
 
 A WORLD grown old in sage experience 
 ought not in practical affairs to think that 
 an issue is solved by an appeal to dogma. 
 In theology creeds are as often explained 
 away as accepted in their obvious meaning; 
 and in politics, while wise men shake their 
 heads at the outworn solution for political 
 evils offered in the divine right of kings, 
 they are hardly less restive at bald assertions 
 of the divine right of democracy. For pol- 
 itics are not to be conducted successfully by 
 the mere instinct of man to govern himself. 
 Societies there are, but they are not human, 
 which seem to arrive at an amazing degree of 
 organized efficiency by the exercise of in- 
 stinct, without the need of a laborious proc- 
 ess of education. The bee-hive has its skillful 
 architects who plan and build shapely houses. 
 
86 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 its provision for sanitation and ventilation, 
 its ordered solution of labor problems, its 
 police, its hierarchy of government officials ; 
 and yet in this compact and industrious com- 
 munity we can find no trace of school or uni- 
 versity in which the young are taught how 
 best to perform the tasks which fall to them. 
 Man is not so happy. Without education, 
 a process lasting through many uncertain 
 years, he puts little beneficent restraint upon 
 his fiercer passions and directs but ill his own 
 energies. It may be that the bees blunder, 
 as man blunders, and are more dependent 
 upon experience than we often imagine, but 
 it remains true that the instinct of the bee 
 leads it to achieve its ends in Hfe by an easier 
 path than that in which man must walk. He 
 must plan anxiously for the well-being of a 
 complex society. It is a vast and intricate 
 task which no one person can understand or 
 direct. Despots have tried it and failed dis- 
 astrously. A single mind could not read 
 deeply enough or see far enough. And now 
 the many are undertaking to solve the prob- 
 lems for themselves and the road to their 
 Olympus is rough and steep. 
 
AND CANADA 87 
 
 In America democracy has its greatest op- 
 portunity; and its success or failure in the 
 American scene is perhaps of all problems 
 of government the most momentous for man- 
 kind. Here was a continent dowered by 
 nature with riches widespread and abound- 
 ing, hardly touched b}^ man. Here destiny 
 might write some new story of man's well- 
 being. His right to "life, liberty, and the 
 pursuit of happiness" does not perhaps cover 
 the whole of his well-being, for it does not 
 .express what is the gravest and yet the most 
 beautiful thing in his experience, stern and 
 chastening discipline in a world by him only 
 partly known and mastered. If America 
 was itself a clean sheet of paper, ready for 
 man's scroll, he began there to write his story 
 with prepossessions derived from a long rec- 
 ord in Europe. Spain governed in America 
 with a despotic ruthlessness, the results of 
 which we see to-day in the instabihtj^ of 
 many of the states which she founded. From 
 the first, England, just because her migrat- 
 ing sons were Englishmen, was forced, 
 whether she liked it or not, to leave them to 
 govern themselves, and thus, by a force work- 
 
88 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ing with the resistlessness of nature herself, 
 jself-governing communities grew up in 
 America. If they were to have good laws 
 and good administration, they must secure 
 them from whatever fountains of wisdom 
 they had within themselves. No one of the 
 founders was or could become so masterful 
 as to be a despot, so that they could not 
 prove whether, after all, in a new world, 
 the vigorous wisdom of one endowed with 
 power was not better than the slack wisdom 
 of the many. They had no alternative but 
 to create democracies. 
 
 Democracy as now we understand the 
 term is in reality a new thing. The Greek 
 democracy was an oligarchy of free men in 
 a society based on slavery, with no political 
 power or liberty for the majority, should the 
 majority be slaves. In the democracy of to- 
 day all are free ; and power is in the hands of 
 the many without check or limitation. Good 
 government under a democracy means good 
 laws and good administration achieved, if not 
 by the wisdom, at any rate by the voluntary 
 acquiescence, of the masses of the people. 
 In all the tasks which man confronts there 
 
AND CANADA 89 
 
 is none more difficult than that of so train- 
 ing the many minds in a political community 
 that they will both understand the common 
 good and unite to achieve it. This involves 
 range of vision, the capacity to see the whole, 
 the magnanimity to forget petty differences 
 in which man, a quarrelsome animal, is be- 
 coming always involved, and to unite in the 
 altruism of securing the well-being of others. 
 Power to the masses must in an efficient de- 
 mocracy go hand in hand with knowledge of 
 how to use it for the best purposes. Selfish- 
 ness is apt always to be clamorous and a self- 
 ish minority, intent on using the authority 
 of the state for personal gain, will seek to 
 confuse issues so that the worse may appear 
 the better reason. The few who know their 
 minds will often win at least temporary suc- 
 cess. This tyranny of the minority is not 
 the less menacing because it works with the 
 cooperation of the wills of those who, in the 
 end, will be the losers. There is no path to 
 well-being in human affairs other than the 
 path along which enlightened wisdom may 
 direct us, and the wisdom of the many will 
 come only with the education of the many. 
 
90 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 Wisdom does not dictate uniformity of 
 method. No doubt from one point to another 
 there is always a shortest road, the straight 
 line. But even the planets in their courses 
 are deflected by the attraction from a variety 
 of bodies. Man certainly does not take the 
 straight hne to his highest good. Politics 
 are a never-ceasing struggle, and the man in 
 the stress of a fight is thinking not of to- 
 morrow but of to-day. One of the most de- 
 structive heresies of political thought is the 
 view that what proves useful in one environ- 
 ment will inevitably prove useful in another. 
 There is something pathetic in the name 
 "New England" which the Puritan colonists 
 gave to their creation. There could never 
 really be a New England. The real England 
 was a land of long traditions, its life shaped 
 by its contact with France and other neigh- 
 bors, its literature and its politics the ex- 
 pression of complex forces. It had the out- 
 look of a sea-faring people living on an 
 island, with only a few miles of open sea be- 
 tween them and continental Europe. To be 
 old was of the essence of this England. But 
 if England was old, Englishmen were young. 
 
AND CANADA 91 
 
 and from their loved homeland they carried 
 In themselves the germs of a society which 
 feared God and honored the king. None 
 the less did they go to a New World, and 
 when the Old World laid a repressive hand 
 on this new society the explosion followed 
 of which echoes vibrate to this day. 
 
 The founders of the American republic 
 made a constitution, and because its terms 
 are in written clauses, subject to analysis 
 under the rules of grammar and of common 
 sense, we consider the constitution to be 
 stiffly starched and call it by the inappropri- 
 ate term inflexible; while to the looser Brit- 
 ish system, based on both law and custom and 
 changeable either by statute or by new prac- 
 tice, we give the name flexible. The writ- 
 ten constitution is not however inflexible, 
 for political forces cannot be fully expressed 
 and controlled under the phrases of a docu- 
 ment. If a fence seems to block the way 
 to some needed action or reform, pohtical 
 ingenuity will make its advance by passing 
 over, or under, or through the fence, or by 
 removing it. The framers of the American 
 constitution planned the election of a pres- 
 
92 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ident by a few men, chosen for the purpose 
 from each of the states, but the written con- 
 stitution has been flexible enough to abohsh 
 this practice in all but form and to provide 
 for the choice of the president by popular elec- 
 tion. The written constitution intends that 
 the Senate of the United States shall really 
 exercise oversight in all important federal 
 appointments. In fact, under what is called 
 "senatorial courtesy," the dominant political 
 forces in each state often, though not always, 
 control federal patronage in all but the most 
 important offices. There is no inflexibility 
 in respect to the surging forces of democratic 
 life. 
 
 A group of Englishmen of a literary turn 
 were asked by one of their number what 
 might be regarded as the most pregnant of 
 current proverbs. After a pause one of them 
 said: "No one knows where the shoe pinches 
 but the wearer"; and the others agreed as 
 to the condensed wisdom of the saying. Each 
 person for himself and each nation for itself 
 must find the defects which can be corrected. 
 The history of modern Ireland illustrates 
 with the grimness of tragedy the deep mean- 
 
AND CANADA 93 
 
 ing of the proverb. Benevolent intentions 
 from an authority external is no guide to the 
 finding of the sore spot. No one but the 
 wearer knows where the shoe pinches, and in 
 a political society, under democratic condi- 
 tions, the wearer must find the remedy. 
 Across the Atlantic are passing exhortations 
 that each side should imitate something in 
 the other. Federal America sees congestion 
 in the Parliament at London. It learns 
 with amazement that all governmental pow- 
 ers, the school system of Scotland, the char- 
 tering of a petty railway in Ireland — all, 
 without exception, of the problems in all 
 their phases which require legislation of any 
 kind, are controlled for nearly fifty million 
 people from a single center. The federal 
 man is aghast and cries: "Why do not you 
 create a federation? Look at us!" And 
 across the sea come voices which suggest 
 that, rather, you should look at us. "If a for- 
 eigner is murdered in Britain and his gov- 
 ernment asks for an explanation, we do not," 
 says the Englishman, "plead that we have 
 no authority to act. We control laws re- 
 specting marriage, and do not permit any 
 
94. THE UNITED STATES 
 
 fenced off area to flout decency by making 
 divorce absurdly easy. We turn out a head 
 of our government when he has lost public 
 confidence and do not keep up a fretful war 
 between one high state authority and an- 
 other. Look at us !" 
 
 These comparisons at long range are not 
 particularly edifying, but perhaps we may 
 find nearer home suggestive likenesses and 
 contrasts. A monarchy and a republic are 
 close neighbors in North America, both 
 subtly ahke and subtly different. When the 
 federation of Canada was made, the prin- 
 ciple of monarchy was so much in the mind 
 of the Canadian framers of the new constitu- 
 tion that they called their creation "the King- 
 dom of Canada." All unconsciously to itself 
 the repubhc of the United States blocked the 
 realization of their plan. The time was that 
 at the end of the civil war. There was irri- 
 tation in the United States against Great 
 Britain, and British ministers feared that 
 to parade a new kingdom in North America 
 before the minds of a republican people, who 
 for nearly a hundred years had proclaimed 
 their suspicion and dislike of monarchy. 
 
AND CANADA 95 
 
 would make worse problems already difficult. 
 Canada in consequence took the nondescript 
 title of "Dominion." It remained true, how- 
 ever, that a vital difference in the two sys- 
 tems hinged on the traditions of monarchy. 
 The superficial likeness between the two 
 federations is so striking that Professor 
 Dicey, an eminent authority on the constitu- 
 tion of the British Empire, has declared that 
 the fathers of the Canadian system who were 
 proud to express their desire to follow closely 
 the constitution of the "United Kingdom" 
 would have been nearer the truth had they 
 said the "United States." Though a con- 
 siderable minority in Canada uses habitually 
 the French tongue, English is the predom- 
 inant language in both federations. With a 
 common language the larger country has 
 more influence on the smaller than the 
 smaller on the larger, for the more populous 
 state produces a greater variety of literature 
 pervaded with its own ideas. Few Canadian 
 newspapers circulate in the United States, 
 but hundreds of thousands of copies of 
 American newspapers are circulated weekly 
 in Canada. The United States and Canada 
 
96 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 are alike in having each a vast territory un- 
 der its control — ^territory of boundless pos- 
 sibihties. It is said of the United States 
 that it has the best three milUon square miles 
 in the world, and it may be that when the 
 resources of Canada are fully known she 
 can tell as good a tale. Each federation has 
 both large and small political units, though 
 the tendency in Canada is to divisions larger 
 than those of the United States. There are 
 but nine provinces in Canada to forty-eight 
 states in the American union. 
 
 Federalism has proved the protection of 
 the peculiarities which grow up in commu- 
 nities with differing conditions. Variety of 
 laws tends to protect variety of human types 
 and to perpetuate the influence of local tra- 
 ditions of character and of soil. Man in the 
 forests of Maine will be different from man 
 in the mild climate and glaring sun and on 
 the browned lands of CaHfornia, lying be- 
 tween the mountains and the sea. If Maine 
 and California were wholly governed from 
 Washington, there would be, at any rate, 
 identity of the laws under which society is 
 regulated. But federalism permits of vari- 
 
AND CANADA 97 
 
 ety in respect to such things as education, 
 religion, the rights of property, and the rule 
 of municipahties, controlled under state law. 
 There was a time when some of the states 
 of the Union had an established church and, 
 if they chose, this they might still have. In 
 Canada there is an even more sticking vari- 
 ety. France was the creator of Canada and 
 laid deep the foundations of her own social 
 system. The French in Canada, extremely 
 tenacious of the culture of their parent na- 
 tion, which they regard as the most advanced 
 in the world, have succeeded in keeping the 
 province of Quebec prevailingly French in 
 character. In its legislature usually the 
 French and not the English language is 
 heard. The Roman Catholic Church retains 
 the privileges which it had when France was 
 still the devoted daughter of that church, 
 and it can still collect by process of law its 
 tithes and the levies for church buildings 
 made on its members. In state-supported 
 schools the tenets of the chuixh are taught. 
 The system of law is French in type, based 
 on the Code Napoleon. Federalism thus 
 lends itself to variety, a virtue or a de- 
 
98 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 feet aecording to the point of view of the ob- 
 server. 
 
 The two federations, lying side by side, 
 are perhaps the most completely democratic 
 of any of the larger states in the world. Ed- 
 ucation is widespread. Newspapers are 
 read by all classes of citizens and carry their 
 influence on the mind, whether it is for good 
 or evil. Conditions in these two great unions 
 tend undoubtedly to foster the individual's 
 sense of his own importance. John Stuart 
 Mill, a judge of democracy not too partial, 
 said long ago that "every American is both 
 a patriot and a man of cultivated intelli- 
 gence." If this was a correct statement in 
 Mill's time, we must admit that no longer 
 is it such, but any measure of truth in it 
 applies to the sister democracy, and in days 
 of murmuring that democracy both does too 
 much and leaves too much undone we may 
 find comfort in the sense of dignity which 
 the reality of power gives to manhood. It 
 is something for the world that two great 
 federations are working out their destiny by 
 the aid of the wisdom not merely of the few 
 but of the many. 
 
AND CANADA 99 
 
 Sharp contrasts there are between these 
 systems. Canada presents this difference 
 from the United States, that it was not so 
 fortunate as to include all the territory in 
 North America which might seem naturally 
 to belong to it. Islands are proverbially 
 jealous of their independence and the great 
 island of Newfoundland lying across the en- 
 trance to the Gulf and River of Saint Law- 
 rence has never entered the Canadian fed- 
 eration. The United States, so happy in the 
 entrance by consent of all the original col- 
 onies, has had its own pecuhar problems in 
 respect to union, for the time came when 
 states which had entered the union freely 
 claimed the right freely to withdraw. The 
 result was civil war on a scale to stagger 
 mankind. Canada, on the other hand, has 
 had no serious movement for breaking up 
 the union. Mutterings there were for a few 
 years after federation was achieved and be- 
 fore its qualities were tested, but they 
 quickly died away. Even in Quebec, which 
 is a nation within a nation in Canada, al- 
 most no voices are ever heard in support of 
 breaking away. 
 
100 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 The contrasts in spirit of the United 
 States and Canada go very deep. The 
 American federation was created in ideahsm, 
 in the hope, as we have seen, that here was 
 inaugurated a great human movement. Its 
 creators beheved themselves called "to vindi- 
 cate the honor of the human race" in a scene 
 where their labors should be remote from 
 "the pernicious labyrinths of European pol- 
 itics." Devotion to an ideal liberty became 
 a striking characteristic of the soldier who 
 fought against the British, and sometimes 
 he wore on his hat or on the sleeve of his 
 coat a band with the words, "Liberty or 
 Death." On every recurring Fourth of 
 July, the anniversary of the Declaration of 
 Independence and a public holiday forever, 
 the assertions of idealism were renewed. 
 A great nation gave itself once a year to the 
 contemplation of the principles for which the 
 republic stands. The Fourth of July ora- 
 tion, often flamboyant in style, often colored 
 by denunciation of the tyranny of monar- 
 chical Britain and overwrought passion for 
 liberty or dissolution, was none the less a re- 
 call to idealism, and tended to perpetuate 
 
AND CANADA 101 
 
 that desire to remain remote from entangle- 
 ments in other continents which is still a potent 
 factor in the politics of the United States. 
 And at the same time, along thousands of 
 miles of the northern frontier of the United 
 States, a people was growing into full na- 
 tional hfe who smiled, possibly with a supe- 
 rior air, when the echoes of American ideal-^ 
 ism reached their ears. They had no Fourth 
 of July celebration, no annual commemora- 
 tion of the right to "life, liberty, and the pur- 
 suit of happiness." Their most enjoyed an- 
 imal holiday came on a fresh day in May 
 when they celebrated the birthday of their 
 sovereign, the descendant of George III, 
 whom the Declaration of Independence de- 
 nounces in terms so virile. These people 
 hardly ever talked of liberty, and the alter- 
 native of "liberty or death" never occurred 
 \o their imagination. The United States 
 was created in idealism. Canada grew out 
 of tradition. If the causes are different, the 
 chief result is similar. Each of the two fed- 
 erations is free. 
 
 The two systems are, however, unhke in 
 their mode of working. Where custom, a 
 
102 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 careful regard for practice and precedent, 
 is the law of life, there is hkely to be hesi- 
 tancy in asserting general principles. In an 
 old society the consciousness grows up that 
 the present is only a part and, it may be, a 
 small part, of the record. The result is a 
 frame of mind which we call conservative, 
 though a better term would perhaps be ex- 
 perimental, a chariness about dogma, about 
 prophesying in respect to the future, about 
 anything but the study and understanding of 
 the things that are. Mr. Galsworthy gives 
 an amusing illustration of this point of view. 
 During the war an expansive American com- 
 rade-in-arms says to an Enghshman: "So 
 you and I are going to clean up brother 
 Boche together!" And the Enghshman's 
 answer is only "Really!" He will not com- 
 mit himself to any enthusiastic program set- 
 ting forth what he is going to do. In his long 
 past he knows that many a program has 
 failed. He will stick to his job for to-day 
 and not say much about what may happen 
 to-morrow. This living in the present may 
 seem to indicate that he has no power of 
 intellectual analysis and, in truth, in this he 
 
AND CANADA 103 
 
 does not excel. His merit is that he keeps his 
 feet on the soHd ground. 
 
 Let us turn now to the contrasts in actual 
 working of the two federal systems, one 
 based upon idealism expressed in the clauses 
 of a written document, the other on an Act 
 {jf Parliament which is a mere outhne defin- 
 ing powers and creating organs but depend- 
 ent for its working upon unwritten tradition. 
 We all know the chief features of the federal 
 system of the United States, one of the most 
 important political creations which the world 
 has ever seen. The head of the state is 
 chosen in every fourth year and has control 
 of the executive government. He has, how- 
 ever, no control over the legislative body. 
 Congress, which makes laws and votes mon- 
 eys, does not direct the administration of the 
 law or the actual spending of money voted. 
 Like the President, Congress is strictly lim- 
 ited in the exercise of power, and a great tri- 
 bunal, the Supreme Court, interprets with 
 authority the rights of both under the consti- 
 tution, which is the supreme law of the land. 
 Except for "treason, bribery, or other high 
 crimes," the President cannot be removed 
 
104 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 from the office which he holds for four years 
 — no President has ever resigned — and Con- 
 gress cannot be dissolved except by the ex- 
 piry of the period of time for which its mem- 
 bers have been elected. The executive and 
 the legislative power may continue for years 
 in acute conflict, and yet one authority has 
 to administer the laws and to spend the 
 money voted by the other. What the Cana- 
 dians call Responsible Government (a bet- 
 ter term is Parliamentary Government) does 
 not exist — that is to say, government in 
 which the elected legislature controls and 
 can change completely the personnel of the 
 executive power. In the legislature power 
 is divided between two chambers, each of 
 them an elective body, but with greater au- 
 thority, as time passed, in the second cham- 
 ber, the Senate, since it has special powers 
 in respect to treaties with other nations and 
 to appointments to office. The central gov- 
 ernment has confided to it only a limited 
 range of responsibility, since the states have 
 charge of all matters not specifically dele- 
 gated to the federal authority, and these 
 cover the important subjects of municipal 
 
AND CANADA 105 
 
 government, public order, and education, 
 and extend to the solemn power to impose 
 and carry out the sentence of death. Federal 
 courts determine suits between citizens of 
 different states, but in the main federal courts 
 administer federal law, state courts admin- 
 ister state law ; and the two sets of tribunals 
 are quite distinct in functions. 
 
 Such in meager and inadequate outline 
 are some features of the federal system of 
 the United States. It is pervaded by pro- 
 visions for checks and balances derived from 
 two types of motive, one to safeguard the 
 rights of the individual states which, claim- 
 ing to be free and sovereign powers, agreed 
 to a limited union and desired protection 
 from possible encroachment by the central 
 authority; the other to make impossible the 
 growth in the state of tyranny on the part 
 of a person or body intrusted with power. 
 The contrasts, in words at least, to be found 
 in the Canadian federation are almost ludi- 
 crous. Here, side by side with the carefully 
 guarded system of the United States, is a 
 poHtical union based upon the conceptions of 
 hereditary monarchy. In words at least the 
 
106 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 sovereign makes the laws and carries on the 
 executive government. An American sen- 
 ator, whose insight would not be praised by 
 the wiser of his countrymen, declared re- 
 cently that Canadians could not be a free 
 people, since the instrument under which 
 they were governed was enacted not by the 
 Canadian people but in so many words "by 
 the Queen's most excellent majesty." He 
 quoted further the horrifying statement, 
 from the point of view of freedom, that "the 
 executive government and authority of and 
 over Canada is hereby declared to ... be 
 vested in the Queen." Canadians make sol- 
 emn oath to "be faithful and bear true alle- 
 giance" to the sovereign, and freely admit 
 themselves to be "subjects" of this ruler. 
 Little wonder that when one of these clauses, 
 indicating the slavery of a whole people, was 
 read aloud, a senator, startled that such a 
 thing could be, cried out in apparent dismay, 
 "Read that again!"' Clearly, there was no 
 thought of checks and balances in an instru- 
 ment expressed in such terms. 
 
 Things in Canada are not really as bad as 
 
 » Debate in the Senate of the United States, March 8,1920. 
 
AND CANADA 107 
 
 they seem, though it must be admitted that a 
 nation accustomed to a constitution in which 
 words are taken in their simple and obvious 
 meaning is to be pardoned for some misun- 
 derstanding of a constitution of parts of 
 which the opposite is ahnost true — that words 
 are not to be taken in their obvious meaning. 
 It is a simple fact that the constitution of 
 Canada is the creation of the Canadian peo- 
 ple, and that in shaping it the sovereign had 
 no voice whatever; that the executive gov- 
 ernment of Canada is in the hands of per- 
 sons chosen by the people of Canada, and 
 that neither the king nor the king's represen- 
 tative has in it any real share; and that a 
 "subject" in Canada is just a citizen, subject 
 no more and no less to the laws of the land 
 than is a citizen of the United States. In a 
 legal system based on tradition and itself 
 the product of a long succession of slow 
 changes, old forms are retained, while into 
 them is read a new meaning. Usually there 
 is never a decisive moment when the old 
 phrases have wholly ceased to be vaHd in 
 their obvious sense and new phrases could 
 be employed. There is no precise time when 
 
108 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 a man becomes middle-aged or old. The 
 young boy and the old man are still called 
 by the same name of John Doe, though the 
 significance of the reality behind the name 
 changes almost from hour to hour. So is it 
 with a constitution which once was young but 
 now is old. The phrases remain; it is their 
 meaning which changes. 
 
 To the uninitiated reader there are max- 
 ims in British constitutional custom which 
 seem to involve either irreverent jesting or 
 statements that belong to an age when the 
 king was believed to be really half divine. 
 There was a time, in France, at any rate, 
 when the statement that the highest law was 
 the will of the king (voluntas regis, suprema 
 lex) had a direct application to government; 
 what the king willed was in truth law and 
 was carried out as such. Out of the Re- 
 naissance period, with its bitter struggles 
 over religion, came the maxim applied in 
 Germany, ''Cujus regio, ejus religio"\ the 
 religious status of a country was determined 
 by the personal faith of its ruler. These max- 
 ims represent doctrines apphed to society in 
 their literal meaning. But what are we to 
 
AND CANADA 109 
 
 say of British maxims, not the survival of a 
 long past, but themselves modern, that "The 
 king never dies" and that "The king can do 
 no wrong"? The first gives a fictitious im- 
 mortality to the sovereign, for it only means 
 that when one king dies his successor at that 
 moment begins to reign, so that always there 
 is a king. Everyone knows too that when we 
 say, "The king can do no wrong" we do not 
 mean what we seem to say, that all which 
 the king does is right. The real meaning is 
 that, if wrong is done — as often it is — not 
 the king, but the minister who advised ac- 
 tion, in the king's name, is to be held respon- 
 sible. Thus a statement seemingly extrava- 
 gant in the attribute it imputes to the king 
 is in reality a rather extreme statement of 
 democratic theory, asserting not only that 
 the king can do nothing of himself, but also 
 that whoever acts for him must not look to 
 the king to shield him but is to be held re- 
 sponsible for any evil thing in his conduct. 
 There is another maxim of British con- 
 stitutional theory which bears on its face 
 almost the mark of blasphemy: "Parliament 
 is omnipotent." We know that omnipotence 
 
110 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 does not belong to man, and yet this is 
 claimed for a body of men chosen in the hap- 
 hazard of a modern election. What does it 
 all mean? Only that Parliament has the 
 right to overrule every other authority. This 
 is far from omnipotence, it is in reality only 
 omni-competence, yet the maxim does call 
 up a vivid phase of the British system. 
 No court restrains Parliament in the exer- 
 cise of plenary authority. In the United 
 States Congress has no control of the execu- 
 tive power, and if it tries to encroach upon 
 the functions of the President, there sits the 
 Supreme Court in solemn gravity watching 
 to protect the President in the exercise of 
 his powers as it will protect Congress against 
 the President in the exercise of its powers. 
 No organ of government in the United 
 States has power both to make laws and to 
 name the officers to enforce them. This Par- 
 liament does, when it makes and unmakes the 
 executive government. The king can do no 
 vTong, but Parliament can do what it likes, 
 right or wrong, and there is no court to stop 
 it, and no person, not even the king, constitu- 
 tionally so immaculate ; for, during two hun- 
 
AND CANADA 111 
 
 dred years, he has exercised no right of veto, 
 and now by the authority of custom he no 
 longer possesses the power to veto a measure 
 enacted by Parhament. 
 
 These contrasts in form between the con- 
 stitutional methods of the American and the 
 British systems seem on the surface so strik- 
 ing as to be perverse. Yet is there a real 
 ) likeness. If the king never dies, it may also 
 be said with truth that the President of the 
 United States never dies, since from the mo- 
 ment that one President retires his successor 
 must be assumed to exercise authority. Thus 
 a repubhc, no less than a monarchy, has a 
 permanent official head. There is too in the 
 American system — if the phrase may be par- 
 doned — all the omnipotence which man can 
 exercise. In British states full power is 
 given to the legislators who are chosen to 
 represent the people; in the United States it 
 is, under the supreme law of the constitution, 
 retained by the people themselves. They 
 may make in the constitution any amend- 
 ments which they please. They could pro- 
 vide that the President should have despotic 
 power. They could give the House of Rep- 
 
112 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 resentatives a commanding authority like 
 that of the House of Commons in the Brit- 
 ish system, and they could make the Senate 
 an hereditary body, so that sons of senators 
 should step by right into the seats vacated 
 by the death of their fathers. The people are 
 omnipotent in the United States as is Par- 
 liament in England ; under the reign of law,^ 
 applied no less in the United States than in 
 the British Empire, if the state, like the 
 king, can do no wrong, its servants do wrong 
 and are held responsible before the law for 
 their actions. 
 
 In the two systems it is not ultimate prin- 
 ciples but methods of working which are 
 different, and here again the contrasts are 
 vivid. I am myself convinced that the deep- 
 est and most important difference is in a 
 mode of political action which, found in germ 
 in Britain at the period of the American Bev- 
 olution, has matured since then into a clearly 
 defined system, known as Besponsible or 
 Parliamentary Government. It was not 
 effective in the time of George III. Dur- 
 ing the war with the American colonies there 
 came a time, in 1778, when public opinion 
 
 '-n 
 
AND CANADA 113 
 
 in England was overwhelmingly in favor of 
 far-reaching conciHation which would cer- 
 tainly give the colonies their freedom and 
 might at the same time preserve the unity of 
 the British Empire. The man whom the na- 
 tion desired to take office and effect recon- 
 ciliation was the Earl of Chatham. At the 
 present time the sovereign could not resist 
 such a demand. But George III resisted it. 
 In opposition Chatham had attacked the pol- 
 icy which the king chose to consider not that 
 of his ministers but of himself. He hated 
 Chatham with a bitter and sullen hatred, and 
 now he declared that he would not have 
 Chatham as his chief adviser; rather than 
 submit to this slavery he would resign the 
 crown. The king was able, by his control of 
 a Parliament not responsive to public opin- 
 ion, to keep Chatham from office, and the 
 result was that the American war went on 
 to the bitter end. Twenty-five years later 
 George III did the same thing and refused 
 the request of William Pitt, Chatham's son, 
 that Fox, a leader of the opposition, should 
 be given office. Though already Parhament 
 made and unmade ministers, the king could 
 
114 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 still keep from oiBce a man desired by the 
 nation. It is not so now. The king cannot 
 resist the demand of public opinion, and 
 within twenty-four hours both the governing 
 personnel and the policy of the state can be 
 wholly altered. To test public opinion a 
 general election may take place at any time, 
 and in both Great Britain and Canada two 
 actually have occurred within little more than 
 a year. No British government is safe 
 for an hour if it has lost the support of pub- 
 lic opinion. It may, of course, cling to office, 
 but it has no security. A breath of public 
 opinion may at any moment blow out the 
 flickering light of a discredited ministry. If 
 pubhc opinion is fickle, this power may in- 
 volve danger. In fact, governments last in 
 England about as long as they do in the 
 United States. 
 
 This is Parhamentary Government, and 
 time has shown it to be the most striking 
 characteristic of the modern British system. 
 France, having tried nearly every other type 
 of administration, at last resorted to Par- 
 liamentary Government under the Third Re- 
 public, with the result that, while ministries 
 
AND CANADA 115 
 
 have changed with dismaying frequency, the 
 republic itself has endured for half a cen- 
 tury. Italy has adopted it and, in spite of 
 difficulties almost overwhelming, maintained 
 stabihty during the Great War partly by 
 changing her ministers to meet current de- 
 mands of public opinion. Results may or 
 may not vindicate Parliamentary Govern- 
 ment. That is not the point under discus- 
 sion. The fact remains that on this method 
 the two great branches of the English-speak- 
 ing peoples are at opposite poles. Britain 
 has adopted it, and ministries and Parlia- 
 ments change from day to day. The United 
 States has not adopted it, and the executive 
 and the legislative authority endure for fixed 
 periods of time and are irremovable. 
 
 The system of Parliamentary Government 
 has had far-reaching results on British pohti- 
 cal methods. It has involved recognized per- 
 manent leaders of political parties. Here 
 too, though, like the creation of Parliamen- 
 tary Government, the system is sanctioned 
 only by custom, and not by law, is one of 
 the vital differences between federalism in 
 the United States and federahsm in Canada. 
 
116 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 In the United States candidates for the pres- 
 idency are chosen anew in each fourth year, 
 and the person elected becomes the party 
 leader for the succeeding political campaign. 
 At short and fixed intervals the struggle for 
 political leadership is renewed, and the pro- 
 gram, the so-called platform, of the party 
 is drawn up. The successful party usually, 
 but not always, has a leader in the President 
 during his term of office, but his authority 
 wanes or grows strong with the prospect of 
 his nomination for a second term. All the 
 time the chairman of the National Commit- 
 tee of each party is watching and directing 
 party policy. In a sense each of these per- 
 sons leads his party, but the kind of leader- 
 ship is different from that of a party leader 
 who will himself take office and carry out 
 his own policy. Under the British system 
 a party always has this type of leader. He 
 sits in Parliament, face to face with the rival 
 leader. Isolation or seclusion is impossible. 
 He is there to be questioned and criticised 
 from day to day. The practice has gone so 
 far in Canada that the leader of the opposi- 
 tion party in Parliament is paid a salary. 
 
AND CANADA 117 
 
 The leadership of a single man may long en- 
 dm-e. Sir John Macdonald led the Conserv- 
 ative party in Canada for nearly forty years, 
 and Sir Wilfred Laurier led the Liberal 
 party continuously for the thirty-two years 
 prior to his death in 1919. Each of these 
 leaders was prime minister and the real ruler 
 of Canada for periods longer than the as yet 
 unreached three terms of an American Pres- 
 ident. There is no doubt that, with perma- 
 nen^t leaders, changes in policy are made 
 more gradually and with less friction than is 
 found when both a leader and a pohcy have 
 to be chosen at the same time. On the other 
 hand, long tenure of a post tends to make its 
 holder unreceptive and sometimes despotic. 
 In England governments do not, as a rule, 
 last longer than six or seven years at most, 
 and the average is much shorter. In the 
 United States their duration is strictly lim- 
 ited by the constitution. In Canada they 
 tend to last too long, owing largely to the 
 difficulty of arousing public opinion in a 
 population scattered over a vast area. 
 . Under the Canadian, which is the British, 
 system, the only persons chosen by election 
 
118 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 are the members of the legislature. This 
 principle applies in the federal system of the 
 United States, except in respect to the office 
 of the President. In the state governments, 
 however, secretaries, treasurers, auditors, 
 and even judges are, in varying degree, ac- 
 cording to the constitution of each state, 
 chosen by popular vote. In the British sys- 
 tem the members of the cabinet, that is to 
 say, the chief executive officers of the govern- 
 ment, from the prime minister, who is really 
 the Canadian equivalent of the President, to 
 the least important member of his govern- 
 ment, must have seats in the legislatm^e, and 
 there give an account of the administration 
 of their offices. To take part in the work of 
 legislation is often an irksome duty for men 
 weighted with complex matters of adminis- 
 tration, but it has come to be regarded as in- 
 dispensable to the working of parhamentary 
 government. In Canada no legislature is 
 chosen for a period of less than four years, 
 and the federal House of Commons is chosen 
 for five years. The long term is safe enough 
 when, in response to public opinion, an elec- 
 tion may take place at any time, but it would 
 
AND CANADA 119 
 
 not commend itself in the United States, 
 with the member free from attack in his seat 
 for a fixed period. In Canada, as in Eng- 
 land, the government is dominated by a sin- 
 gle chamber, the House of Commons, whose 
 will the second chamber is, in the long run, 
 impotent to resist. It would be impossible to 
 have two chambers of equal authority and at 
 the same time to have parliamentary govern- 
 ment, since, in such a case, a deadlock be- 
 tween the two houses might prevent an ap- 
 peal to the people. "You might as well at- 
 tempt to stick a dog's tail on a lion's back" 
 as to have a strong second chamber with par- 
 liamentary government, said Joseph Howe, 
 of Nova Scotia, and Great Britain has found 
 that she must have a weak House of Lords 
 if the country is to be ruled under the pub- 
 lic opinion of a democracy. The contrast 
 with the strength of the American Senate is 
 striking. 
 
 In the Canadian federal system there are 
 restrictions on the authority of the provinces 
 which stand in contrast with the rights of the 
 states in the United States. In a certain 
 sense the forming of the Canadian federation 
 
120 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 involved the breaking-up of an earlier union 
 as much as it did the creation of a new one. 
 The older Canada, consisting of the two 
 great provinces which are now Ontario and 
 Quebec, had existed for a quarter of a cen- 
 tury under a single legislature in which 
 French and English members were about 
 equal in number. There was intense racial 
 strife and, in the end, federation was a refuge 
 from an unhappy union. In such a case it 
 was easy for the constitution builders to 
 delegate to each of the new provinces only 
 the matters which had chiefly caused friction 
 — religion and education — and with these the 
 other affairs of a local character. Thus it 
 has come about that in Canada the provinces 
 have only the powers specifically delegated 
 while the central government retains all other 
 authority. This principle, so sharply in con- 
 trast with that applied in the United States 
 of giving limited and specified powers to the 
 federal government while the states retain 
 ali the rest, has made it natural in Canada 
 to have a common criminal law for the whole 
 country, and a single judiciary, which admin- 
 isters both federal and provincial law. No 
 
AND CANADA 121 
 
 judges are either appointed by the provinces 
 or elected in Canada. All judges are named 
 by the federal government. Yet, except in 
 the cases of the judges of the federal Su- 
 preme Court and the single judge of the 
 Exchequer Court, which deals with the finan- 
 cial relations of the federal and the provin- 
 cial governments, all the judges of Canada 
 are paid by the provinces in which they exer- 
 cise ihfeiT functions. It has been the federal 
 government which has vindicated the sanctity 
 of the law in the more unsettled regions, and 
 this has resulted in so strong a preservation 
 of order that lynching is unknown. Only 
 the federal government can exercise the pre- 
 rogative of pardon. No criminal undergoes 
 anywhere in Canada the sentence of death 
 without the gravest consideration of his case 
 by the central federal authority. One impor- 
 tant contrast in the two systems depends only 
 on practice and has no inherent necessity. 
 Canada has copied the system of England 
 and has the budget control in finance. Only 
 the government of the day can propose the 
 expenditure of pubhc money. Each year 
 the Minister of Finance submits an elaborate 
 
122 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 statement of expected income and expendi- 
 ture, and no additions to the proposed expen- 
 diture can be made without the consent of 
 the government. At this moment there is 
 keen discussion as to whether the United 
 States should adopt this budget system. 
 
 To point out contrasts in the sense of sug- 
 gesting that a good practice in one country 
 would of necessity work amid different con- 
 ditions in another is to be guilty of the arch- 
 fallacy in politics that what works anywhere 
 will work everywhere. Would the British 
 Cabinet system under parhamentary gov- 
 ernment work in the United States? We do 
 not know; it is one thing to work a system 
 in a compact and crowded island where every 
 one, through an active press, can ponder on 
 the same day the same political problems, 
 and quite another to apply successfully such 
 a system in an area thirty or forty times as 
 gxeat, with varying climates, a large part of 
 the population scattered and remote, and 
 communications often slow and difficult. In 
 the island public opinion is alert and united 
 because it is easy to appeal to the many at 
 almost the same hour. But it is not so easy 
 
AND CANADA 123 
 
 to get California to ponder the problems of 
 Maine, or, in a different scene from that of 
 Maine, to understand conditions which may 
 be alien to the thought of its people. There 
 is a comforting maxim in the moral world 
 that each of us gets the lot which he deserves. 
 It may be true of nations that each matures 
 the system best fitted to its own conditions. 
 At any rate, nothing is more certain than that 
 it is rarely wise to transfer the system of one 
 country to another. Political philosophers 
 are fond of saying that Great Britain would 
 do well to adopt the federal system of the 
 United States. Yet it is clear that as yet all 
 practical steps to carry out such a plan have 
 seemed to fail, and that to-day Ireland, sup- 
 posed to be able to find the solution of its 
 heart-breaking discords in a federal union 
 with Great Britain, is coldly critical of such 
 proposals. 
 
124 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 LECTURE y 
 
 THE PLACE OF CANADA IN THE 
 BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 
 
 The United States and Canada, speaking 
 the same language, occupy the greater part 
 of a vast continent, and it is of some import 
 to mankind that they should understand each 
 other. Yet in this there are pecuhar diffi- 
 culties. The most vivid historical recollec- 
 tion of the people of the United States is 
 that once they were colonies of England, and 
 that after a long and cruel war they estab- 
 lished their independence and united to form 
 a republic. To them the relation of parent 
 to daughter state is the relation of superior 
 to inferior, of a patronizing and protecting 
 society to one that is as yet immature and 
 weak. It must be confessed that there is in 
 history abundant justification for this inter- 
 pretation of the imperial relation. If, how- 
 ever, it were the whole story, there would be 
 at the present time no British Empire, except 
 
AND CANADA 125 
 
 in the sense of a conquering England hold- 
 ing some scattered islands and naval stations 
 and the territory which her legions had mas- 
 tered. France and Holland still have great 
 possessions overseas; but they are not states 
 inhabited by French and Dutch who have 
 migrated from the motherland. They are 
 literally possessions, with alien peoples, who, 
 no doubt for their own good, are, in the ulti- 
 mate analysis, held in obedience to the mas- 
 ter state by mihtary power. No communi- 
 ties composed of the flesh and blood of the 
 motherland will ever be satisfied with an infe- 
 rior status. Spain lost her colonies because 
 the Spaniard in America would not l)e sub- 
 ordinate to the Spaniard in Europe. The 
 only other great colonizing power has been 
 Great Britain. She lost her American col- 
 onies because she demanded their obedience. 
 On the same condition she would in time also 
 have lost Canada and Austraha. There re- 
 mains a great British state because of the 
 growth of a different type of relation. 
 
 So far as the self-governing nations of the 
 British Commonwealth are concerned, there 
 is now really no such thing as a British Em- 
 
126 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 pire. An empire, one would suppose, is a 
 state which has a central controlling gov- 
 ernment. But although the British Parha- 
 ment is, in a strictly legal, though not con- 
 stitutional, sense, supreme over all British 
 dominions, there is no central government 
 for the whole British Empire. The Parlia- 
 ment of Great Britain has no constitutional 
 right to pass any measure affecting the gov- 
 ernment of Canada, except merely as regis- 
 tering Canada's own decisions. 'No one body 
 can tax the British Empire. Canada and 
 Australia and New Zealand and South 
 Africa are not governed from London, nor 
 have they any common government. Each 
 of these nations governs itself. As long ago 
 as in 1859, when Canada imposed a tariff on 
 British goods and the government at London 
 protested, there was no uncertain sound 
 about the reply of Canada. It asserted "the 
 right of the Canadian Legislature to adjust 
 the taxation of the people in the way they 
 deem best, even if it should unfortunately 
 happen to meet the disapproval of the Im- 
 perial Ministry." It is more fitting to de- 
 scribe as a "Commonwealth" than as an 
 
AND CANADA 127 
 
 **Empire" the state in which the different 
 parts are so completely self-governing/ 
 
 The most interesting growth in the Brit- 
 ish Empire during the nineteenth century- 
 was in the self-government and individuality 
 of the various British peoples. There was 
 very little of it in the British Empire of a 
 hundred years ago. The American Revolu- 
 tion removed from the Empire the only ele- 
 ment overseas that could make any claim to 
 self-government. After that tragic cleav- 
 age between the English-speaking peoples, 
 almost none of British origin were left out- 
 side the homeland. In Canada, even in- 
 cluding the Loyalist refugees from the re- 
 volted colonies, there were fewer than one 
 hundred thousand. The same is true of the 
 West Indies, relatively more important then 
 than now. In India there were perhaps half 
 this number. And this was the whole tale 
 of British people overseas. Australia, New 
 Zealand, South Africa, as we know them, did 
 not the n exist. There is little wonder that 
 
 * This and succeeding paragraphs are, with some modifica- 
 tions, taken from an article by the author on "The Growth 
 of Nationalism in the British Empire" in The American Hu- 
 iorical Review, October, 191 G. 
 
128 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 the successful revolutionists of the United 
 States should feel a fine scorn of the Britons 
 in Canada who would not join them. These 
 seemed to be misguided supporters of a 
 lost cause. A tyrannous motherland had 
 forfeited all right to the allegiance of her 
 sons overseas, and successful revolution 
 called the Canadians craven, since they did 
 not join in the fight for liberty. 
 
 It was, indeed, in the half-century after 
 the Revolution that there was a real and 
 united British Empire, for every part of it 
 was governed from London. It is true that 
 never after her loss in America did Britain 
 attempt to tax her colonies. They were to 
 her a costly burden. What we now know 
 as the Dominion of Canada consisted of four 
 or five detached provinces, each insignificant, 
 each really ruled by a governor sent out from 
 England, each backward and almost stag- 
 nant. Little thought as yet had any of the 
 colonies that they were new nations, with 
 the same rights of self-government which 
 Britons at home possessed. Yet was there 
 a something working in these communities 
 which had promise for the future. Each of 
 
AND CANADA 129 
 
 them had its own legislature; each had the 
 storm and tmnult of elections, in which there 
 were free speech and free voting. The 
 elected members, however, did not control 
 the executive government ; that was the affair 
 of the governor and of the Colonial Office 
 in London, which appointed him. 
 
 With the growth of population came 
 changes. By 1830 there was a clamorous 
 demand in Upper and Lower Canada for 
 complete control by the people of their own 
 local affairs. The controversy was violent. 
 In 1837 and 1838 it led to armed rebellion 
 by the radical element which asked for full 
 political rights. Though the rebelHon was 
 put down, the cause apparently lost was 
 really won. A dozen years later, that is by 
 the middle of the century, every British com- 
 munity in North America had secured con- 
 trol of its own affairs. The movement spread 
 to other continents. Australia followed 
 quickly. Canada was the older British do- 
 minion and naturally led the way, but the 
 British colonial system as a whole was 
 changed, and by the mid-century its self- 
 governing states in all parts of the world 
 
130 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 were really freer than had been the former 
 Enghsh colonies in America. 
 
 This very change, however, brought a dan- 
 ger to the British system. Why should the 
 motherland take any trouble to preserve a 
 tie with communities which brought her little 
 advantage? They erected hostile tariffs 
 against her goods, they were a charge upon 
 her revenues, they were perennially relying 
 upon her army and fleet for defense. Can- 
 ada was frquently involved in disputes with 
 the United States. In 1837-1838 there were 
 frontier incidents which might well have 
 caused war. A few years later there was 
 the question of the boundary line in Maine, 
 Then came that of the western boundary, 
 with the insistent demand of American pio- 
 neers in the west of "Fifty-four forty or 
 fight," which meant that all south of this de- 
 gree of latitude should go to the United 
 States on penalty of war. There is perhaps 
 not much wonder that British statesmen 
 should have thought a self-governing em- 
 pire overseas not worth having. Gladstone 
 told Goldwin Smith that the cession of Can- 
 ada to the United States would not be an 
 
AND CANADA 131 
 
 impossible compensation to the North if the 
 South should break away. Beaconsfield, 
 Gladstone's great rival, hoped at one time 
 that the troublesome colonies would become 
 independent. When this was done Britain 
 would be left with no European peoples 
 overseas, but only with races of alien blood 
 and faith whom she could really rule. 
 
 Then, just when these depressing views 
 were current, a strange thing happened. 
 The half -torpid colonies in North America 
 suddenly revealed a new life and a new wis- 
 dom. They shook off their narrow isolation 
 and formed a great federation. Fear had 
 much to do with it. The United States, re- 
 cently torn by civil war, was likely to become 
 a great military nation, a menace to the 
 British communities on its northern border. 
 Because of this and of impotence and dead- 
 lock in their own political affairs, the Brit- 
 ish colonies united to form one great state. 
 By 1872, the union of once separated colo- 
 nies extended from the Atlantic to the Pa- 
 cific. In this movement, if men could have 
 read it aright, was the birth of a new con- 
 ception of the British Commonwealth. But 
 
132 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 this meaning was not seen at once. For a long 
 time the old idea of the subordination of the 
 colonies to the motherland still survived. But 
 the movement for separation was quickly 
 checked. It was one thing for British states- 
 men to look on blandly while a few scattered 
 colonies broke away ; but quite another thing 
 to let a country like Canada go with four 
 million people. After all, trade tended to 
 follow the flag, and thus, even on lower com- 
 mercial grounds, it would be a bad thing to 
 end the colonial relation. Other reasons 
 there were, too, and one of them, most potent 
 of all, was that, even though Great Britain 
 might be willing to let go of Canada, Canada 
 had no wish to let go of Britain. 
 
 Here we come upon one of the unexpected 
 things in this strange British Empire. The 
 old assumption was that when the new states 
 were strong enough to stand alone they 
 would wish to do so and would break away 
 from the mother country. But this repre- 
 sented only the coldly intellectual view of 
 pohtics. In fact, political loyalties have as 
 much to do with the heart as with the head. 
 It never occurred to the average Canadian, 
 
AND CANADA 133 
 
 even when his country reached national stat- 
 ure, that he could not remain both a Cana- 
 dian and a Briton. The British flag had al- 
 ways been his. Why should he change? 
 True, he was a Canadian first, for Canada 
 was the country he knew. Britain he had 
 probably never seen, and he understood but 
 little of a state of society in which there were 
 an aristocracy, a House of Lords, and an 
 established church. Still he saw no reason 
 why he should break with the old home of his 
 race and no movement for separation would 
 come from him. 
 
 There was too a strong political drift 
 against change. Union was in the air when 
 the federation of Canada was created. This 
 event followed immediately upon the reun- 
 ion of the United States after the Civil War. 
 The North-German Confederation was 
 formed in the very year in which the British 
 North America Act, creating the Dominion 
 of Canada, passed the British Parliament. 
 Three years later Italy was finally united. 
 In the next year, 1871, came the creation of 
 the German Empire. This was followed 
 quickly by an eager ambition among Euro- 
 
134 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 pean states to secure colonies. Trade rival- 
 ries were keen, markets were needed, and 
 markets under the samie flag seemed to be 
 more secure than markets under an alien flag. 
 It thus happened that the ungracious per- 
 mission offered to the colonies about 1860 
 that they might go when they liked, and the 
 sooner the better, had become by 1890, thirty 
 years later, the rather nervous fear that they 
 might take themselves off and leave Great 
 Britain to a lonely sovereignty over a de- 
 pendent empire ten times more populous 
 than herself. 
 
 During all this time the movement was 
 growing for unions within the Empire on 
 the lines of the Canadian union. In 1900 
 the six Australian states united to form a 
 great Commonwealth. Most wonderful of 
 all, less than ten years later, the four col- 
 onies of war-worn South Africa formed a 
 strong union more centralized and consoli- 
 dated than any of the other unions in the 
 British Empire. In no case, however, was 
 union effected with the view of breaking 
 away from the Empire. Rather was the de- 
 sign to draw closer together. Yet each union 
 
AND CANADA 135 
 
 represented a distinct type and was brought 
 about in conformity with local conditions. 
 Here, then, is the paradox which is charac- 
 teristic of the British nations— the more 
 they become separate in type the more they 
 hold together. 
 
 The unity of outlook with Great Britain 
 was tested in Canada in 1899, when the 
 South African War broke out. The people 
 of Canada accepted without reserve the Brit- 
 ish view of the issue and thousands of Cana- 
 dians fought on the veldt. Britain, how- 
 ever, paid the bill. Canada was not a real 
 partner. It was the Great War, begun in 
 1914, which brought to a head a long proc- 
 ess of development. Complete self-govern- 
 ment in respect to domestic affairs Canada 
 had had for nearly three-quarters of a cen- 
 tury. There remained, however, this lack 
 of full national hfe, that she had no direct 
 diplomatic relations with other states. The 
 government of Canada had no power to 
 deal with the government of the United 
 States; a treaty made in reahty between the 
 United States and Canada was in name be- 
 tween the United States and Great Britain. 
 
136 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 When, during the war, a Canadian War 
 Mission was sent to Washington this diffi- 
 culty was overcome by the subterfuge, hu- 
 mihating in form if hardly so in fact, that 
 the Mission might deal with the departments 
 of the government of the United States but 
 not with that government itself. Canada 
 was not classed as an American nation, with 
 the result that when a Pan-American Con- 
 gress came together the American state which 
 ranked in importance next to the United 
 States had no place. Before the war it was 
 uncertain what pa*rt self-governing states 
 like Canada and Australia would take when 
 Great Britain became involved in a struggle 
 which should tax her full strength. The 
 breathless days of the simmier of 1914 set- 
 tled this doubt. Then it became clear that 
 on a vital issue the whole British Empire 
 would act together. No nation was more 
 surprised than Britain herself by the com- 
 pleteness of the union of hearts. 
 
 This war was Canada's first war. Never 
 before had she recruited and paid her own 
 armies in a great struggle. People care- 
 less of speech sometimes say that Canada 
 
AND CANADA 137 
 
 went into the war to help England; but this 
 was not really the thought of the Canadian 
 people any more than it was that of the 
 Scottish people. What the British peoples 
 felt was that they were fighting together as 
 partners. Fears there were in Canada that 
 her civilian soldiers might not be able to 
 bear the test of war against the greatest mil- 
 itary power in the world. But before a year 
 of war had passed this fear was gone. As 
 thre war lengthened world-wide organization 
 of British effort became necessary. In 
 March, 1917, a Conference on the War of 
 representatives of the whole British Empire 
 was held in London, and at the same time 
 the direction of the war was put in the hands 
 of a new body called the Imperial War Cab- 
 inet, in which sat the British, the Canadian, 
 and other prime ministers. Mr. Lloyd 
 George was careful to say in the British 
 House of Commons that the status of the 
 members of this Cabinet was one "of abso- 
 lute equality." In the absence of the prime 
 minister of Great Britain, the prime minis- 
 ter of Canada presided, since Canada ranked 
 as second among the self-governing states 
 
138 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 of the Empire. Each of these states was 
 by official pronouncement declared to be "an 
 autonomous nation." When peace was to 
 f)e negotiated it was the British Empire Del- 
 egation, with Canada playing an important 
 part, which directed British policy. Thus 
 within the British Empire equahty of status 
 between Canada and Great Britain was fully 
 recognized. It remained, however, to record 
 international recognition of this fact. This 
 was done when peace was made. Plenipo- 
 tentiaries of Canada signed the peace with 
 direct official authority from the king to sign 
 for Canada, exactly as plenipotentiaries of 
 Great Britain signed with official authority 
 from the king to sign for Great Britain. 
 This was the culminating official act in a 
 great political movement. The British Em- 
 pire had become a Commonwealth of Na- 
 tions, and each of the nations was entitled to 
 the fullest expression of its national life. 
 
 Usually the full meaning of a great con- 
 stitutional change is not immediately appar- 
 ent. Unless there is the upheaval of revolu- 
 tion the old machinery goes on working. 
 There are things which still seem to indicate 
 
AND CANADA 139 
 
 that Canada is in a state of tutelage to Great 
 Britain, and these things will disappear only 
 slowly as occasion arises to consider and dis- 
 card them. The head of the Canadian na- 
 tion, acting for the king, is called the Gover- 
 nor-General; he is appointed by the British 
 government, and, in some measure, he is 
 an official of the Colonial Office. In fact, he 
 is not a governor but a viceroy, with only 
 the authority in Canada which the king has 
 in England; in fact, while he is appointed 
 by the government in London, it is only with 
 the approval of Canada ; in fact, too, the Co- 
 lonial Office has no authority in Canada, for 
 the prime minister of Canada and the prime 
 minister of Great Britain take counsel to- 
 gether and reach decisions on the important 
 questions between the two countries. Can- 
 ada has no Foreign Office, and, as yet, no 
 ambassadors. But she has now the full con- 
 stitutional right to create both when she so 
 chooses. In the strict letter of the law Can- 
 ada is at war when Great Britain is at war; 
 but the events connected with the peace 
 treaty made her separate consent to peace 
 necessary and this may involve the corollary 
 
140 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 that she is not at war without her specific 
 consent. Far-reaching, indeed, will be seen 
 to be the constitutional changes of the period 
 of the Great War. 
 
 It is to be expected that when the experi- 
 ence of a few years has shown that Canada 
 has her special interests in foreign affairs 
 and is not content to be merely the pupil of 
 Great Britain, there will be some friendly 
 cleavage between the two countries. Great 
 Britain has so long controlled the foreign 
 policy of the British Empire, with undivided 
 responsibility, that she may well feel sur- 
 prise and even resentment at Canada's as- 
 sertion of variant views. When Canada, as 
 an American nation, takes her place in the 
 assembly of the League of Nations she will 
 stand more for the American than for the 
 European view of world policy. In respect 
 to Japan, Canada's interests are rather those 
 of the United States than of Great Britain. 
 Such differences of opinion will, however, 
 be wholesome. They will tend to prevent 
 Great Britain, after all a world state with 
 vital interests in every continent, from being 
 too completely dominated by interests 
 
AND CANADA 141 
 
 merely Asiatic or European. At the same 
 time Canada, drawn out of obscure isola- 
 tion, will learn to understand the burdens 
 of a great Empire. The result ought to be 
 a better understanding all round. The 
 British nations are really closer together in 
 1920 than they were in 1850, chiefly because 
 in the intervening seventy years they worked 
 out the same ideals of political liberty. An- 
 other cycle of years may see them united in 
 sharing the same responsibilities in a world 
 commonwealth, and, if this result is to be 
 reached, it will be along the path of bearing, 
 each state for itself, the responsibilities of 
 British nationhood. 
 
 There is no doubt that variety of environ- 
 ment tends to produce a variety of peoples. 
 The Canadian is different from the Austral- 
 ian, and both are different from the English- 
 man. The differences are physical and they 
 are also mental. The man who has seen the 
 society about him created in his own genera- 
 tion will have a view of social relations dif- 
 ferent from that of a man born into a highly 
 organized society, with ancient buildings, 
 traditions, and gradations of rank. It is 
 
142 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 easier for an Englishman than it is for a 
 Canadian to show deference and respect. 
 The Canadian, in turn, is a citizen of a lesser 
 state, and is humbled commercially by con- 
 tact with a great neighbor much more highly 
 organized than himself. The Austrahan, 
 supreme in his lonely continent in the South- 
 ern Sea, has no old local traditions and no 
 neighbors. He creates his own standards 
 and beheves in himself. When shown West- 
 minster Abbey he may murmur, "Ah, but 
 you ought to see the Presbyterian Church at 
 Ballarat!" He is subtly different from the 
 other types. The difference is not racial, 
 for the race is the same. It is the difference 
 caused by conditions, and it will increase with 
 time. You will not flatter the Australian 
 by calling him an Enghshman. He wishes 
 to be known as what he is, an Australian. 
 In this respect his nationalism is complete. 
 This, however, is not the whole story. This 
 man, so thoroughly himself in his southern 
 home, is passionately a Briton and one in 
 feeling with all other Britons. The thought- 
 ful Australian or Canadian will deny that 
 he owes any loyalty to the British Isles. He 
 
AND CANADA 143 
 
 feels this no more than the Enghshman feels 
 loyalty to Canada. Each of them is satisfied 
 to be loyal to himself and they hold together 
 because, on great national issues, they have 
 the same outlook. I am a little puzzled when 
 I try to explain why this unity exists. No 
 doubt it is largely the result of education, of 
 habitually surveying questions from a cer- 
 tain point of view. Probably its deepest 
 cause lies in unbroken tradition. Each of us 
 is set in the midst of a system in which many 
 forces are uniting to shape our conception 
 of life. British political liberty has had a 
 slow growth. The religious outlook, the 
 education, the social relations, the tastes and 
 habits of to-day come to us from a long past. 
 Ill some such way as this is the note struck 
 that we call British. All the people of the 
 scattered British Commonwealth share it, 
 and, though there are different types, widely 
 separated, they have the unity of a family. 
 
 This unity is not racial. Racial unity is 
 necessarily limited to those whom birth has 
 made members of the race. Thus it cannot 
 become comprehensive and cosmopohtan. 
 It tends to run to pride and arrogance, to 
 
144 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 thoughts like those of the Hebrew that his 
 race is the chosen of God. When the British 
 Empire was younger we used to hear about 
 the triumphant destiny of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race. At one time we seemed to seek imi- 
 formity, partly, perhaps, because we as- 
 sumed unity of race. It was held that poHti- 
 cal wisdom required in Canada and in 
 Australia an exact copy of Britain. Can- 
 ada, as we have seen, was to have a House of 
 Lords and an established church. Experi- 
 ence, the true teacher, dispelled this dream. 
 In time not likeness, but diversity, of institu- 
 tions was emphasized, and little thought was 
 given to race. We know now that no one 
 part of the British Empire can be quite like 
 any other part. When we ask why, the an- 
 swer is that this is the fruit of liberty. Na- 
 ture herself is infinitely varied and, when 
 men are free, when they adjust themselves 
 to the varieties of nature, they evolve differ- 
 ences. To-day no wise statesman has any 
 thought of trying to Anghcize the British 
 Empire. The wonder-worker is not race 
 but liberty. Let us dismiss forever the super- 
 stition that there is any magic in race to hold 
 
AND CANADA 145 
 
 peoples together and effect political unity. 
 In the late war the most determined and 
 irreconcilable opponents were states of the 
 same Teutonic race. It is partnership in 
 common liberties which unites people. 
 
 Without including annexations due to the 
 war, the British Commonwealth represents 
 about one-fourth both of the population and 
 of the area of the world. The population of 
 the world is about 1,800,000,000; the area 
 some 51,230,000 square miles. The British 
 Commonwealth is nearly evenly divided be- 
 tween the northern and the southern hemi- 
 spheres. Two-thirds of it are in the east and 
 only one-third is in the west. The chief seat 
 of power is in the west, but six-sevenths of 
 the people under British sovereignty are not 
 Europeans. The proportion of people of 
 European origin is likely to grow, since they 
 hold for occupation nearly two-thirds of the 
 ^vhole area of the British Commonwealth, 
 with vast unoccupied spaces still to be peo- 
 pled. It is a vital characteristic of the Brit- 
 ish system that, in spite of the recent war, it 
 is becoming less and less occupied chiefly 
 with Europe. It is of the east as well as 
 
146 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 of the west and of the south as well as of 
 the north. It is less a creation than a 
 growth, a growth out of conditions and ne- 
 cessities into a syatem unprecedented in the 
 history of the world. It has become a micro- 
 cosm of the world itself. It includes people 
 of every race and of every creed. No other 
 state has ever held such vast areas in every 
 continent — almost half of North America, 
 much of fertile Africa, nearly the whole of 
 Australasia, and a great area in Asia. In 
 Europe alone is the territory of the Com- 
 monwealth comparatively small in magni- 
 tude. There are in it more than three times 
 as many Hindus and nearly twice as many 
 Moslems as there are Christians. 
 
 "If the Canadians loved liberty," said an 
 American senator recently,' "they would not 
 stay under the British flag." Virginia and 
 other States desired to withdraw from the 
 American union and were retained within 
 it by force of arms. Canada, free to go, stays 
 in the British union. She is freer to go than 
 was Virginia, but she remains under the 
 British flag. One reason is her pride in be- 
 
 » Debate in the Senate, March 8, 1920. 
 
AND CANADA 147 
 
 ing a member of a great Commonwealth. 
 Let me ask American^ a question. If the 
 republic, in the slow growth of years, had 
 founded kindred republics in every conti- 
 nent, had fostered and protected them, had 
 dreamed dreams about what this union of 
 free peoples would do for mankind, would 
 you willingly let this union end in disrup- 
 tion? To-day British citizenship is wonder- 
 ful, for it makes the Briton at home in every 
 continent. Suppose that an American, sail- 
 ing eastward, found himself in another 
 United States in Europe under the Stars 
 and Stripes. Suppose that he went on by sea 
 and found himself in South Africa and still 
 in the United States under his own flag. 
 Suppose that he sailed on and found him- 
 self in India with more than three hundred 
 millions of people still under the Stars and 
 Stripes. Suppose that he went on to the 
 great continent of Australia and found still 
 his flag, on to New Zealand, on still across 
 the Pacific to America, where he has his 
 home, half a continent still under the Stars 
 and Stripes. In every one of these states he 
 has been a citizen, needing no change of alle- 
 
148 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 giance in order to vote. And this is the 
 British Commonwealth. 
 
 In this Commonwealth there is, as I have 
 said, no one central government. The tie 
 which links the various peoples into one is 
 allegiance to the same sovereign. If I say- 
 that it is the monarchy which holds together 
 the Commonwealth, I am likely to be mis- 
 understood, for this is apt to give the im- 
 pression that there is a ruling, and not 
 merely a reigning, king. The truth is that the 
 monarchy expresses visibly the bond of un- 
 ion which is in reality spiritual. Tradition, 
 one may say again, plays a great part in hu- 
 man society. Other things being equal, the 
 scion of an ancient house commands greater 
 influence in social circles than a member of 
 the nouveaucc riches. Tradition often pro- 
 duces its effect with no consciousness on the 
 part of the individual that it even exists. The 
 novelist plays with this instinct when, for the 
 entertainment of the many, he brings on his 
 stage people of ancient lineage moving in ex- 
 clusive circles, in scenes of magnificence, 
 with old buildings, tapestries, and pictures, 
 inherited from a glorious past. When a 
 
AND CANADA 149 
 
 prince passes, our eyes turn to follow him, 
 less because of what he is in himself than 
 because of the long tradition which he rep- 
 resents. The letters "E. R." recently and 
 the letters "G. R." now on mail carts in 
 Canada always stir my interest. "E. R." 
 "Edwardus Beccr The first of the name was 
 "Malleus Scotorum/' the hammer of the 
 Scots, who six long centuries ago broke his 
 enemies, stood up for his kingly rights 
 against a powerful church, and asserted for 
 future ages in England the principle that 
 what concerns all must be approved by all. 
 The letters "G. R." call up a past less happy 
 in what it did than useful as a warning; for 
 it was a Georgius Bex who broke up in dis- 
 aster the first British Empire. It is some- 
 thing to the British peoples that the symbols 
 are preserved which link the fruits of to-day 
 with the roots of a long ago. 
 
 The United States has nearly twice as 
 many English-speaking people as has the 
 whole British Empire. All these people, so 
 far as political institutions are concerned, 
 are in practically the same stage of poUtical 
 evolution. All the state legislatures have 
 
150 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 substantially the same powers and all the 
 states share in the same manner in the fed- 
 eral government. The American Common- 
 wealth is the greatest community the world 
 has ever seen with a uniform type of repre- 
 sentative government over its whole vast 
 area. Strikingly different is the government 
 of the British Commonwealth. Even its 
 sixty-five millions of peoples of European 
 origin have an almost capricious variety of 
 systems. Great Britain, even half a century 
 ago, was governed by the nobihty and the 
 upper middle class. It was with dismay that 
 Queen Victoria saw the late Joseph Cham- 
 berlain, a manufacturer and a supposedly 
 extreme radical, take high office. Soon work- 
 ing men, who had labored with their hands, 
 became Cabinet ministers, and now the prime 
 minister himself is from this social class. The 
 House of Commons has gained final mastery 
 over the House of Lords, which now can de- 
 lay, but cannot permanently defeat, measures 
 not to its taste. Democracy is in the saddle 
 in Great Britain, but the old forms are un- 
 changed. There is a king; there are peers 
 and commoners; men still pursue eagerly 
 
AND CANADA 151 
 
 hereditary titles of honor ; but the vitality has 
 gone out of conservative reaction and the 
 masses control the government. It is a far 
 cry from the Whig Lord Palmerston of the 
 sixties to the Lloyd George of to-day. 
 
 In other parts of the British Common- 
 wealth the logic of environment has produced 
 other types of constitutions. England re- 
 mains immovable in that omnicompetence of 
 Parliament which keeps a-ll legislative power 
 for Great Britain at Westminster. But for 
 British states differently situated this sys- 
 tem has proved inadequate. In 1867 Can- 
 ada turned to federahsm. When, more than 
 thirty years later, in 1900, Australia, after 
 long hesitation, adopted federahsm, it was a 
 federalism more closely akin to that of the 
 United States than is the Canadian system. 
 Australia took power to change its own con- 
 stitution, something which, in form, Canada 
 has not yet done. Ten years later South 
 Africa, in a different situation, adopted for 
 its four states a type of political union which 
 was less a federation than a unitary state 
 with subordinate legislatures of very limited 
 authority. New Zealand has a single legis- 
 
152 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 lature; and now India, clamoring for self- 
 government, is given a system which is half 
 federal in that it divides authority, but in re- 
 spect to the executive power is not greatly 
 unlike that of Canada sixty years ago. The 
 variety of systems in the British Common- 
 wealth is accompanied by what is unknown 
 in the United States — a variety of official 
 languages. Federal Canada uses indiffer- 
 ently French or English in public affairs. 
 South Africa uses indifferently Dutch or 
 English. 
 
 There is no serious movement to create a 
 federal union of all the self-governing states 
 of the Commonwealth. The war has fos- 
 tered an acute nationalism in Canada. For 
 the moment, at least, there is no prospect of 
 securing Canada's assent to any form of cen- 
 tralization which, in the slightest degree, im- 
 pairs her own sovereignty. There exists, 
 however, the machinery for consultation and 
 cooperation. The absence of any real central 
 authority has made the more necessary some 
 means for discussing matters of policy which 
 affect the British Commonwealth as a whole. 
 In response to this need there met in 1887 
 
AND CANADA 153 
 
 the first Conference, called then the Colonial 
 Conference, but now significantly renamed 
 the Imperial Conference. Since that date 
 in every fourth year, at least, have come 
 together representatives of all the British peo- 
 ples to take counsel. The body has no man- 
 datory authority; it is in very truth a Con- 
 ference only ; but it discusses great problems 
 and it has reached agreements and helped to 
 mold the public opinion of all the British 
 states. It gives at least opportunity to the 
 leaders to come together, and to learn to un- 
 derstand each other. One can only record a 
 melancholy regret that in 1776 no such Con- 
 ference had been created. If at that time the 
 leaders of all the British states had been able 
 to sit quietly round a table to discuss their 
 differences, the story of the world might 
 have had some happier pages. 
 
154* THE UNITED STATES 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 THE FUTURE 
 
 In the stress of a great conflict it gives 
 men pleasure to picture the days of peace 
 when they may rest from their labors. It 
 is a paradox of life that idealism flourishes 
 most in times which are farthest from the 
 ideal. Amid the horrors of war we picture 
 with intense hope the joys of peace. Thus 
 it happened that during the Great War we 
 dreamed and hoped and, in many cases, be- 
 lieved in a new era which should come with 
 victory. This idealism was sincere, and it is 
 only a shallow view to suppose that it has 
 failed. But now the strain of war is re- 
 moved; the dirt, the brutality, the coarse ob- 
 scenity are no longer in evidence ; and we are 
 not compelled in our misery to turn for com- 
 fort to the ideal. Perhaps it was thought 
 that the new era would come more easily than 
 could be possible. But, until hope becomes 
 a vice and is no longer a virtue, no wise per- 
 
AND CANADA 155 
 
 son will sneer at the conviction that out of a 
 world struggle must come a world awaken- 
 ing to better ideals of well-being. The task 
 is difficult, and when we confront it we may 
 ponder the solemn words of Milton: "To 
 guide . . . mighty states by counsel, to con- 
 duct them from institutions of error to a 
 worthier discipline, to extend a provident 
 care to furthest shores, to watch, to fore- 
 see, to shrink from no toil, to flee all the 
 empty shows of opulence and power — these, 
 indeed, are things so arduous that, compared 
 with them, war is but as the play of children." 
 The idealism of a time of war has a cause 
 simple enough. Men are united in a com- 
 mon purpose. If in the colossal strength of 
 their union they can conquer the problems 
 of war, they feel that they can face with ease 
 the safer problems of peace. On these prob- 
 lems, however, there is not the samje unity of 
 conviction. Society is so organized that each 
 class considers its safety to depend upon 
 alert regard for its own interests. The 
 wage-earner tries to get the most from the 
 employer, and the employer in turn fears 
 ruin if he yields too much to the wage-earner. 
 
156 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 Thus the idealism of a period of war is apt to 
 end with the war itself, and with peace comes 
 a reversion to rival aims and rival interests. 
 It is all a part of the drama of man^s life; 
 but because this happens the pessimist must 
 not imagine that he has gained an easy vic- 
 tory. War seems to change even the fiber of 
 men's minds ; there is no doubt that the late 
 war, at least, has shattered a mass of con- 
 victions which men accepted as ultimate with- 
 out reasoning on their origins. In effect, 
 if not in form, some political parties have 
 disappeared and all have been shaken. A 
 good many people blush to think that they 
 once accepted shibboleths which now they 
 see to have had no meaning. The pessimist 
 sees in this the dissolution of human society. 
 No doubt it is a serious thing for the con- 
 ventions which men have obeyed suddenly 
 to break down. But, if we have an ultimate 
 faith in man, we will believe that the break- 
 down means the liberation of his mind from 
 what was dead and oppressive, and that he 
 has the vitality to reorganize his effort on 
 better lines. Out of the debris of the old 
 system will come slowly, and no doubt with 
 
AND CANADA 157 
 
 the pain and sorrow which accompany all 
 of man's achievement, something which to 
 vital insight will seem to justify his sac- 
 rifices. 
 
 Unless we can face the future in this spirit 
 there is not much in the political outlook at 
 the present time to cheer the heart. Europe 
 is still [April, 1920] the scene of the horrors 
 of war, and America is not at peace with it- 
 self. On every side are unrest and suspi- 
 cion. Whole peoples are suffering as they 
 have never suffered before. Every effort 
 of devilish ingenuity is being made to embroil 
 the two great English-speaking nations. 
 Perhaps humanity has learned by this time 
 that the good triumphs only after evil has 
 done its worst; and it may be that the very 
 intensity of the efforts to create bitterness of 
 leeling is proof that the dawn of a better 
 tlay is near. At any rate we may regretfully 
 admit that the task of shaping the relations 
 '^f nations to make war impossible is so stern 
 and difficult that compared with it the prob- 
 lems of war itself are "but as the play of 
 children." 
 
 The two English-speaking federations in 
 
158 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 North America became in the end partners 
 in the Great War. There was a difference. 
 From the first day Canada was clear in its 
 resolve not to stand aloof, while only slowly 
 and with reluctance did the American people 
 see that they too must join in this struggle 
 which had begun between nations in Europe. 
 The difference has its roots deep in history. 
 The American federation, as we have seen, 
 was founded in the conviction that the repub- 
 lic was to give to the world a new note in 
 political life, and that one chief condition of 
 success would be to keep aloof from entangle- 
 ment in the worn-out politics of Europe. 
 What wonder that, when this tradition had 
 been fixed for a century and a quarter, and 
 when suddenly Europe burst into the flames 
 of a mighty conflagration, there should be 
 careful scrutiny of the issue in the United 
 States. At the outburst of the war in 1914 
 I happened to be living in a watering-place 
 where about half of the people were Ameri- 
 cans and half of them Canadians. All felt 
 that Germany had provoked the war and 
 condemned her action. "You must remem- 
 ber, however, that this is a European war. 
 
AND CANADA 159 
 
 and that we are not in it," said a young 
 American scholar to me. The attitude of 
 the young Canadian was in sharp contrast. 
 He had never been taught any tradition of 
 holding aloof from entanglements in Eu- 
 rope. His fear during the tremulous days 
 just before the 4th of August, 1914, was 
 that Britain might hold aloof. If she did, 
 he even thought that Canada ought to de- 
 clare war against Germany on her own ac- 
 count and do her part, whether England did 
 or did not share in the effort to save liberty 
 in the world. 
 
 It may be that in this contrasted attitude 
 of mind we find one of the chief differences 
 in the spirit of the two federations. Of all 
 Europe, not excluding France, her own ally 
 in the Revolution, the United States is sus- 
 picious. She has made her territory the 
 refuge of the oppressed, and the multitudes 
 who have flocked to her shores from Europe 
 to find hberty have strengthened rather than 
 weakened her conception of the dangers from 
 European intrigues. Canada, on the other 
 hand, has preserved a close tie with a Eu- 
 ropean state, and has had a child-like beHef 
 
160 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 in this state as playing a magnanimous role 
 in world politics. If, in wide circles in the 
 United States, everything which England 
 proposes or does is to be scanned with a 
 suspicious eye, in Canada the presumption 
 is that the politics of Britain are the purest, 
 her system the most wisely democratic, and 
 her statesmen the best trained and the most 
 high-minded of any in the world. When the 
 Canadian constitution was framed, all par- 
 ties were unanimous in trusting the tribunal 
 known as the Privy Council, which sits in 
 London, to say the final word when any dis- 
 putes should arise as to the interpretation 
 of the constitution. To this day Canadian 
 lawyers cling to the right of ultimate appeal 
 to this tribunal as a guarantee that the best 
 judgments will be given which human wis- 
 dom can achieve. Thus it happened that 
 when Britain was involved in the war there 
 was not a moment's hesitation in Canada. 
 For what was at stake she was ready to 
 pledge her all, and did in the end pledge it. 
 In this she was not unique. Australia and 
 New Zealand made sacrifices as great and 
 the whole British Commonwealth was united 
 
AND CANADA 161 
 
 in measure not thought, even by astute 
 statesmen, to be possible. 
 
 Paradox lingers on the path of all our 
 efforts, and it is certainly true that out of 
 this unity has come a new emphasis upon 
 the right, and, indeed, the need, of each of 
 the nations in the Commonwealth to live its 
 own distinct national life. The paradox is 
 less striking than it seems. No compulsion 
 could have produced the unity. It was rather 
 the expression of free individuahty, a con- 
 sensus based upon both natural instinct and 
 political reflection. The strain of the great 
 effort brought to each unit a vital self-con- 
 sciousness. Each was free to do what it 
 chose; each felt that the race for victory 
 could be won only by the trained use of 
 every muscle ; each felt that it was in honor- 
 .able competition with the others. It was 
 with a thrill of pride that Austraha and 
 Canada found that their sons ranked with 
 the best in the intricate achievements of war. 
 This experience quickened the growth of na- 
 tionaHsm, and it took unexpected forms. At 
 an earher time the Canadian Pacific Rail- 
 way, conceived and carried through by men 
 
162 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 whose fortunes and interests centered in 
 Canada, had been an achievement which de- 
 manded recognition and the recognition 
 which seemed most appropriate was to make 
 three of its leading architects members of the 
 British House of Lords. In the early stages 
 of the war this recognition of Canada's ef- 
 fort by British titles of honor was accepted. 
 Then there came a sudden outburst against 
 it. People began to say that titles of honor, 
 and especially hereditary titles of honor, 
 which might be in place in an old civili- 
 zation, were out of place in Canada, and the 
 Canadian Parliament put an end to the 
 practice. 
 
 It has not been easy for other nations to 
 follow this growth of national life within the 
 British Commonwealth. The United States 
 had long since recognized the principle that 
 the British Empire was in a fiscal sense a 
 single state which might give what trade 
 preferences it liked among its own members 
 without raising any question of the rights 
 of other countries to the treatment of the 
 most favored nation. In this sense there was 
 to the United States but one British nation. 
 
AND CANADA 163 
 
 In the law of belligerency there was also 
 one. When Great Britain was at war, Can- 
 ada too was at war. It was therefore puz- 
 zling to find Canada claiming definite na- 
 tional status and the right to speak for her- 
 self at foreign capitals, and the puzzle was 
 increased as soon as the problems of the pro- 
 posed League of Nations came under close 
 scrutiny. When the Treaty of Peace was 
 signed at Versailles, in 1919, the representa- 
 tives of Canada, Australia, and other Do- 
 minions signed it, and in doing so became in 
 their own right members of the League of 
 Nations. Thus, as parties to the peace, the 
 British Commonwealth became not one but 
 six nations. Yet, as we have seen, in the view 
 of the United States, and for the advantage 
 not of the United States but of the British 
 Commonwealth, it was regarded fiscally as 
 a single state. It was one, too, when a ques- 
 tion of war arose. Now, in the League of 
 Nations it became six. On the surface polit- 
 ical paradox could no further go. 
 
 The League of Nations has become a vex- 
 ing problem in politics, and this is not the 
 place to take sides on a great issue. If one 
 
164 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 may summarize what the League aims at, 
 it may be covered under four chief points : 
 
 1. Publicity of treaties between states, so 
 as to end secret obligations which may be- 
 come a menace to the security of other states. 
 
 2. The creation of an international court 
 to give judgment in cases of disputes be- 
 tween nations, and thus prevent recourse 
 to war. 
 
 3. Provision for the reduction of arma- 
 ments by consent of the nation or nations 
 concerned, and guarantees for the perma- 
 nence of the scale of armaments agreed upon. 
 
 4. The ending of the system of exploiting 
 weak states by strong ones, and the putting 
 of weak states under the ultimate guardian- 
 ship of the League of Nations, with author- 
 ity to give mandates to nations selected for 
 the purpose to act as guardians of the weaker 
 states, and under obligation to give account 
 to the League of Nations for the discharge 
 of the responsibility assumed. 
 
 When the opportunity to join the League 
 of Nations came, Canada entered the League 
 gladly and proudly. The United States, 
 however, speaking through the Senate, held 
 
AND CANADA 165 
 
 back. Once more was there in evidence the 
 contrast in tradition of the two federations, 
 the United States dreading entanglements 
 in Europe, Canada feehng herself as much 
 a European as an American state, and ready 
 to follow where Britain led. A nation which 
 feels that it has made a special place for 
 itself in the world and has based its institu- 
 tions on a new application of political theory 
 naturally looks with a critical eye on propo» 
 sals for adopting a common policy with other 
 states. The outside world wondered that 
 during the war the United States never 
 spoke of "allies," but always of "associated 
 powers," for the good reason that she made 
 no treaty of alliance with the other beUig- 
 erents like that between France and Britain. 
 There was working the thought that com- 
 plete identity of aim was not possible be- 
 tween an idealist republic and the war-worn 
 states of Europe. Objection to joining the 
 League of Nations thus fitted in with a vivid 
 tradition. The United States must do noth- 
 ing to guarantee pohtical frontiers in Eu- 
 rope and thus embroil itself there; it must 
 maintain its authority in respect to America, 
 
166 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 and not permit non- American nations to take 
 part in directing policy which might conflict 
 with the principles of the Monroe Doctrine ; 
 it must maintain the right to use its own 
 judgment as to withdrawal from any 
 League ; above all, it must not put itself in a 
 position of relative inferiority to any other 
 great power. Six votes for the British Em- 
 pire with only one for the United States 
 seemed to indicate inferior status. So rea- 
 soned American idealism, and for the mo- 
 ment the United States remained out of the 
 League. 
 
 The Canadian federation had its own 
 idealism working to an opposite conclusion. 
 The political movement, which we know as 
 the American Revolution, was at first only 
 a domestic protest in a matter of constitu- 
 tional right. When, however, the issue was 
 once confronted, American thought took a 
 wider range and confronted an ultimate 
 problem of human liberty. A year of strug- 
 gle convinced Washington and his comrades 
 in arms that they must break with a treas- 
 ured past, and declare for British citizens 
 in America complete independence of the 
 
AND CANADA 167 
 
 motherland. The reluctance with which the 
 step was taken is very marked — as marked 
 as that with which the Pilgrim Fathers 
 turned from their dear England to make new 
 homes in a rough and unknown continent. 
 The tragedy of the American Kevolutionary 
 War demonstrated the truth that it is a vio- 
 lation of a law of nature for a people to try 
 to hold in a position of subordination com- 
 munities of similar origin but of more recent 
 foundation. The old have always thought 
 that they could speak words of guiding wis- 
 dom to the young, but the young have sooner 
 or later retorted that their manhood required 
 them to think for themselves. The problem 
 which Canada, the second in importance of 
 the Enghsh-speaking states overseas, has had 
 to solve has been not less vital than that of 
 the American Revolution. Could Canada 
 remain a state of the British Commonwealth 
 and yet attain national manhood on the basis 
 of complete poKtical equality with Great 
 Britain? 
 
 When the time came for making peace, 
 Canada demanded recognition as a distinct 
 nation, but a nation within the complex Brit- 
 
168 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ish Commonwealth. The demand was ac- 
 ceded to at Versailles. Possibly when M. 
 Clemenceau so readily accepted it he had in 
 his mind the thought that it really did not 
 matter, since in ultimate constitutional fact 
 the British Commonwealth was one in re- 
 spect to the issues of war and peace, and sep- 
 arate signature of the Treaty by Canada 
 would serve only to reenforce an obligation 
 which the single signature by Great Britain 
 already created. But Canada valued the 
 point. It involved the recognition by the 
 whole world of a political principle which 
 the leaders of the American Revolution had 
 believed incredible, that within a single state 
 under a single sovereign there could be dis- 
 tinct nations, no one of them subordinate to 
 any of the others, and yet linked together 
 by ties firm enough to be strengthened, and 
 not weakened, during the hard testing and 
 sacrifices of war. The observer might well 
 smile when he saw the United States so cau- 
 tious and reserved in regard to assuming the 
 obligations of the League of Nations and 
 Canada so eager to accept them. But there 
 was a reason. The United States, as a re- 
 
AND CANADA 169 
 
 suit of a revolution, had an assured status 
 before the world. Canada, long regarded as 
 a colony of Great Britain, had no such status 
 as a nation. For this status she was wilKng 
 to pay the price by assuming responsibiUties 
 as a member of the League of Nations. 
 
 Now, with the war over, the English- 
 speaking peoples must face the whole ques- 
 tion of world-order. The war was a war of 
 principles. It is not manly to hurl re- 
 proaches at a defeated opponent, and this is 
 not the time to pile up an indictment of Ger- 
 many. History has given and will maintain 
 its stern verdict. During many years Ger- 
 many steadily refused to join in the move- 
 ment to lessen by arbitration treaties the dan- 
 ger of war. The nations of the world re- 
 quired, she believed, leadership and, if need 
 be, control from the strong and efficient. 
 This she thought herself to be in a sense 
 true of no other nation. Germany alone, 
 as Fichte said early in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, had been intrusted with "the seeds of 
 human perfection," and if Germany should 
 fail, humanity would succumb. Thus not 
 brotherhood, but mastery, was Germany's 
 
170 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 duty, and every step needed to secure mas- 
 tery was justified. "Our troops must 
 achieve victory. What else matters?" said 
 a certain General von Disfiirth, and he 
 a^Med that Germany owed explanations to 
 no one for Lou vain and Reims: "There is 
 nothing for us to justify and nothing for us 
 to explain away." Germany was to rule the 
 world for the world's good, and, since the 
 end was noble, all means to secure the end 
 were permissible. Even the German sword 
 had its hymn: "Day after day I ride aloft 
 on the shadowy horse in the valley of cy- 
 presses, and as I ride I draw forth the life- 
 blood from every enemy's son that dares to 
 dispute my path. . . . Am I not the flaming 
 messenger of the Almighty?" 
 
 The alternative to the German concep- 
 tion is to consider mankind a brotherhood, a 
 family of potential equals, in which the 
 strong will help and encourage the weak 
 and try to raise them to the level of the high- 
 est. It is no doubt true that the greater 
 part of man's record tells a story far other 
 than this — a story of the robbery, the en- 
 forced servitude of the weak by the strong. 
 
AND CANADA 171 
 
 Only a bold nation could plead "not guilty" 
 to the charge of having played some part 
 in this melancholy aspect of the human 
 drama, and the culmination was a world war 
 in which perished something like ten million 
 human beings. During the agony of this 
 struggle men asked themselves whether this 
 must always be so, and the heart of mankind 
 said "No!" White men and brown men and 
 yellow men and black men all gave the same 
 aspiring answer. No one of them was will- 
 ing to be under the heel of the other; all, 
 as the world unrest of to-day shows, had as- 
 pirations to be free and independent. There 
 could be no one great and strong state dom- 
 inating all the others for their good. Differ- 
 ent types of men must evolve differing types 
 of state. They would have misunderstand- 
 ings and rivalries. Always would there be 
 the danger of armed strife, and to prevent 
 a renewed and even greater catastrophe 
 some means must be devised of making not 
 Force but Justice respected and obeyed. 
 And this was the call for a League of 
 Nations. 
 
 The subject lends itself, without doubt, 
 
172 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 to the platitudes and perorations of easy- 
 going optimism. In eras of upheaval men 
 have loved to dwell upon vague theories of 
 abstract right, and the exhortation of Mira- 
 beau has always some pertinence, that if 
 heed is given to Duties, Rights will take care 
 of themselves. In all ideahsm there is the 
 perennial danger of mere pedantry. Some 
 who talk of the rights of a people to self- 
 determination seem to imply that every peo- 
 ple has the capacity to devise and conduct a 
 government, which is not true. Perhaps 
 Mirabeau was right when he told the 
 French National Assembly to think only 
 of duties. Rights are privileges. Duties 
 relate to responsibility. More and more 
 does the modern state within its own border 
 organize effort to protect the helpless and 
 restrain the strong who seek to do evil. In 
 a civilized society no one is allowed to take 
 the law into his own hands, and the decent 
 people unite to support the forces of order. 
 Churches and individuals make great sacri- 
 fices in order to uplift remote peoples by 
 missionary effort. It is not too much to 
 hope that such labor can be carried beyond 
 
AND CANADA 173 
 
 private effort, and that nations will unite in 
 sacrifices to make the world a decent place 
 in which to live. 
 
 Careless optimism has proved baneful in 
 the past and may easily do so again. A 
 great empire has been laid in the dust, and 
 yet its sixty million people are not wholly 
 crushed. From it have been taken not 
 merely Alsace-Lorraine in the West, now 
 protected by the powerful arm of France, 
 but Polish provinces in the east, with no 
 protector but the newly organized repubhc 
 of Poland, which has hardly yet escaped 
 from the disorder and incompetence due to 
 a tragic past. Germany looks upon these 
 Slav peoples as "a malleable medley of in- 
 competents," and feels in regard to her lost 
 Polish provinces what the United States 
 would feel if by some stroke of ill-fortune 
 Mexico should recover control of Texas. 
 That Germany accepts her loss as final is 
 hardly conceivable. She has a vast popula- 
 tion which, however disunited in respect to 
 forms of government, is united in feeling 
 contempt for the Pole, and in a resolve to 
 leave no German population under his dom- 
 
174 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ination. In seeing that this is true we need 
 not read into the German mind any sinister 
 desire to revive the old dream of world- 
 power. That ambition is gone, probably for- 
 ever. But there remains, even if we look no 
 farther than the borders of the old Germany, 
 enough of bitter race hatreds and rivalries 
 to make armed strife at any time possible, 
 and such a fire is likely to spread. What is 
 the use of trying to reconstruct a shattered 
 civilization if it is only again to be menaced 
 steadily by the same old destructive forces, 
 unchecked and unrestrained? The task 
 would be too disheaTtening. Hope and 
 courage need some new note to cheer them 
 on. And the note that has in it vital prom- 
 ise is found in the unity of aim and in the 
 cooperation of the two English-speaking 
 peoples. 
 
 At this moment these two peoples are the 
 strongest force ever known in human his- 
 tory. In natural resources they surpass any 
 measiu-e which can have been imagined in 
 earlier ages. They have coal and iron, gold 
 and silver, timber and rich agricultural lands, 
 and climatic conditions the most suitable for 
 
AND CANADA 175 
 
 human effort. They have the power to say 
 of evil forces working in international af- 
 fairs that they shall not prevail, power to 
 hold malignancy in check, power to restrain 
 ignoble greed among the nations for terri- 
 tory and plunder. It is true of each of the 
 two great English-speaking states that they 
 .have no unachieved ambitions to make them 
 )discontented and restless in respect to things 
 as they now stand in the world. Germany 
 was conscious of power within herself; she 
 felt that the acknowledged scene of her dom- 
 inance was not adequate to her capacity ; and 
 she waged war in order to enlarge her bor- 
 ders. There is no temptation for the Eng- 
 lish-speaking peoples to attempt anything 
 of the kind. They will not give up what the 
 fortune of history has brought to them; but 
 they desire nothing that anyone else holds. 
 Neither of them has any ambitions which 
 menace the other. They speak the same lan- 
 guage and can understand each other's 
 thoughts. They are both great trading and 
 industrial nations. Both know perfectly 
 well that peace is their highest interest. If 
 they stand together for human well-being, 
 
176 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 they can at least make the world safe from 
 the menace of great wars. 
 
 The world has had many experiences of 
 plans to avert war, and we shall not be wise 
 to think that after so many failures a final 
 remedy is to be found. In the Middle Ages 
 the Pope, the universal spiritual father, was 
 to be the tribunal to which his believing chil- 
 dren were to bring disputes for settlement, 
 without wars. Yet war continued to flour- 
 ish. It flourished with even deadher perti- 
 nacity when some nations broke away from 
 the papacy and the terrible wars of religion 
 followed. Dynastic wars came in the wake 
 of religious wars. Then in a revolutionary 
 age old dynasties broke down, and a Napo- 
 leon offered peace to the world on the basis 
 of his own power as a soldier to hold all 
 others in check. Napoleon fell, and a holy 
 alliance of European rulers, who should act 
 toward each other as Christian brothers, 
 seemed to furnish the best promise of endur- 
 ing peace. And a hundred years after the 
 creation of this cure for the ills of nations 
 came a World War, with destruction and 
 horror on a scale surpassing anything in the 
 
AND CANADA 177 
 
 previous history of mankind. It is not an 
 inspiring record, but it has its conspicuous 
 moral — ^that no tribunal, no mechanism of 
 procedure, will save the world from war. 
 Only the friendly spirit, the belief of whole 
 peoples in each other's integrity, will create 
 the conditions which will insure peace. 
 
 If the English-speaking peoples cannot 
 learn this mutual confidence, we may indeed 
 sorrow for the future of mankind. The out- 
 look of a people is molded to an extent great, 
 but not capable of analysis, by its traditional 
 modes of thought, by the attitude toward 
 life of its classic writers, by clearly defined 
 and explicit standards handed on from one 
 generation to another. The Puritanism of 
 England of the age of Cromwell passed into 
 the fiber of the New England which sprang 
 from it, and to this day it shapes the moral 
 standards of millions of Americans who 
 know not from what source has come the 
 fashioning of their beliefs. The devout Cath- 
 olic acquires from the long past of a Rome 
 of which he may know nothing the tradi- 
 tional beliefs and motives which touch his 
 dearest hopes and affections. Thus is it 
 
178 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 that tradition makes the present the child 
 of the past. Peoples with differing tradi- 
 tions find it hard to understand one another. 
 The body of French tradition is different 
 from that of Germany. The classic leaders 
 and thinkers of one country are not those of 
 the other, and it is not easy for a Frenchman 
 and a German to attain unity of outlook. 
 Montaigne may have molded the thought 
 of one, Luther that of the other. There is 
 above all the barrier of language. If all 
 Germany spoke French or all France spoke 
 German, we should probably find strange 
 and unexpected results in the attitude of the 
 two peoples toward each other. Friendli- 
 ness might not at first increase, for mem- 
 bers of the same family often quarrel be- 
 cause they understand each other so com- 
 pletely, but each country would know the 
 thoughts of the other. The recent war 
 taught the world that the German language 
 concealed from understanding by other na- 
 tions a mentahty well-nigh impervious to in- 
 fluences from without. 
 
 In the light of such facts one may be par- 
 doned for asking again what hope there is 
 
AND CANADA 179 
 
 for agreement among other nations, if the 
 two EngHsh-speaking nations cannot learn 
 to understand each other. From the same 
 source came their most precious traditions, 
 their language, their literature, their attitude 
 toward hfe. They are creative peoples. 
 Wherever they go they bring curiosity and 
 energy to bear on what nature offers to 
 man's effort; and industry and commerce 
 spring up from this turning of nature's re- 
 sources to the service of man. Both are self- 
 reliant and masterful, but the masterfulness 
 does not take the form of a desire to enslave 
 others. It is the masterfulness of equals in 
 free competition. Both have made great 
 sacrifices to abolish the institution of slavery, 
 with man owning man as property. Free- 
 dom of speech, diversity of religious beliefs, 
 but complete tolerance for all, a political 
 system based on appeals to the judgment of 
 the many — ^these are common to both peo- 
 ples. Both have profoundly influenced the 
 political life of the modern world. Eng- 
 land has played in history the role of creat- 
 ing and handing on to others representative 
 institutions now accepted in every continent; 
 
180 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 the United States has led in giving votes to 
 the many and in forwarding that democ- 
 racy, so potent for good if wise in spirit, so 
 mahgnant in its working if the spirit is evil. 
 We are tempted not less in domestic than 
 in international affairs to satisfy om'selves 
 with creating machinery, without taking the 
 needed care to furnish the power which will 
 make the machinery perform its proper 
 tasks. In pohtics the vital thing is not the 
 form but the spirit. A despotism, indefensi- 
 ble in the principles which it embodies, may 
 yet, if inspired by sanity and wisdom, effect 
 beneficent ends, while, on the other hand, 
 a holy alliance, become the tool of design- 
 ing selfishness, may lure nations on to irre- 
 trievable disaster. There is no magic which 
 will miake a League of Nations or a democ- 
 racy bring about good rather than evil, other 
 than the magic of intelligent and high resolve 
 expressed in energetic action. The noblest 
 ideals may be perverted to base ends. The 
 militarist ambitions of the soldier caste in 
 Germany were concealed behind some of 
 the best aspirations of a political society. 
 The Germany which Bismarck created had 
 
AND CANADA 181 
 
 universal suffrage, so that every man seemed 
 assured of political rights; it had a costly 
 and eflScient system of state education, so 
 that no one need be illiterate; it had pen- 
 sions for old age; it cared for the indigent, 
 and boasted that in its crowded centers 
 there were decency and comfort unknown 
 in the slums of London or New York. Yet 
 behind these good things lurked the spirit 
 which made force its god and despotic power 
 its end, and a world disaster followed. The 
 German who read deeply enough to see 
 what all this really meant was yet impotent 
 to check it, for he was confronted by a pow- 
 erful and ruthless hierarchy which brooked 
 no interference with its aims. 
 
 In moments of gloom we are tempted to 
 think that the forces of evil are more readily 
 organized than those of good; but it is not 
 really so. Since evil is selfish it carries with 
 it the seeds of disintegration. Any system 
 based upon the denial of fundamental hu- 
 man right is weak. Democracy with all its 
 faults is stronger than despotism. Despot- 
 ism means the power of one over the many 
 and cannot be based on any hmnan right, 
 
182 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 while democracy asserts the right on the 
 part of the many to think and act for them- 
 selves. A democratic society, however drab 
 and commonplace it may seem, rests never- 
 theless on a sound basis. What it needs is 
 leadership which it can trust, leadership 
 which will appeal to the fine things lurking 
 in man's nature and not to the evil things 
 also lurking there ; it needs direction by the 
 best, and not by the worst, elements in our 
 society. Some who think themselves initi- 
 ated and in touch with reality will shrug 
 their shoulders and say that the thing is im- 
 possible, that there is no room in politics 
 as now organized for the refined and the edu- 
 cated. It is an age-old cynicism. Su T'ang 
 Pu, an ancient Chinese poet, expressed it 
 in his bitter reflection on the birth of a son: 
 "Families when a child is born want it to be 
 intelligent; I, through intelligence, having 
 wrecked my whole life, only hope the boy 
 may prove ignorant and stupid ; then he will 
 crown a tranquil life by becoming a Cabi- 
 net minister." But the cynicism does not 
 express truth. The man who made the 
 greatest personal impress on his generation. 
 
AND CANADA 183 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt, came out of the circle 
 which thought it degrading for a gentleman 
 to face the rough-and-tumble of politics. I 
 say nothing of his policies, which may have 
 been right or mistaken, but he made himself 
 felt beyond what was possible to a man of 
 coarser type. Education, intelligence, and 
 refinement, if linked with simplicity of char- 
 acter, are assets, and not handicaps, in the 
 leadership of the masses. England has one 
 lesson to teach which other democratic soci- 
 eties have not yet learned — that the best and 
 ablest in a nation's life can find in its poli- 
 tics the widest sphere for their ambitions. 
 
 John Stuart Mill described democracy as 
 "collective mediocrity." We might say the 
 same of an army; indeed, of mankind as a 
 whole. But this collective mediocrity fol- 
 lowed an inspired Lincoln in civil affairs; 
 and the masses in France followed and be- 
 lieved in the greatest military genius whom 
 the world has ever known. The multitude 
 has the capacity to recognize a man when 
 it sees him. A distracted world is clamor- 
 ing for leaders who can say the word of wis- 
 dom because they have intelligence trained 
 
184 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 for their tasks. We confront far-reaching 
 problems of capital and labor. Who but 
 an educated man can understand them? 
 Cobbett defined capital as "money taken from 
 the laboring classes, which, being given to 
 army tailors and such like, enables them to 
 keep fox hounds and trace their descent from 
 the Normans." There is cynical cleverness 
 in the definition, but it does not go far to 
 explain one of the most inti-icate problems 
 of oiu* present society. One condition of a 
 real belief in liberty is a prior belief in man, 
 in his capacity and willingness to see and fol- 
 low the good, else would hberty be only the 
 license to the brute to gratify his own appe- 
 tites. When we claim the right for the indi- 
 vidual to judge for himself we imply the 
 confidence that in the long run he will judge 
 wisely and who can help him to do so if it 
 is not the trained and the educated? 
 
 There is ground for a chastened optimism 
 when we look out on the world. The free 
 English-speaking peoples have power. Let 
 that be written in the forefront of our hopes. 
 For more than a hundred years there has 
 been no bloody strife between the two divi- 
 
AND CANADA 185 
 
 sions. The long record of peace among some 
 of the great nations takes a very wide sweep 
 which seems to indicate the working of 
 forces hidden to our consciousness. In the 
 hands of five nations is to-day the destiny 
 of the world. The nations are the United 
 States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan; 
 and it is noteworthy that no one of them 
 has for more than a century drawn the sword 
 against any of the others. They represent 
 the dominant power in all the continents. 
 Hardly a dog dare bark should they say the 
 word of prohibition — and among themselves 
 they have loved and long preserved peace. 
 This is a story full of promise. Of prom- 
 ise, too, though often not so regarded, is a 
 part of the record of the nations which have 
 been at war. We look upon the settlements 
 made at Vienna in 1815 as having contained 
 the seed of future strife. Yet they so en- 
 dured that for forty years there was no seri- 
 ous war in Europe. Nothing is clearer in 
 the history of Europe during the last hun- 
 dred years than that the hand of justice is 
 strong to rem,ove the causes of war. Dur- 
 ing that period the Turk has been at the 
 
186 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 root of half the wars of Europe. His is a 
 terrible record. His brutal tyranny mangled 
 the very souls of the peoples of southeastern 
 Europe, and recovery from their degrada- 
 tion will take centuries. The Turk caused 
 the Crimean war. He has been the soiu-ce 
 of most of the trouble in the Balkans. He 
 brought Russia and Great Britain face to 
 face with war in 1878. More than once did 
 his presence in Europe bring Russia and 
 Austria to the verge of war. In his fatuous 
 folly, after Italy and the Balkan states had 
 nearly destroyed him, he plunged into the 
 last great war. He has long been the key 
 to European unrest. He ruled without jus- 
 tice. Now, with his malevolent power gone, 
 the ferment of Europe will tend to disap- 
 pear. Other modern wars have been due to 
 a type of injustice which broad statesman- 
 ship could correct. It was injustice in Italy 
 that brought Austria and France to war in 
 1859. It was slavery that brought civil war 
 in the United States. It was the denial of 
 nationahsm, in itself a sound principle of 
 political hfe, which brought the era of war 
 in central Europe between 1864. and 1871. 
 
AND CANADA 187 
 
 With the ahen oppressor removed and the 
 rights of nationality now recognized, most 
 of the causes of recent wars disappear. It 
 will take time for peoples suddenly freed to 
 find their natural equilibrium, but war will 
 tend steadily to decrease if nations will rec- 
 ognize decent standards of justice, and the^ 
 free nations must assert these standards. 
 
 It is a sound maxim of individual conduct 
 to keep friendships in repair, and the maxim 
 is sound, too, for nations. There is no ground 
 for suspicion and antagonism between the 
 English-speaking peoples. They are rivals 
 in trade, but so also are persons who share a 
 common citizenship and patriotism. If they 
 will cultivate friendship and rebuke the 
 breeders of strife, they can lead the world 
 with power irresistible. To be champions 
 of justice in the world, they must correct the 
 injustices within their own borders. Every 
 nation has some great vexing problem to test 
 the vitality of its spirit of justice. Great 
 Britain has the problem of Ireland, the 
 United States that of the negro. Both are 
 profoundly difficult and neither is capable 
 of any ready-made or mechanical solution. 
 
188 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 The thing to make sure of is that remedial 
 processes are working vigorously. There is 
 no harm in one nation criticizing another and 
 pointing out defects. What does harm is 
 malignancy, the deviUsh desire to create dis- 
 cord. School-books foster it when they in- 
 still into the minds of the children of to-day 
 the worn-out passions of conflicts long since 
 ended. The press fosters it when it places 
 undue emphasis upon differences and for- 
 gets deeper causes for agreement. Indi- 
 viduals foster it when they permit them- 
 selves to speak of other nations in terms of 
 reproach and contempt. To keep friend- 
 ships in repair we must nourish the methods 
 of friendship. 
 
 We stand to-day at the beginning of a 
 new era for mankind. As never before in 
 human history are minds unsettled and old 
 methods of action and persuasion aban- 
 doned. We confront in millions suspicion 
 and discontent, so strident that timid souls 
 think all is lost and abandon hope for hu- 
 man society. But, unless we give up belief 
 in mankind, this is not the note of true man- 
 hood. Rather is the call of to-day to new 
 
AND CANADA 189 
 
 faith and, on the basis of faith, hope. The 
 law of sacrifice is the law of human progress. 
 There is a sacrifice or, rather, a retribution, 
 which is the Nemesis of national misconduct, 
 and Nemesis has now demanded her full por- 
 tion. The nations were selfish and greedy; 
 the rich were arrogant and the poor were 
 oppressed; there were dreadful sores in the 
 body politic; and the screaming horror of 
 war was, in part at least, nature's heaUng. 
 But there were other sacrifices than those 
 which purifying justice demanded. Mil- 
 lions of brave men, the pride of the nations 
 from which they sprang, confronted death 
 with firm and sad constancy, not because they 
 beheved that they must die to expiate their 
 country's sin, but because they were willing 
 to die as Christ died, to save mankind by a 
 glorious obedience to the highest call of man- 
 hood. The world stands in the light of that 
 ' stupendous sacrifice, and faith in what is in- 
 volved in manhood makes us believe that the 
 sacrifices cannot have been in vain. 
 
 Here on the American continent two 
 English-speaking federations, heirs to the 
 liberty of all the ages, are living side by side 
 
190 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 in the vast expanse of their territories, and 
 are called to take their share of responsibil- 
 ity for human well-being. The older fed- 
 eration has no antagonism to the younger. 
 The younger has copied the older in much 
 that it has done. The older, a new type of 
 political society in a new sphere, with its 
 own tests and standards, shows a proud in- 
 dependence of what the rest of the world 
 may think. The younger is a member of a 
 world-wide union; it is tied by convictions 
 and sympathy to an ancient state; and it is 
 following the traditions of that state. It 
 would be the pride of Canada to play some 
 worthy part in bringing closer together this 
 ancient state and the newer society in Amer- 
 ica. She owes m,uch to both ; in a deep sense 
 she is a pupil of both; she has shared the 
 burdens of both in the hard field of war ; and 
 she is linked to both by fresh memories of 
 its stern cost. 
 
 Thus my last word, a Briton, a Canadian, 
 an alien speaking in the United States, is 
 this, that there is something noble to be done 
 to save the world, that our two peoples rep- 
 resent dominant power in the world, and 
 
AND CANADA 191 
 
 that they can, if they will, achieve a mighty 
 thing for mankind. The sick world needs 
 the support of the strongest arms. Much 
 ought to be done, and what ought to be done 
 can be done. "What desertion is for the sol- 
 dier, pessimism is for the civilian," said a 
 French writer during the war. The war is 
 over, and the problems of peace are before 
 us. During war faith made us spurn any 
 thought that we could be beaten. It is trea- 
 son to mankind to give up hope that similar 
 endurance and courage can solve our prob- 
 lems of peace. 
 
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