The Masques of Ottawa Part 25

CONCLUSION

A Canadian newspaperman once flippantly asked the late W. T. Stead:

"What do you think about continentalism in North America?"

The answer came just as flippantly:

"Every nation has a right to go to the devil in its own way. Canada should not be denied the privilege."

There was a blunt candour about the reply that even from an egotist like Stead meant infinitely more than the soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by some of the visiting prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that in establishing independence of the United States, Canada should cut the painter from the Great British Commonwealth. But he was a trifle cynical about the young nation, just as Disraeli was fifty years ago when he said that "these colonies would yet be a millstone about Britain's neck".

Neither of them was more cynical about us than we usually are about ourselves, never in theory, but in practice.

Most of the men sketched in the foregoing pages, as well as hundreds of others in public life, realize that Parliament and Legislatures have a hard time to keep themselves from going to the devil, and that so far as they go along that road the nation travels with them. As an experiment in nationhood we have some peculiar and original weaknesses, as well as strengths. Belgium, for instance, could be tacked by Atlas overnight on to one of our northward coasts, or set down as an island in some of our northern waters, when only a geographer would notice the difference.

Belgium has a king and two million more people than Canada. We have slightly more territory than the United States, when New York State alone has as many people as our whole country. We are as big as many Britains and we have enough railway mileage to make Britain a spider-web, when our population is about one-fifth of hers and our ultimate authority in democratic government comes from Downing Street. Yet there are prophets among us who predict that we shall yet be the pivot of the Empire.

Once you begin to speculate about the future of this country there is no end. And the past of the nation has rather little to do with estimating its future. We have been a wide-open immigration country. In twenty years we have transformed ourselves by a foreign policy with which Britain had nothing to do. Twenty years more and we could do it again with even more disastrous results. In 1867 the great compromise known as Confederation tied four and a half millions of people into a political unity. In half a century we doubled our population; built 30,000 miles of transcontinental and branch lines of railway; made ourselves a race congress imitation of the United States; enacted a National Policy of protective tariffs that failed to protect us from ourselves; created an Oriental problem on the Pacific, exaggerated a race problem on the Ottawa, and developed an American-penetration system clear across the country; sent a small army to help establish a similar government and dual problem to our own in South Africa and a huge army to Europe to help make the world safe for the kind of democracy of which we consider ourselves a fair sample; created a small army of millionaires and had bestowed upon us about an equal number of knighthoods as well as a number of peerages, and four years ago pet.i.tioned the King through Parliament to abolish the practice; gave a first mortgage on the country to one great transcontinental railway, and a second and a third to two more which we have since nationalized into government ownership because the roads were bankrupt for the present and built for the future, which is yet a long way off; developed a cycle of quite remarkable big industries and federalized banks which a large element of our heterogeneous democracy now consider a menace to the nation; and on the prairies which, shortly after Confederation, we bought for a few millions sterling from the Hudson's Bay Company, a Liberal Government, never contemplated by the Fathers of Confederation, carved out two new great Provinces which for ten years have tried to kill the Tory Party which gave the Northwest its birth, all Liberalism that does not go back to the furrow, and aims to abolish even the moderately successful economic system by which we have come to our present state of comparative prosperity.

If that is the kind of thing that Stead meant by "every nation going to the devil in its own way" it must be conceded that we have lost no time over the going. We are among the forward nations, even though we are less radical than Australia. No young nation ever accomplished visibly and materially so much in so brief a period. We had the enormous scientific resources of the 20th century to give us momentum. Perhaps we were a little too fast on the down grade. We still take some inspiration from looking at the map to reflect that no other part of the British Empire occupies so strategic a position as Canada. We note that Canada is not only the natural interpreter between Britain and the United States--which it took some of our far-seeing statesmen a long while to discover--but that we are also a transformer between the power-house at Downing Street and the one at Tokio; that we are fair on the highway of traffic and travel between London and Yokohama; that we have room within a reasonable time for as many people as are now living in Britain, and that if we are not too awfully anxious about going to the devil we can make that population one of the most potential in the world for its size, not only in producing things to eat and wear and export, but in helping to hold the British Commonwealth steady long enough to let the old thing work out its big share of the world's salvation.

Such is the outlook. Meanwhile we have our innate defects, the first of which arises from the vastness of geography and the littleness of politicians. Little politics in Canada are pocketed away in sections.

Some of our native born are the most parochial. There are groups in Canada as un-national as Eskimos who in some respects are our best citizens because they owe nothing to, and expect nothing from, any Government.

People shout about a.s.similation, not knowing to what pattern, if any, foreign peoples should be a.s.similated. The missionary goes abroad and extracts from the heathen even the n.o.bilities of his own faith and leaves him often the miserable animosities of a creed. Political and social missionaries in Canada make the same mistake about foreigners. It is a great thing to Canadianize a race. But we ought to begin by Canadianizing some of our native-born.

Even our public men believe in political servitude. A man goes to Ottawa burning with zeal to inaugurate political liberation. Six months or a year produces sleeping-sickness. He is given a hyperdemic [Transcriber's note: hypodermic?] of conformity. He gravitates into the formula of a group. His message is muzzled. If not, it too often breaks loose in a tirade on behalf of some section littler than even any of the groups in Ottawa.

Big men do not, as is often said, go into Parliament. There is a great reason. The wonder is that the few big men we elect stay there so long.

Government is supposed to be business. But the business takes a long while to do--even badly. Ottawa is the place where the national field-gla.s.ses too often get turned wrong end about.

We are seldom honest about public men. A man's own party praises, the opposite party d.a.m.ns him. In an old nation this intellectual strabismus is pardonable. In a young nation it is a form of political suicide. We too often wait for a man to make a great speech before admitting independent of party, that he is anything great as a man.

Because Canada is so vast, political leaders find it necessary to enunciate one doctrine here, another one there. This is an old trick; playing the lights on stage when the spot-light is reserved for the big local issues. We are constantly besieged by "national policies". Many of them have very little to do with national citizenship. Most of them sketch out milleniums that are never realized. We are a people of extremisms. When national prosperity is the objective we tolerate, and even idolize, any man who is bold and big enough to capture the country with his special-interest programme. Then the delirium is over, heyday is done, and the nation wakes up to cla.s.sify as public plunderers the very men whom it once regarded as the economic saviours of the country.

Our faculty of national criticism is not as yet strongly developed.

Thank heaven, we are not cynical; but it is better to be a hopeful cynic than a disgruntled idealist. Men will arise with specious programmes by means of which they can hypnotize a group and aim at capturing the country. Progress carries on by means of such men and such groups. But the devil himself stands behind the stage bush to prod these zealots into the limelight and the next moment to lead the claque in the gallery. We are carried away by the act, afterwards find that we have been duped and hold indignation meetings after the show is safely ten miles down the line.

Like all other nations we have had our share of "the new time coming".

During the war we had all the old parties dead and buried along with patronage and race cries and public graft. But while the preacher was busy over the funeral rites a number of chief mourners were somewhere "making hay". A nation's adversity is too often some man's opportunity.

In moneymaking this is even worse than in politics. It is too easy to shout and to shed tears. We deplore the past, suspect the future and work hard to make ourselves solid for the present.

Many men in Canada do not regard public life as public service. There is little or no preparation for doing the nation's business. Men are log-rolled into Parliament and pitchforked into Cabinets. The work they are expected to do has little or no relation to the work for which nature and experience intended them. It is regarded a simpler matter to administer a great State department than to manage a big industry.

Ottawa is the natural objective of all those who "want" something. When interests camp on the trail of Governments and of Parliament, the interest of the nation is going to suffer--and it always has. We are paying in taxes now for the lobbying that went on ten years ago. No Government is ever considered so patriotic and humanly powerful that can resist the inroad of "big interests".

Bigger interests arise. In a storm of newly patented virtue they declaim against the "big" ones. They fail to admit that they merely want to usurp instead of to magnify Government. The political machine of the country is regarded as a part of the machine by which special interests prosper. In its efforts to repudiate such a connection Governments resort to the trick of clamouring on behalf of "the people".

Presently even the people lose faith in Government. They come to believe only in cla.s.s-conscious groups. No nation can be big whose parties are small. No parties can be great whose platforms are for the good of a cla.s.s or the veneration of what "my grandfather" used to think.

Elections are eternally war. A general election has for a sure sign the prediction on the part of the Opposition that the Government intend to "put one over" in order to grab another lease of power. Experience has taught us that the prediction is too often true. It does not teach us that it is time to abandon the expectation or the practice. Men who in party bondage have helped to win elections by redistribution after a census, and to award patronage to the victors, arise years later in Opposition to denounce such practices when carried on by the present Government. The pot usually succeeds in calling the kettle black. Hence a bad black eye to political sincerity.

The average parliamentarian knows very little about Canada; much about his own Province, or his own const.i.tuency, or his own group. Politicians do not even travel except on business. A country of vast and variegated human interest, of wonderful charm even for scenery, without considering people at all, is the home of a large number of people burning to do national work who know little or nothing about the life of the nation, historically or otherwise.

President Harding solemnly predicts that the United States will produce a race of supermen. He does not say how. He merely observes the need. He knows that his country has gone the pace that will take generations of coming back before any superman nation can begin to be. In Canada we have not gone so far that we cannot easily come back. But we have no vision of any future for this nation except a larger instalment of what we have been.

We talk about being a nation when we ignore the very disadvantages that militate against true nationalism. We bl.u.s.ter about national sentiment and spend our money on paying to have ourselves Americanized. When we are tired trying to explain that, we fall back into dithyrambics on the Old Flag and the great British Empire.

But if we are ever going to be anything but a national and polyglot sandwich between the United States and Great Britain, it is time we paid some respect to the innate democracy of the British idea by developing our own national ident.i.ty. Our strategic position in the Empire will be worth no more to us than our great native resources, or our bilingual nationalism, or our pioneering history, or all combined, unless we elect to make the biggest and best we have dominate our national life. This is a big country that must become a great nation if those who aim to lead it will abstain from little ways. We need more poetry in our public affairs. More imagination in Parliament. More vision in the Administration. More faith in the country. Less sectionalizing propaganda everywhere. If we rise to the measure of opportunity, we may yet prove that when the Fathers of Confederation hung our national future on a great compromise and a transcontinental railway they were not talking in their sleep; and that when Empire statesmen look to our leaders for counsel we shall not send unto them any man who represents a cla.s.s-conscious economic group instead of a nation.

It is true that Governments have always capitulated to groups. We have sacrificed a great deal for the sake of protection when that was merely a tariff to keep certain industries from obliteration. But a nation cannot be forever built upon smoke-stacks and blue-books. We can better afford to have continental free trade and spiritual freedom as a nation, than a high tariff and bondage to an industrial-financial-transportation group.

But if we gobble the bait of free trade, and find ourselves on the hook of economic and national domination by the United States, our last state will surely be worse than our first.