Delphi complete works of.., p.797
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 797
One would naturally ask what we are to do about it all. To which the only answer can be that all we can do is to be fully aware of the danger that provincial autonomy may block the path of progress and to act accordingly. We cannot do everything nine times over; or step out boldly with nine feet first. What we cannot do directly we must do indirectly, reaching agreement all the more easily by being fully aware that disagreement means disaster. We may ponder here on Benjamin Franklin’s immortal phrase about all hanging together or all hanging separately.
Deeper and more dangerous is the division as between French and British in Canada and never in a sense more critical than in the present hour under the strain of the war. In the days of peace that once were, many of us British people in Canada, and certainly most of us British people living in French Canada, considered the presence of the French, of their separate language and distinctive culture, a decided asset to the Dominion. It seemed to us to balance and offset certain shortcomings of our own people. The hysteria of the swing to prohibition led us to admire the refusal of the French to be carried away. The province of Quebec, wrote Andrew Macphail, is the last refuge of common sense in North America. We contrasted, too, the tyranny of the Ontario Sunday with the wholesome outdoor Sunday of the priests and their seminary scholars playing games together. We admired the quiet contentedness of the French Canadian habitant and its contrast to the eager haste, the get-rich-quick, the quest for money of the restless English. We liked the stories that Dr. Drummond told us of Jean Baptiste coming home again from the States, or Louis Hémon’s far-away-and-long-ago picture of the world of Maria Chapdelaine. Around French Canada hung all the romance of history, the appeal of a lost cause and the respect for a people happy in their own lot. Above this level of the plain life of simple people was the pride felt by the educated and academic classes of society living in a dual culture, in drawing upon two languages and two great literatures, on the traditions of two great nations.
It looks in retrospect like a beautiful landscape, now a deserted garden — the storm and sand driving over it. But we must see how much of this dual Canada we can get back.
This is because the outbreak and the course of the war have thrown a high light on the ground, half shadowed in the days of peace, that separate the British from the French. When the war came it was only too clear that a much larger proportion of the French than of the British desired to keep out of it. Indeed, to speak frankly, there was no comparison. And a much larger proportion of the French than of the British were opposed to conscription. More than this, it became evident that to many, one may almost say to most, of the French Canadians this issue of participation in the war was not a matter to be settled by all-Canada majority rule. Quebec must decide the fate of Quebec.
Hence the danger on the horizon now is this steady drawing apart of the two races as if disillusioned with one another. The old rallying cries no longer call to the heart. Where now is the twin glory of Montcalm and Wolfe, the brotherhood of LaFontaine and Baldwin, each elected by the other’s people in North York and Rimouski? Or the memory of Sir John A. Macdonald, doing everything for the French at the price only of a flag; and for their language, everything except speaking it. Or of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, as British as the Empire itself, a crown jewel of its Jubilees?
Are those echoes dying out? Are the ashes cold on the hearth? There is a Latin motto which says that the falling out of mutual friends is but a renewal of their friendship. Can it be so with us? Or do we realize that these were dead ashes from which no new flame can come. For the present hour reveals that this new glory of Britain that marks the British as the greatest people on the earth falls in a broken light on Canada. The glorious episode of Dunkerque, when every aiding seashore Englishman dropped back a thousand years and became again a son of the sea, was followed by the heroic defense of London under the Blitz of 1940, shouting back its defiance of “We can stand it!” — willing, if need be, to die unmoving on the spot.
These things sent a thrill of admiration and affection throughout the British world. Those who died did not die in vain. There was a rebirth of British spirit throughout the Empire. The song, There’ll Always Be An England echoed in every heart and moistened every eye. All of us who were British born felt that we had done a noble thing in being so. Gilbert’s jest came true and “in spite of all temptation to belong to another nation, we’d been born an Englishman.”
Now what share have the French Canadians in this new pride, in this new birth of an ancient spirit? What share can they have? In all fairness we cannot expect them to feel as we do. But this new spirit reveals to us that anyone who would cut off Canada from its British connection must first cut off the lives of the millions of people whom this spirit inspires and animates.
But the French cannot share this pride. Nor can they fall back on a parallel pride in the glory of France. That may come later if once again the French people can get into their hands the arms they threw so foolishly away. It is not now. But in any case French Canada is not based on France. The Conquest brought a physical separation, the French Revolution a moral one.
So the French Canadians, in this new British ascendancy, are driven in on themselves, to hold all the more tightly to their idea of a “little nation,” an isolated devout people, only asking to be let alone. Some even talk of an actual State, a republic of their own — a Laurentia presently to rise on the St. Lawrence, a dream place, beyond the world of money and rapacity and war — all their own. Who would not sympathize? Better a place of one’s own with one’s own people in the wilderness than alien rule in a paradise. But geography forbids Laurentia. The St. Lawrence is the gateway to a continent. They can’t have that. Yet even a pleasant dream makes an unwelcome day easier.
It seems to me that on both sides we should try to realize the attitude of the other race and meet and match it where we can, and where we can’t, say so. British people must realize that the French and their language and their religion are here to stay, and deserve to. The legal guarantees we gave should be rewelded with the guarantee of honest opinion and intention. The French are not going to disappear, and they are also not going to spread over Western or Maritime Canada.
Much of Canada, far the greater part of it in area, is not French, never has been and is never likely to be. It is false history to think of Canada (our present Dominion) as a former French colony taken over by the British Empire. The Maritime Provinces, apart from alternations of nominal possession and cession, and apart from the expulsion of the Acadians in 1756, had no great element of French in their actual final settlement. Prince Edward Island, as the Isle St. Jean, had but a handful of French settlers and refugees when it was taken over. Its real settlement, like that of Nova Scotia was mainly by British immigration, mostly Scottish. New Brunswick in its birth, settlement and growth was Loyalist and British from the soil up. Ontario as Upper Canada was opened up by the British Loyalists in what had been empty country. The Northwest was the territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company sailing out of the port of London, and of their rivals (later partners) the North West Company from British Montreal. The influx into their service of French Canadian voyageurs and trappers bred the population of the Métis, the French half breeds of the Red River. But the country was British. Beyond the mountains British Columbia knew nothing of New France, nor of French Canada, nor of the French language, except as learned out of a school book brought from England.
But all this does not impair the proper claim of French Canada not only to the privileges legally guaranteed but to the consideration arising out of our historic association.
There is however no sense in minimizing the actual separation that divides the two races, not paralleled, one may well imagine, elsewhere in the world. It is a separation that can never be bridged, unless the French Canadians give up their cherished ideas about schools and marriage in relation to religion. This they won’t, within human vision. One should try to realize the completeness of this separation between the French and English in Canada even where they are thrown closely together as in Montreal. It begins with the cradle and follows them to the altar and the grave.
Children who do not go to school together can never know one another. And the two school systems are not only separate but built on opposite ideas, each a denial of the worth of the other. Stating each in its own terms, we find the French Roman Catholic school systems resting on the idea that no education is sound unless accompanied, unless permeated, with the teaching and the doctrine of the Church; that one cannot separate in the mind of the child its religious training (meaning its training in the dogma and the moral precepts of the Church) from its intellectual learning. If you do so you attain only to “godless” education, a hideous growth undermining faith, threatening the cohesion of society. Hence at every stage of education is the priest — let us call him the good father — and his book.
But the Protestant to the contrary. As he sees a school, it is to be made, a place inspired by religion and morality, though cut off from the teaching of dogmas and creeds and rival articles of faith. Each day well spent, arduous and industrious, is a prayer. The honour of the classroom and the playground, the busy, happy day of honest effort and games that teach subordination of oneself, these things teach religion. This “godless” school, seen thus, is seen as the school that God loves best.
Marriage is another separating line, a gulf of division by religion that even love, blind though it is, dare seldom leap across. A French Roman Catholic, and that means practically all the French Canadians, must not marry a Protestant except with a pledge that children of the union must be reared as Roman Catholics. Nor is a Protestant form of marriage held valid, no matter what a perplexed law may say. The only real marriage, a sacrament of the church, is one solemnized by a priest. What can a Protestant youth do about this? Nothing, except to keep his eyes away from French girls — a thing not always easy to do.
It is true that the Irish Roman Catholics with the language of one race and the religion of the other, fall crosswise of this division. But they cross it only to perplex it, not to heal it. And they add to it, along with much good fellowship, a few animosities of their own.
Nor is there any general remedy for this racial situation to be found in an attempt towards a universal bi-lingualism throughout Canada. In most parts of Canada French is not spoken at all. We cannot reduce our speech to one language and any dream of bi-lingualism, all over Canada, of people twittering away in both languages in Hamilton, Ont., Moose Jaw, Sask., and Victoria, B.C., is just a dream. Bilingualism is not so easy and so offhand as this. It only comes under very special circumstances of necessity, of opportunity and of daily intercourse, as in some of the two-language areas of unhappy Europe. Nor does it ever come when one of the parties concerned is British. We are but poor linguists. The average Englishman not only can’t learn a foreign language but he can’t even learn to try.
Such is the difficult relation of the two races that has to be taken into account in all our plans for national development and social betterment. There is no way in which we can obliterate or revolutionize it. We can only apply the policy generally favoured by the highest present statecraft in this country and wait till it all goes by. Each side must act fairly to the other. The French have no right in law or in history or in common sense to think of Canada as a combination in which all grave policy must depend on French Canadian veto or consent. The British have no right to misuse the British connection and the British heritage to give an unfair deal to the French by sheer majority power.
On those terms all depends on, and needs men of goodwill.
CHAPTER VIII CANADA AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD
OUR MAIN CONCERN in Canada after the war will be the development of this Dominion for the sake of our own welfare and for those for whom we hold it in trust. We shall be compelled to take some thought of the outside world. But for most people in Canada our relation to the outside world will in a sense be intensely isolationist. “Never again,” will be our watchword. Never again must the flower of the youth of this country be offered up to the treachery and sin of the German people. Canadians will not be interested in the idea of educating the Germans; they will prefer to do it with a club.
Nor will it be possible for the day-to-day thought of Canadians and the day-to-day policy of our Government to turn on the dissensions, the minority races and the interlocking frontiers of Europe. The one aim of our insistence, will be that of physical security, not ink, not treaties, the physical security that can only be obtained by rendering German treachery and German brutality harmless by lack of weapons. We need no ropes of sand of the past League of Nations nor a New League armed as itself a sovereign state. We need a League only as a gesture — a sort of International Y.M.C.A. — powerless to threaten, attack or coerce.
For actual security we shall look to the associated power of Britain and America — not as running the world, but as preventing the world from running Britain and America. In that associated power we shall join but only by way of solidarity, not by way of splitting votes and dividing policy. Russia is obviously a great ally on the side lines but the national interests of the Russians are far away from ours, and will be till the Pacific world fills up.
With France, for some time to come, we do not need to count. Field-Marshal Smuts aroused wide criticism when he implied in his November London speech that after the war France would not appear as a great European power. But he spoke only what is fact. France has been impoverished, plundered, trampled under foot, its whole mechanism of war destroyed or confiscated. Worse than that. After the war over a million French prisoners of war will return from the starvation and brutality of Germany to settle accounts with over a million Frenchmen in France who “collaborated” with the Germans, and joined with them in the persecution of their fallen country. Over a million Frenchmen, and these the youth of the country, will return, if they still survive, from their forced slavery in Germany to settle accounts with the men who sold them into it. All over France the cry will go up against the Vichy rule that tore down “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” and defiled the ideals of a hundred years.
Take out from France the German armies and the Allied forces and what will be left? No one doubts the ultimate revival of France: its annals have been too glorious, its soul too high, its achievement too great to die. But for the present, for now, where is the great power that we can invoke and on which we lesser people can lean?
So too in Asia. China for the Chinese! You and I are all for it. Japan for the Japs, and even less if they can crowd onto it without tipping it up. The Dutch Indies for the Dutch — or at any rate none of our business.
Even on our own continent we need no new formal contracts or pledges or alliances. Pan-Americanism is a grand sentiment over which to drink sweet champagne in Lima, Peru or Santiago, anywhere, at the expense of the United States, which is commonly understood to foot all Pan-American Union bills. But Pan-Americanism in any sense of mutual alliance, pledge or guarantee has no reality behind it. We have learned to admire many things about the South Americans; their solution of the colour problem by going colour blind; their love of beauty that builds and adorns their beautiful cities, which not even a revolution is allowed to disfigure: indeed their revolutions themselves, not spread out as in England and America over years and years but carried out in a day with no disturbance of domestic life. But this happy continent is not for us to cement or guarantee; friendships, champagne, compliments, but political compacts — impossible.
Nor do we need any further tinkering with our own Empire. Field Marshal Smuts in his same speech spoke of the reorganization of the British Empire with larger Dominion units. But there he spoke as a South African for whom the whole sub-continent south of the Congo appears the natural area of a united government.
In Canada we are large enough to need no extension. Newfoundland, one may well trust, will take another look at our lion’s den and find it not a den at all. Greenland, too, we need to take over for air security’s sake, even if we have to pay half a cent an acre for it. But if the Danes, helpless to protect it, won’t sell it out, then let it freeze for another thousand years. We can manage.
There has been talk of our taking in the West Indies but the people who so talk are mostly ignorant of the simple fact that the West Indies are as black as a hat, and getting blacker. What kind of Canadians would they be, forbidden to enter the rest of Canada, and by custom and prejudice not marriageable with other Canadians?
Nor do we need to try to alter the structure of the Empire. The everlasting theorists always reach for a pen to write a constitution. In an unlucky moment they persuaded us to give the Empire a sort of constitution in the (Imperial) Westminster Statute of 1931. Here is what happened. It was felt during the Great War that formal recognition should be given to the altered status of the Dominions. But nobody knew just what the altered status was. Imperial Conferences in 1926 and 1930 drafted clauses to explain the status. The Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Eire and Newfoundland) severally requested and consented to the submission of a measure to Parliament. Hence the Statute.
But has it been accepted? Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland in their “request” called for ratification by their parliaments. New Zealand ratified. Australia never has. Newfoundland ceased to be a Dominion in 1935. Eire in place of ratification traversed the statute with an Irish Act which leaves nothing of the Imperial connection except that the King of England is King of Ireland outside of Ireland. What that means only the Irish know. South Africa traversed the Statute with a Status of the Union Act, giving full legislative sovereignty to South Africa. Canada did nothing, thereby tacitly accepting the Statute. This creates the paradox that there is now no way to amend the Constitution of Canada except through the Imperial Parliament — as if the Statute had never been passed.
