Part 40

The average parliamentarian knows very little about Canada; much about his own Province, or his own constituency, 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 bluster 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 identity. 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 class-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.