CHAPTER

     I national consciousness
    II foundation for hope
   III the tie that binds
    IV Americanization
     V why reciprocity was rejected
    VI the coming of the English
   VII the coming of the foreigner
  VIII the coming of the Oriental
    IX the Hindu
     X what Panama means
    XI to Europe by Hudson Bay
   XII some industrial problems
  XIII how governed
   XIV the life of the people
    XV emigration and development
   XVI defense
  XVII the domain of the north
 XVIII finding herself
        index

THE CANADIAN COMMONWEALTH

CHAPTER I

NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

I

An empire the size of Europe setting out on her career of world history is a phenomenon of vast and deep enough import to stir to national consciousness the slumbering spirit of any people.  Yet when you come to trace when and where national consciousness awakened, it is like following a river back from the ocean to its mountain springs.  From the silt borne down on the flood-tide you can guess the fertile plains watered and far above the fertile plains, regions of eternal snow and glacial torrent warring turbulently through the adamantine rocks.  You can guess the eternal striving, the forward rush and the throwback that have carved a way through the solid rocks; but until you have followed the river to its source and tried to stem its current you can not know.

So of peoples and nations.

Fifty years ago, as far as world affairs were concerned, Japan did not exist.  Came national consciousness, and Japan rose like a star dominating the Orient.  A hundred years ago Germany did not exist.  Came national consciousness welding chaotic principalities into unity, and the mailed fist of the empire became a menace before which Europe quailed.  So of China with the ferment of freedom leavening the whole.  So of the United States with the Civil War blending into a union the diversities of a continent.  When you come to consider the birth of national consciousness in Canada, you do not find the germ of an ambition to dominate, as in Japan and Germany.  Nor do you find a fight for freedom.  Canada has always been free—­free as the birds of passage that winged above the canoe of the first voyageur who pointed his craft up the St. Lawrence for the Pacific; but what you do find from the very first is a fight for national existence; and when the fight was won, Canada arose like a wrestler with consciousness of strength for new destiny.

II

Go back to the beginning of Canada!