The period of settlement has passed, and already a young “CANADIAN” generation has sprung up sturdy, thrifty, progressive from the transplanted Ruthenian stock.  The numerous children of that prolific race are gradually passing from the home into the schools and from the schools into the community life of the country.  This Slavic race is striking deep roots in Canadian soil, particularly in our Western Provinces.  The loss of faith has been heavy, we believe, especially in our large cities.  Naturally, allowance must be made for the drift-wood which always follows the tide of immigration.  In our rural centres, be it said to the praise of that simple-minded people, and to the confusion of the enemies of their faith, the great majority have kept their allegiance to the Church of their baptism.  But, where the “bogus mass,” the false priests and “Moscovite money” have failed, the neutralizing process of a so-called “Canadianization” may succeed.  The flank envelopment has often a greater success than the frontal attack.  This leads us to dwell on another phase of the Ruthenian problem.

In the history of the human race there is nothing more complicated than ethnic assimilation.  It is a slow, delicate and, in many cases, very dangerous process.  In the laboratory of the world many explosions are due to the ignorance of what we would call “human chemistry.”  “One cannot play with human chemicals any more than with real ones.  We know by experience that at times they are fulginous and ready to break into open flames.”  But there are two elements which have to be treated with the greatest care:  Religion and Race.  They are the two foci of the ellipse in which moves history; the two shores between which oscillates the tossing tide of humanity.  Lord Morley calls them “the two incendiary forces of history, ever shooting jets of flame from undying embers.”  This explains why the soil of history is so volcanic, so filled with burning lava which time itself has not cooled.

The racial element in ethnical assimilation is gradually modified by the imperative adjustment of the immigrant to his new conditions of life.  For the observer and student of history there is nothing more instructive and, at times, more pathetic than that borderland which lies between what has been and what is to be in the life of the immigrant.  This violent breaking away from the past and gradual assimilation with the present has its dangers.  Unknown and occult factors are at work with the blood of several generations, pulsating in the veins of the new Canadian.  Whilst beckoning hands stretch out to receive him on our shores and initiate him into our national life, other hands, the hands of the dead, stretch out through several generations to lay claim on him.  Like everything in nature this change or rather this transformation should be imperceptible.  Mutual toleration is the factor of a healthy assimilation.  This has given to