[1] This memoir was presented to the Premier of Saskatchewan at a time when this problem was widely discussed in the Press.  As the legislation, then enacted, did not bring a satisfactory solution we thought that the argument as presented would be of service for a future date.

CHAPTER XI.

DREAM OR REALITY[1]

Higher Education in Western Canada—­Duty of the Hour—­University Training Condition of Genuine Leadership—­For Catholics Higher Education means Higher Catholic Education—­The Concerted Action of all Catholics in Western Canada can make a Western Catholic University a Reality.

Never has the world manifested a keener and more general interest in higher education.  The facilities which Governments offer to place within the reach of the mass of the people; the benefits of university education; the enormous sums left by wealthy individuals for the endowment of chairs and the foundation of scholarships; the eagerness with which these offers are grasped by men of all classes; the extraordinary success of the Overseas University in the American Army, which had a student body of 10,000—­these are, without doubt, manifest signs of public opinion on the matter of higher education.  The world-struggle, we all feel, has shifted to another battlefield, and the future in every realm of human activity rests on the mastery of ideas.  In that intellectual conflict, the primary school rooms are the trenches on the first line of defence; the college and university lecture halls stand out as the strategic heights from which the heavy artillery of ideas smashes the way to victory.  Hold the college and university heights to-day, and the hinterland of industry, commerce, science, art and politics will be yours to-morrow.

Catholics throughout our Dominion begin to realize that higher education is the price of leadership.  “Of the many points of contact between the Church and the modern world, education is the point where Catholicism has most to gain by energetic thought and action, and most to lose by an atmosphere of indifference.”  We are waking up from our deep lethargy and beginning to understand that we shall not have our share in the shaping of the destinies of our own Country until our leaders, particularly among the laity, impose themselves upon the nation by their number and their value.  The magnificent campaign of the “Antigonish Casket” in favour of higher education and the exchange of views this point at issue brought from various correspondents, the successful drive in favour of Loyola College of Montreal, the growing influence of the Catholic student bodies in the various universities, the creation of Laval, in Montreal, as a distinct unit from Quebec; the tremendous success this newly born organization met with in its drive for $5,000,000; all these facts indicate concentration of forces in the direction of higher education.  The national