all the equipment they need and all the funds that ensure their being carried on in the highest state of efficiency. These schools catch the children of the immigrants and manufacture them into citizens with Anglo-Saxon democratic ideals. The people themselves provide the churches. I was surprised during my tour in Canada to find how many churches there are, and how fine are the church buildings even in cities that cover what twenty years ago was virgin prairie. The Canadians are fully alive to the part played by religion in the development of nationhood and civilisation. The churches catch the immigrants, especially the bright young fellows and young women who are settling in the Dominion. They are not only spiritual hearths, but they are social centres, and nothing is more needful than social centres of the right kind in a new country with a rapidly flowing-in population. It is in the churches that the ideals are held up and kept alive which will save Canadian nationality from being materialised in its cradle. There is a possibility that the very richness of the resources of Canada, the variety and greatness of the opportunities it presents for getting on in the material sense, may lead to a coarsening of the national fibre which would prejudice the whole future of Canada. Canadians must be made to realise that a nation, like an individual, “lives not by bread alone,” that it has a soul to be saved as well as a body to be fed. Canada must be preserved from the national tragedy of growing to be a giant in bulk with the strength of a giant—but a giant without a soul.

THE MAKING OF MODERN CANADA

Though Canada, as a country explored and occupied by white men, is more than three centuries old, it is only within the last half century that its possibilities have begun to be realised even by its own settlers. There are reasons to explain this tardy awakening to the significance of the country. During the French occupation, which was decided on that dark night of 1759 when Wolfe’s army scaled the Heights of Abraham at Quebec and sent its crashing volleys into the regiments of Montcalm, Canada was as badly governed as any dependency of a Western nation has ever been. So far from encouraging colonisation and laying the foundation of a French nation on American soil, the French Government of Canada did everything, both positively and negatively, to strangle the child in its cradle. The France of Louis XV. especially did worse than neglect Canada. It sent to Quebec and Montreal men who were not merely incompetent, but who ruthlessly pillaged the Canadians by every legal and illegal means. The story told by Parkman and other recent historians who have examined the contemporary historical material of the way in which, with the connivance of the Quebec Government, the people were almost flayed alive by the malpractices of agents and contractors, is unparalleled in the history of wholesale robbery and corruption. The Verres of Cicero’s impeachment was a heaven-sent benefactor of the Sicilians compared with the Canadian Intendant of Finances, Bigot. The Canadian farmers had not only no encouragement to wring its riches from the soil, but they were punished for their success. They were made to pay over and over and over again for everything that was necessary to agriculture in order that the Governor-General, the Intendant, and their swarm of male and female satellites might strut as in a miniature Versailles, mimicking alike the manners and the morals of Versailles. The French Colonials fought well, in spite of all they suffered from the French Government, for the French dominion of Canada, but when, after the capitulation and the Treaty of Peace, the horde of ruffianly officials were sent back to France, they soon reconciled themselves to the British Government. They found that the alien Government was at least a Government and not a systematised official brigandage, and they settled down to their farming and to the enjoyment of their legal parochial self-government and of their complete liberty for their Roman Catholic worship. The French Canadians to-day number two millions, mostly concentrated in the Province of Quebec, though there is an increasing movement westward of the young French-speaking Canadians who have had their appetites whetted by the stories of fortunes to be made in the Prairie Provinces. The old folk at home and the Roman Catholic parochial clergy look askance at this movement of population, as they do at the increasing proportion of British and other non-French settlers in the Province. It is useless for them to fight against it. Quebec Province contrives to combine the most intense conservatism with regard to religion, language, methods of farming and manner of life with political Liberalism of a peculiar kind. The French claim that they are the real Canadians. “We were here before you,” they say to the English. They are proud of the fact that a French Canadian, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, was Prime Minister of the Dominion for fourteen years, and that during his term of office the country sprang forward by leaps and bounds. They are the backbone of the Liberal Party of the Dominion, they are Imperialists of the Imperialists, and yet at the same time they are Home Rulers of the Home Rulers. A saying of a French Canadian has been often quoted, that “The last rifle fired in defence of the British dominion in Canada will be fired by a French Canadian,” and yet it is the French Canadian Liberals who have made it an article of their political creed that the future Canadian Navy shall be a Canadian Navy and not an integral part of the British Navy; that is, that it shall be built, manned, and be under the control of Canada and not be regarded as merged in the ships of and directly controlled by the British Admiralty. By a curious reversion of position, Liberalism in Quebec Province means Provincial Home Rule carried to the extreme limit, while Liberalism in the Prairie Provinces means the maintenance of Dominion control of the Provincial land tax, and Prairie Province Conservatism means Provincial control of land tax raised in the Province.