BRITISH IGNORANCE OF CANADA [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—I am not surprised at your Canadian contributor's bewilderment at discovering the average English attitude
towards Canada. " Complete absent-mindedness " I think best describes it as regards geography, customs, and above all, history. The longer Mr. Calvin studies it the more bewil- dered he will be—I am certain. His suggestion that the know- ledge of British Canadian history would be encouraged by a series of volumes similar to Parkman's French Canadian studies, even if there were any analogy between such widely different scenes, is at the best ingenuous. (Who, alas ! now reads or remembers Parkman ?) • For within recent years a great many histories of Canada have been published or circulated in England—written by the best Canadian historians or by English writers generally selected for their special qualifica- tions, and to all of which The Spectator and contemporaries have given their approval and good wishes. A circulation limited to the small minority of a few thousand readers interested in Empire history. The average educated English- man has not the faintest notion that British Canada was founded by 50,000 American loyalists driven penniless from their homes for their support in arms or sympathy with the British cause in 1775-82. He imagines that it was gradually settled, like the Antipodes and S.A. colonies, from Great Britain Nor does he know how Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester) in 1775-6 saved Canada by his defence of Quebec from becoming an American State. Still more, not one Englishman in 500 knows anything of those three years of bitter fighting in 1812-15, when half a dozen British regiments and a few Canadian militia battalions held the invading armies of the United States at bay till relieved by Wellington's Peninsula veterans in 1814.
The invariable apology for ignorance of these Imperially epoch-making events is that they are merely Canadian history 1 As if our loss of all footing in the Western Continent was historically a mere local affair ! For nearly half a century, as an Englishman, I have been in contact with this strange mental attitude of the most colonizing nation in the world toward those fractions of their race that have made them so— particularly towards Canada, by _fiar the greatest of her off- spring I am still wondering ! And _shall die wondering. So will your puzzled Canadian correspondent. As to the ordi- nary physical and social misconceptions of Canada that is an old joke, and will be regtdarly replenished by new jokes till time is no more or till aeroplanes have possibly altered the whole situation. Finally, take our educators, what, propor tion -of a public school staff knows even these bare facts 1
• Possibly 20 per cent. A college common-room perhaps the same ! Of average educated Englishmen less than 1 per cent., much less! I could relate instances of this " absent- mindedness " in high 'quarters which would astonish, let us 'say, the faculty of the University of Toronto 1—Yours, &c.,
A. G. BRADLEY,
Hon. Vice-President, Royal United Empire Association of Canada.
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