THE FUTURE OF CANADA

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By H. V. HODSON

M. ANDRE SIEGFRIED brings to the task of writing about Canada no greater technical qualifications than a score of men might possess : wide reading, a number of visits to the Dominion between 1898 and 1935, familiarity with the avail- able statistics. But he brings also a unique insight that enables him to penetrate and undeistand the spirit of things and people. He has produced, in consequence, a brilliant and stimulating book on the complex and vital problem of Canada and its future. He shows once more that he under- stands the British genius ; from a deep well of sympathy he draws understanding of the French Canadian genius. If he seems to show less sympathy and understanding towards the genius of the people of the United States, treating them too often in the lump, and neglecting the almost international differences between East and West, North and South, he can plead that this is a book about Canada, not about the States, and that reaction against Americanism in the lump has been and will be the most powerful of all forces in the making, preservation and growth of Canada. (Gratitude is also due to Miss Doris and Mr. H. H. Hemming, who have furnished an excellent, vigorous translation, with only a few verbal lapses.)

Has Canada a destiny as a separate nation, or is she doomed to become—spiritually if not politically—no more than the northern section of North America ? At present, Canada moves in the orbit of two much greater gravitations, the one British, the other American. Her separate existence as a nation (like that of Belgium) is the resultant of opposing forces. " A purely British Canada," writes M. Siegfried, " could never be anything but a colony, and an American Canada could only be a group of States in the Union." The conflict is one between geography and history ; only historical and political causes have prevented the north-and-south lines of force, inherent in the continent's geography, from proving economically and socially irresistible. The tariff and the trans-continental railroads are memorials to the victories of history. But it is ever on the defensive, and in the films and cheap periodicals the forces of geography - have been given a new and deadly weapon of aggression.

" For an American country the Dominion is English, and for an English country, it is American. According to whether one arrives in Canada from the United States or from Ell:. and, one or other of these two impressions is invariably received." I myself, coming into Canada for the first time from the south, was astonished by its unexpected Englishness ; but on a later visit, haVing landed direct at Montreal, I remember being quite taken aback when an American-owned theatre in an Americanised city street, amid North Atherican accents, ended its performance of an American film with " God Save the King." There can be no simple explanation of the life and outlook of a country whose racial make-up is three of Old France to five of the British Isles and two of other parts. The racially British section, though steadily declining in proportion to the rest, has never lost its sense of being a governing people. Its reaction to Americanism varies from the negligible to the fiercely deliberate._ (All the most caustic stories beginning " Have you heard about the American who . " are to be heard in Canadian clubs and drawing- rooms.) The racial ties with Great Britain are reinforced by subtle institutional ties : the British parliamentary system, royal-patroned professional bodies,-, the Aiiglican Church, the

Canada. By Andre Siegfried. (Jonathan Cape: ios. 6d.) banks with their Scottish and English traditions. But, apart from the greater natural increase of the French Canadians and the European immigrants of the West, the British element inevitably grows less British as generations pass and it becomes more distinctly Canadian, and therewith more American. Most of the foreign immigrants are soon assimilated, but as Canadians rather than as British.

What, then, of the French Canadians ? Are they primarily French, or Canadians, or North Americans ? In their tradi- tion is nothing of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution,

nothing of the imperialism of Napoleon, nothing of the decadence of the Second Empire, nothing of the laicism of the Third Republic ; they were as unready to be conscripted to save France as to save England. Their language and culture are

French, but their loyalty is to their own group. If M. Siegfried is right, they are Canadians first, and Canadians second. Con- federation was for them no more than a political expedient, and

for most of them " their instinctive feeling of patriotism is towards their province, not towards Canada as a whole."

They are defenders of the British conneN ion largely because they are colonial-minded rather than Dominion-minded, and because Great Britain appears to them as a guarantor of their provincial and religious rights. Their strength lies in their solidarity, and their solidarity is based on a whole code of life and morals, between which and the American code " no com- promise is possible."

" According to the ethics of French Canadian Catholicism, the individual is obliged tq live within a social framework, encom- passed by a series of rites which punctuate the passage of the days and years. He submits to the effective direction of a spiritual hierarchy, which extols to the faithful the beauty of sacrifice, the value of discipline, and the virtue of family. English Canadian Protestantism, on the other hand, puts the accent on man's moral responsibility to his own conscience, with no need for intervention on the part of a sacramental priesthood. In their (sic) eyes the development of a material civilisation is, in fact if not in doctrine, a form of moral dignity. When the Catholic ideal of renunciation is set aside in this way, the door is open wide to Americanism, which teaches that material progress prevails over spiritual pre- occupations."

" The French Canadian," writes M. Siegfried, "is a peasant. The Americans . . . have only agricultural industrialists."

Not merely racial make-up and degree of urbanisation, but also this contrast in agriculture radically distinguishes the East from the West of Canada. The single-crop, soil-mining system of the prairies is in complete contrast with the peasant cultivation and mixed farming of Quebec, Ontario and the Maritimes. The depression, which bankrupted the West, has posed questions that would have been laughed out of Court in 1928. " Can America live indefinitely without peas- ants ? " asks M. Siegfried. Be that as it may, the West and the wealth it brings when times are good are an essential

part of the Canadian standard of life. And the West depends on export markets, which means depending on Great Britain— in more ways than one. With the money she gets for her wheat, Canada buys in America, where she also sells the products of her timber and power industries. So the triangle is completed. The two gravitations continue to pull upon Canada's destiny. If the imperial gravitation were to weaken, not only would Canada's path be changed, but her internal system of forces might break down. For the French Canadian people, spiritu-

ally compact and biologically strong, can and will resist with fargreater tenacity-than the British group the insidious invasion of Americanism.