Phase of Expansion
Prospect of Canada. By Ernest Watkins. (Seeker & Warburg. 21s.)
ONCE I was praising Venice, a city I love as much as any on earth, to a Venetian. He looked at me with a mixture of pleasure and irritation. 'But,' he said, it is like living in a museum.' Mr. Ernest Watkins thinks that Englishmen are now becoming 'custodians of a museum, and even our right to alter or discard the exhibits is atrophying.' Obviously he is overstating his case; but there is some- thing in it. Put into more sober and civil service language, he meant that it is a long time since this country was in a phase of expansion; all our political and wordly skill, which is considerable, is spent on the problems of a society already in the crude sense restricting itself. These problems can be intricate and deep, and we have become very deft at solving them; good solutions to these problems of a stable, restricted society produce a degree of concern for individual human beings which is very rare in man's brutal history. This was true of Venice in its decline: it is even more true today of this country, Scandinavia, Holland: it is becoming true in the rest of the Western world, including America. The collective psychology of the whole western world is restricted, defensive, careful. This has many advantages. For the anonymous individual citizen, our country and Scandinavia today are probably more considerate homes than any. that have so far existed on earth. But, of course, we pay a price; and to a good many temperaments, such as Mr. Watkins's, it often seems too heavy a price. That is why Canada is beginning to become a symbol of—whatever you like—hope, opportunity, recklessness, expansion, untidiness. For Canada, quite genuinely and quite alone in the west, has its expanding phase before it, here and now. In the next thihy years it seems bound to zoom (and creak and sometimes bump) much as the United States did between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. Canada happens to possess nearly every resource that a major industrial state requires; in natural equipment it is better endowed than the United States and at least as well as Russia ; it only lacks people—and perhaps time (it is much more precarious becoming a major industrial state now than it was in 1860).
With all these qualifications made, it is more likely than not that Canada will be one of the most powerful nations in the world by the year 2000. Such a prospect of change and growth is 'one that our great-grandfathers knew in this country, but that we have almost forgotten: that is why Canada is taking hold of our imaginations. Mr. Watkins thoroughly luxuriates in the prospect of a nation on the up-and-up, a Beaverbrook society rather than a Venetian one; and Beaverbrook (it is fitting that the large hotel in Fredericton should be named after him) is the mascot of this book. It is dis- respectful, exultant, ingenious, informed, and a little cranky. A good deal of it is concerned with economic facts and speculations, and these are presented with as much sparkle (and sound as reason- able) as in any similar book I know. Mr. Watkins is adept at making his facts more acceptable by suddenly letting one of the bees in his bonnet buzz. He hates Toronto; he would like to die in Vancouver; he has a mild passion for Saskatoon ; he has a pet scheme for improving the climate by diking off the neck of Hudson's Bay, and raising the temperature of the resulting' lake by means of atomic piles. Any visitor to Canada ought to read his book, and it would do most of us good, when we are handling the delicate complex articulations of our own stable society, to have a look at tasks which are not delicate at all. There is one gap which Mr. Watkins has left: he was moving so fast that he had no wind left to mention the arts and sciences. Actually, Canadian science, as one would expect in a country rapidly industrialising itself, is growing very fast; it is suitable that some of Rutherford's most fundamental work was done at McGill. There are also some good Canadian writers, and by all the rules should be more as the country comes nearer the peak of its pdwer. At present it possesses a most promising young novelist, a French Canadian, Roger Lemelin, who has shown what in human terms the industrialisa- tion of his native province means. If Lemelin were English or metropolitan French, we should make a fuss of him. c. P. SNOW
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