The ceremony on Vimy Ridge on Sunday united three peoples,
the,British,- the French and the Canadian, between two of which the third has long stood as an enduring link already, for French-speaking CanadialiS from Quebec share eternal honour with their English- speaking comrades • from other provinces in the great memorial erected on the ridge which the Canadian forces under Byng wrested from the Germans in 1917.
The King's speech, with its impressive close-:---" In the spirit of thankfulness for their example, of reverence for their devotion, and of pride in their comradeship I unveil this memorial to Canada's dead "-was worthy even of so great an occasion. In suggesting that it would suffer nothing by comparison with Pericles' funeral oration Sir John Marriott is claiming far more for it than King Edward would dream of doing. He Was delivering neither a Periclean oration nor a Gettysburg speech, Those great utterances had their individual qualities, and so had this. It is enough to say of each of them that it met the need of the occasion to the full. The King, in showing himself so simple, so human and so moving where it would have been so easy to be merely con- ventional, planted his words deep in the hearts not only of the thousands of Canadians gathered round the memorial he was dedicating on what is now for ever Canadian soil, but also of the millions of English-speaking listeners throughout the Empire.
