“VASSAL” CANADA.

JUST at the moment when the principle of loyalty to the Empire has been triumphantly reaffirmed in the South African elections, a voice arises from Nova Scotia to warn us that Canada’s days as a dominion of the Crown are numbered. It is Dr Archibald Macmechan, professor of English literature in the Dalhousie University, who thus premonishes his fellow citizens in the pages of the “Canadian Historical Review.” Dr Macmechan has no hope. The spiritual subjection of Canada to her great neighbour has gone too far, and “Canada as a vassal state”. He marshals in support of it a long array of facts. These would point out that only an artificial land frontier runs for 3,000 miles between two peoples using the same speech, the same laws, and the same forms of religion; that intercommunication is easy and continual, and intermigration likewise. To these reasons for concluding that political fusion is only a question of time, Dr Macmechan adds others derived from the experience of daily life in the threatened dominion. Canadian newspapers look like American ones, and American magazines crowd the Canadian bookstalls. Canadians no longer play lacrosse, and do play – or watch – baseball. American films monopolise the Canadian cinema. Canadians have acquired the taste for chewing gum. American styles in clothing are followed in Canada. There is no Canadian slang; all new flowers of speech are culled from the tropical luxuriance of the American vernacular. Upon these and other social and economic facts Dr Macmechan founds the unwelcome conclusion that union with the United States is being steadily brought, nearer by means more subtle and irresistible than those of political intention.

Only Canadians can give with authority the reply to Dr Macmechan which his argument seems to us to invite; but we will venture the opinion that his forebodings are groundless, after all. We do not believe that a political union of Englishspeaking North America will ever be cemented with chewing-gum or based upon baseball. The prevalence of American cinema-films cannot be very much greater in Canada than it is here; but we have never heard it referred to as a precursor of our absorption in the US. As for the infection of American slang, it reaches us, too, in a form attenuated by distance, and the common speech of London, Ontario. is only somewhat less free from it than that of London, England. The resemblance between Canadian and American newspapers is not much more marked than the resemblance between French, Italian, and Spanish newspapers; and what does that prove? The facts about commercial penetration, and of Labour organisation, do undoubtedly go deeper; but do they go to the depth of patriotic sentiment and the sense of political independence? Few Canadians, if any, would even discuss the idea; there never was a time when Canadian national feeling ran so strong or so deep as it does now.

The truth is that the near neighbourhood of a national civilisation that is more fully developed, more powerful and more prosperous than is that of Canada – as yet – has exerted its inevitable effects on a people having already so many things in common with their great neighbour. Canada’s illimitable future is before her. She will build up a life characteristic of herself; but then, too, the two peoples will always influence one another, and why not? Each will retain its own loyalties, its own political soul, as each does now. A very great Canadian professor, Goldwin Smith, believed otherwise; but Canada after his death is much more firmly and vigorously Canada than while he lived. The professor of English literature at Dalhousie will long survive, we trust, to see his similar anticipations ever more signally falsified as the years roll on.