CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3015, 27 December 1911, Page 85

CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES.

A Canadian writer,.. Mr Beckles Willson, commenting in the Nineteenth Century and After upon the defeat of ' :Continentalism" in Canada, remarks upoivthe enormous influence if Mr Rudyard Kipling's message to the Canadian people. The message was printed, not as a paragraph, not as a column, but actually filled an entire page in many leading Canadian newspapers. According to Mr Willson, it was read and digested by virtually the whole English-speaking voting population of the Dominion, and was discussed more than any single speech or. pronouncement- by Mr Borden or Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in the. whole course of the campaign. He notes, f'or example, a private letter written by a leading business man at Brandon, Manitoba, at the end of last September:—" Although I am, as you know, a convinced Liberal and a follower and admirer of Sir Wilfrid, and fully intended to vote Liberal, as usual, whan it came to polling-day, I gave my vote for Aikins, the anti-reci-procity 'candidate. It was Rudyard Kipling's 'etter which influenced me, as it must have influenced thousands. We all heard Borden, Foster, and Sifton, but Kipling alone—struck absolutely the right note. We saw how we stood in the eyes of the world as compared with the United States, and we realised that ' ten to one is too heavy odds.' . . . Out here we are great

admirers of Kipling, but only once before in his life, when he wrote the ' Recessional,' has he hit the nail on the head so exactly." What Mr Kipling did was to direct attention to " Canada's soul as a consideration apart from her bank account." and this at once awakened Canadian enthusiasm, because, as Mr Wilson puts it, "The people of the Canadian provinces, separately and jointly, and in different degrees,'have been engaged'in a moral struggle, often fierce, often seemingly hopeless, for them, against the peculiar forces and tendencies which characterise America in the world's eye." Canadians, in fact, French and British alike, have long dreaded lest they, too, should be. in the words of Professor Sedgewick, " trimmed, lopped, and squeezed into the American mould." Across their borders they have also noted the progress of machine, "grinding," as Sir William Butler once put it, "Celt and Saxon, Teuton and Dane, Finn, and Goth, into" the same image and likeness of the inevitable Yankee." During recent years they have also noted the progress of political corruption after the American model within -their midst, and the adoption by their own youth of American standards* of life and conduct and manners. They felt that American civilisation, despite its smartness and outward show, was from every point of view, save the purely material, a lower civilisation than their own. Thev feared lest ,they should be Americanised, and Mr Kipling's message—whether indiscreet or no—focussed this fear upon the proposed reciprocity treaty.