An empire the size of Europe setting out on her career of world history
is a phenomenon of vast and deep enough import to stir to national
consciousness the slumbering spirit of any people. Yet when you come
to trace when and where national consciousness awakened, it is like
following a river back from the ocean to its mountain springs. From
the silt borne down on the flood-tide you can guess the fertile plains
watered and far above the fertile plains, regions of eternal snow and
glacial torrent warring turbulently through the adamantine rocks. You
can guess the eternal striving, the forward rush and the throwback that
have carved a way through the solid rocks; but until you have followed
the river to its source and tried to stem its current you can not know.

So of peoples and nations.

Fifty years ago, as far as world affairs were concerned, Japan did not
exist. Came national consciousness, and Japan rose like a star
dominating the Orient. A hundred years ago Germany did not exist.
Came national consciousness welding chaotic principalities into unity,
and the mailed fist of the empire became a menace before which Europe
quailed. So of China with the ferment of freedom leavening the whole.
So of the United States with the Civil War blending into a union the
diversities of a continent. When you come to consider the birth of
national consciousness in Canada, you do not find the germ of an
ambition to dominate, as in Japan and Germany. Nor do you find a fight
for freedom. Canada has always been free--free as the birds of passage
that winged above the canoe of the first voyageur who pointed his craft
up the St. Lawrence for the Pacific; but what you do find from the very
first is a fight for national existence; and when the fight was won,
Canada arose like a wrestler with consciousness of strength for new