destiny.


II

Go back to the beginning of Canada!

She was not settled by land-seekers. Neither was she peopled by
adventurers seeking gold. The first settlers on the banks of the St.
Lawrence came to plant the Cross and propagate the Faith. True, they
found they could support their missions and extend the Faith by the fur
trade; and their gay adventurers of the fur trade threaded every river
and lake from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia; but, primarily, the
lure that led the French to the St. Lawrence was the lure of a
religious ideal. So of Ontario and the English provinces. Ontario was
first peopled by United Empire Loyalists, who refused to give up their
loyalty to the Crown and left New England and the South, abandoning all
earthly possessions to begin life anew in the backwoods of the Great
Lakes country. The French came pursuing an ideal of religion. The
English came pursuing an ideal of government. We may smile at the
excesses of both devotees--French nuns, who swooned in religious
ecstasy; old English aristocrats, who referred to democracy as "the
black rot plague of the age"; but the fact remains--these colonists
came in unselfish pursuit of ideals; and they gave of their blood and
their brawn and all earthly possessions for those ideals; and it is of
such stuff that the spirit of dauntless nationhood is made. Men who
build temples of their lives for ideals do not cement national mortar
with graft. They build with integrity for eternity, not time. Their
consciousness of an ideal gives them a poise, a concentration, a
stability, a steadiness of purpose, unknown to mad chasers after