"I've come to the point," said a wholesale hardware man of a Canadian
city, "where I won't employ a man if he has a cockney accent. I've
tried it hundreds of times, and it has always ended the same way. I
have to break a cockney's neck before I can convince him that I know
the way I want things done, and they have to be done that way. He is
so sure I am 'ownley a demmed ke-lo-neal' that he is lecturing me on
how I should do things before he is in my establishment ten minutes. I
don't know what it is. It may be that coming suddenly to a land where
all men are treated on an equality and not kicked and expected to doff
caps in thanks for the insolence, they can't stand the free rein and
not go locoed. All I know is--where I'll employ an Irishman, or a
Scotchman, or a Yorkshireman, on the jump, I will not employ a cockney.
I don't want to commit murder."

And that business man voiced the sentiment of multitudes from farm,
factory and shop. I'll not forget, myself, the semi-comic episode of
rescuing an English woman from destitution and having her correct my
Canadian expressions five minutes after I had given her a roof. She
had referred to her experience as "jolly rotten"; and I had remarked
that strangers sometimes had hard luck because "we Canadians couldn't
place them," when I was roundly called to order by a tongue that never
in its life audibly articulated an "h."


IV

Before digging down to the subterranean springs of Canadian loyalty, we
must take emphatic cognizance of several facts. Canada, while not a
republic, is one of the most democratic nations in the world.