ideals. It is the other type that gives one pause.


V

Well--what is Canada going to do about it? Bar them out! Never! She
needs these raw brawny Vandals and Goths of alien lands as much as they
need Canada. She needs their hardy virility. They are the crude
material of which she must manufacture a manhood that is not sissified,
and one must never forget that some of the most honored names in the
United States are from these very races. One of the greatest
mathematicians in the United States, the greatest copper miners, the
richest store keepers, one of the most powerful manufacturers--these
sprang from the very races that give Canada pause to-day.

It is on the school rather than on the church that Canada must depend
for the nationalizing of these alien races. Nearly all the colonists
from the south of Europe have brought their church with them. In one
foreign church of North Winnipeg is a congregation of four thousand,
and certainly, in the case of the Doukhobors, the influence of the
foreign priest has not been for the good of Canada. But none of these
races has brought with them a school system, and that throws on the
public school system of Canada the burden of preserving national ideals
for the future. Will the schools prove equal to it? I wish I could
answer unequivocally "yes"; for I recall some beautiful episodes of
boys and girls--too immature to realize the importance of their
work--"baching" it in prairie shanties, teaching at forty dollars a
month; amid the isolation of Doukhobor and Galician and Ruthenian
settlement preserving Canada's national ideals for the future; little
classes of foreigners in the schools of North Winnipeg reading lessons