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The essential aim of this pamphlet is to stress the value, both to the British Empire and to all the world, of the continuance in despite of wars abroad, of that international peace and good will which now unites all of English-speaking North America. This happy situation has developed imperceptibly during more than a century of history. Time has turned the edge of earlier animosities, and prepared a ground upon which the seeds of bye-gone discords have come up as flowers.

If it is the will and the destiny of the people of the United States to join us in arms in defence of our heritage of freedom, or at least to assist our effort with material aid, we in Canada are glad to have it so. But if this may not be, we take up our burden of the war without complaint, crying out to no one, anxious only to help those overseas whose burden is even greater than ours.

The writer of this pamphlet pleads as his right to speak his thirty-five years on the staff of McGill University of which he is now a Professor Emeritus: his years as a student at the University of Chicago, from which he holds a doctor’s degree: his honorary degrees from Brown and Dartmouth Universities: the indulgent reception by the American public of the forty volumes he has written; and the acquaintanceship he has been privileged to make in twenty years of public lecturing, with American Colleges and American audiences.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University,

October, 1939.

It’s all right, Mr. Roosevelt, about this business of arms and embargo and the shipment of war material to us over here in Canada. I mean, if you can send us over a lot of first class machine guns, that’s fine! We know just where to use them. But if not, send us some shot guns. They’ll do. And if you can’t, perhaps you could ship us over some of those old muskets that we used against one another in the battle of New Orleans, and that have been hanging up on the wall for over a hundred years of peace. Send us them. But if you can’t, that’s all right, because all these Canadian boys are going over to the war, anyway, even if they have nothing to shoot with but Fly-Tox.

But if you can’t send anything, it’s all right! Don’t let that or anything else interfere for a moment with the wonderful association in friendship that has grown up between our country and yours. Let’s keep that, anyway. Whatever happens, don’t let this continent go the way of Central Europe: let nothing and nobody betray us into that. I am sure you grasp just what I mean. Don’t let us let,—no, that’s a poor phrase,—I mean, let no one let,—that is to say, it’s taken a hundred years of good will to place our northern continent where it stands and we mean to keep it there.

I remember a while ago hearing my friend Bob Benchley, speaking at a Canadian-American luncheon in New York, ask where else in the world could you find another case like ours,—three thousand miles of forts and not a single frontier? And none of us could think of any. Somebody suggested China and Japan. But it doesn’t seem the same.

It took a hundred years, more than that, a century and a quarter, to make that frontier as it is,—with long care and effort, most of it unconscious and working by an instinct of good will, and without a plan till it was laid down, till the rugged wilderness of nature and of animosity that once separated us was laid down as flat and even as a bowling green.

A bowling green,—that reminds me! I remember years ago up in my part of the country, an old fellow who kept a summer hotel and laid down a bowling green for his guests in front of it. And he had it rolled, beautifully rolled down into such gentle slopes and inclines, with little hollows that you couldn’t see, that the bowls would go rolling exactly to the right spot, mistakes corrected themselves, and everyone found himself a fine player. And the old man would stand and watch the opponents play and would call to one of them “Well done!” and then “Well done!” to the other, and then “Well done, both of yous!” . . . Well, that’s our frontier, and on it and across it we carry on our friendly and unending game. Don’t let’s spoil it. You can’t get turf like that in a day.

So it’s all right, Mr. Roosevelt. For, you see, we are not asking anything,—we have never taken our relations with you in that way. If we had, we’d long since have been a mere puppet, a shadow. But we are not Manchukuo! No, sir. . . . Just where it is I don’t know but we’re not it anyway, and it sounds just the kind of thing not to be.

You see, we have never taken the Monroe Doctrine that way,—it never meant to us that in case of danger we were to throw our arms round your neck and shout “Save us!” No, sir, don’t be afraid: there isn’t a farmer in Alberta, or a lumberman in the shanties will throw himself round your neck. . . . Perhaps the girls may later on, if you’re good, but that’s different.

And it’s all right, too, about the other aspects of the situation, I mean things like the enlistment of soldiers from your country into ours. . . . If any of the boys are coming over to enlist, and you allow it, there’s a welcome and a place for any of them. If any of the McGruders of Mississippi,—they were Highlanders, weren’t they originally?—want to come over and join the Royal Highlanders in Toronto, we’ve a tartan and sporran and a jorum (one forgets these Highland terms) for each of them. Let them all come. Perhaps they can bring the Virginia Robinsons and Randolphs with them, or “round-heads” from Connecticut still stamped with the image of the Ironsides: or the Lowells or the Cabots from Boston,—but no, I forgot, they don’t talk to anybody—or to nobody that they’d meet in Europe. But if the boys can’t come, it’s too bad, but we’ll understand it. They would if they could, and if not, let them string out along the border and sit and listen to the skirl of the bagpipes and the march of the battalions, all in threes, as the new army of our Dominion goes by.

The marching feet,—tramp! tramp! tramp!—in every city of Canada, and soon in every village and hamlet and on every roadside the tramp, tramp of the marching feet of those who go to war. Tramp, tramp, till the sound of it, the beat of it, stamps into the mind of all the rest of us the sense of duty for each and all of us, or young or old, or rich or poor, that tells us to do something, if not in arms, then with pick, or pen, or shovel in the cause for which they go.

So, in such a cause, and with such an aim, I want to set down here how this, our unwritten American alliance, came about, and what is the background that enables it to stand as it does. It needs no guarantees or scraps of paper or pacts. We leave pacts to Judas Iscariot who first trafficked in one. Our alliance has no more “axis” than the axles of our lumber waggons. But it holds as deep in the soil as a New England elm. Tear it out with the stump-extractor of evil tongues and angered quarrels and you can never set it back.

Let us first turn back the pages of our history. You remember your American Revolution, do you not, that ended with the surrender of—well, never mind, that’s just a little painful; say, it ended with the Peace of 1783. And then it turned out, and has been turning out more and more as kindlier eyes looked at it, in the colours of the sunset, that it wasn’t a revolution at all. No, sir, nothing of the sort!—just another triumph of British freedom on the soil of America. You see, the quarrel was really a family quarrel, as between cousins, a sort of civil war, with all kinds of people good and bad on each side, and ever so many people, the wiser people, on both sides. Because when a war is unjust and brutal and evil the wise man takes a side in it once and for all and never leaves it. But in a friendly family quarrel like the American Revolution the wise man is prepared to say “Well done, both of yous!” And so it was.

The British themselves saw it first. They discovered after the Revolution, as I say, that it was a great triumph for British freedom, and that George Washington was a typical English country gentleman. In fact, they annexed the whole thing, made it part of British school history, called it “manifest destiny”, and recommended it to all other quieter colonies:—Just as a mother, don’t you know, always likes best the bad boy of the family.

And the Loyalists, the refugees who left the States so as to stay under the old flag? Well, that was queerer still. You see, some of them left because of the old flag and some because of other reasons—in fact they had to leave but we won’t talk of it. Anyway, they left and a lot of them went to the Maritime Colonies and the greater bulk of them, perhaps ten thousand, went on past the maritime settlements on up the St. Lawrence,—their pilgrimage, would you believe it, took the best of a year. They wintered in the snows of Sorel,—and in the spring they went on up the river to Lake Ontario. Some of them settled on the river and some all along the lake, and as ever so many of them were from New York State, they had really come back home again. You see, they didn’t exactly know where they were going,—geography was pretty thin then,—and all they knew was that they were striking out to make a home in the wilderness, and it turned out that the wilderness was home.

You remember, Mr. Roosevelt, when you opened up that new Friendship Bridge across the river near Gananoque,—and all the girls here went wild about it,—1938—wasn’t it? Well, that was there, I mean, those were it. Those people on the two sides of the ribbons you cut had been waiting to come across and hug one another again, for a hundred and fifty years.

Now a strange thing was that those loyalists who had come from New York all the way round the St. Lawrence, were joined by another group of loyalists who came across where your bridge is. These were all Highlanders, settled in the backwoods of New York Province, and formed during the war into the King’s Royal New York Regiment. When the war was over they were disbanded and moved with their families to Upper Canada, alongside the river, and a year later five hundred more Highlanders came out from Glengarry, and presently a thousand more. Thus rose our Scottish Settlement of Glengarry; partly from your people and partly from the homeland. For a full hundred years they still spoke, and preached, in the Gaelic. And of their descendants, some of them, as I write these lines, are close beside me here, at drill on the campus of McGill University as a part of the Highland Regiment, the Black Watch of Canada. Their drill floods all the campus with the moving lines of colour of the khaki and the tartans. And in the pauses of their drill they sit in little groups upon the grass, like children in a daisy chain, to listen to a sunburned sergeant read from a manual of Active Service in War.

But I turn back to our history. When all those people, and those who followed in their footsteps in the next few years got settled in Upper Canada, though they called themselves “Loyalists”, they were none the less Americans. They brought with them from New England their Thanksgiving Day Turkey and from New York the “York Shilling” that was our count of money there till yesterday, or at least till I myself remember it there sixty years ago. And we had, too, the “little red school house” framed on the Massachusetts model in a school “section”. I was a “scholar” in one myself. Notice that,—a “scholar”: who ever heard in England such a use of the word? It’s ours and yours exclusively. In the “little red school house” we learned out of the same spellers and readers, practically, as you did: we recited with you William Cullen Bryant’s Prairies, and Longfellow’s Excelsior, and wondered just as you did, where the uncomfortable boy was trying to climb to.

If the plain people of what we now call Ontario look and talk a good deal like the plain people of New York State, at least there’s lots of reason for it.

The other loyalists, I say, stayed in the Maritime Provinces, and made a new one, New Brunswick, all for themselves. But instead of becoming angry enemies to your Republic they turned into a sort of outlying part of New England with Harvard University as the capital of the Maritime Provinces, the Mecca of all its student pilgrims. Thither, when the Maritimes got started in their great export industries,—fish and brains,—went all the gifted students of the provinces. It is only of late years that with great difficulty we’ve been able to coax them away. Even now they’re apt to slip off to Harvard, as boys run away to sea, and later, like the runaway boys, turn up as notable men, college presidents and doctors and divines. They’re strong on divinity. You have to be, in a country as bleak as the Nova Scotia coast.

So that was how our history started and that was the way it kept going on. Quarrels that refused to turn to hate, animosities that broke down into friendship, seeds of dissension sown in a soil that brought them up again as flowers. Such is our history. Are we going to falsify it now?

Let the vanishing feet pass on, and let the armies go, weaponed or weaponless, so that your hearts go with them,—that is all we ask, or that at least is the chief thing we ask. . . . But, by the way, I suppose you couldn’t lend us,—you haven’t got a loose dime, have you, Mr. Roosevelt?—but we’ll come to that presently. And if you haven’t, it’s all right. England will give it to us, and then we’ll lend it back again, do you see, like a little boy buying a present for mother.

So, as I say, our history was like that all along. There was the war of 1812. We can’t get it quite straight now, what it was all about, but it makes great “pictures”. Did you see the one with the White House in it? But what that war was for, we can no more make out now than old Caspar could with his. It was something to do with “pressing” sailors, but it’s all gone now,—“pressed and cleaned” like the rest of our history, as fragrant as old lavender in a cedar chest. As a matter of fact, as in all our conflicts and quarrels, both kinds of people seem to have been on both sides. Why, in the Upper Canada of that day, of its 80,000 inhabitants only 35,000 represented the Loyalists and their children, and 25,000 were “American” settlers who had come in on their own account, and the rest (20,000) had wandered in from the old country. And, per contra, ever so many Americans thought the declaration of war was a policy of madness and the Governor of Massachusetts issued a proclamation (June 26, 1812) for a public fast for a wrong committed “against the nation from which we are descended and which for many generations has been the bulwark of the religion we possess.”

Or take your Civil War! My, didn’t we spring to your help! Yes, sir! on both sides! We fought in the Northern armies, lent money to the South, took in refugees,—they annexed our towns of Cobourg and Old Niagara and have never left,—we supplied hay and oats at a bare cost (or pretty bare: farmers will be farmers) and when it was over we exulted with the North, shed tears with the South, and have glorified Lincoln and the Union along with you, ever since.

Then you remember,—at least I can, ever so well,—the Venezuela boundary dispute about the Essoquibo River that broke into sudden tumult round Xmas of 1895. England very nearly called out the Household Troops (out of the bars) and you almost mobilized the Texas Rangers, only they were moving too fast. And in six months it was all over, and nobody could remember where the Essoquibo River was and they hadn’t known anyway, and the Household Troops went in again for another beer, and the Texas Rangers went on ranging.

So have all our emergencies and quarrels and animosities passed and gone overhead like April showers, or summer thunder, only to clear the air.

You see the underlying reason of all this is the queer intermingling of our history and our population. Those loyalists were only just the beginning of it. All through a century and a half our populations have washed back and forward over the line. Why, if at the present moment you count up all the people born in Canada and still alive, fourteen out of every hundred are living in the United States, a total of 1,250,000 in all. And conversely, 350,000 American born people are living among us. Our Dominion Statistician told your American Statistical Society the other day, when they made him President of it;—(we get jobs like that all the time)—he told them that of the people “of Canadian stock” one-third are living in the United States.

Sometimes the tide rises into a flood in one direction, and then turns to an ebb in the other. Back in the eighties, when the mortgages fluttered down on our farms like snowflakes, there was so great a wave that for every 1,000 added to the native born of Canada there were 726 outgoing emigrants to the United States: not the same individuals, but the same proportion. That was largely the great exodus of the French Canadians moving into New England so steadily and in so large a volume that the Pelletiers and the Dufresnes began to outnumber the Smiths and the McLeans. About 150,000 French Canadians moved across the line between 1875 and 1890, by which date there were 395,000 people in the United States who were French Canadian born, and of these 275,000 in New England. In spite of “repatriation” the French Canadians, by birth or descent, in the United States now number about,—I forget what.

But a few years later, to even up the balance, there came your American invasion of our Northwest. When the farmers of the Kansas prairies saw their farms blowing away northwestward in clouds of dust, they followed after their farms and landed in Alberta. They came in caravans of prairie schooners, or by the new railways with carload lots of furniture, children and household goods,—people of substance moving into the promised land, as the Israelites had moved, or the overland immigrants in the prairie schooners moving on California. Before this exodus only about 500 Americans a year had come into our northwest, but in 1900 there came 15,000, in 1911, 100,000 and 139,000 in the banner year of 1913, in all 600,000. Our official calculation was that the immigrants, at the height of the exodus, brought in money and goods and property to the value of $1,000 per person.

All this interchange of population one might think would have to lead to amalgamation, to the “annexation” of Canada by the United States, or of the United States by Canada. “Annexation” indeed used to be the bogey of our Canadian politics, the turnip on a stick with a candle in its mouth, used to frighten the electors. It is a dead topic now. It seemed odd the other day to read in the papers that one of our most patriotic statesmen, speaking in Toronto, made a passionate appeal for us not only to get into the war but to get into it good and hard, for fear we might be invaded by Nazis and then the United States would have to drive them out and as a result we’d get annexed to the United States. Funny kind of argument wasn’t it! But, you see, away back in the past, there was a time when many of our leading statesmen, in England and over here, were always afraid of Canada getting too friendly with the United States, just as on a respectable farm they don’t like their daughters going round too much with the hired man. You can’t tell what may happen. Well, that was us.

Annexation to the United States! What a strange part that idea, that phrase, has played in our history and how completely it has passed out of it. It has served as a sort of bogey or warning,—just as children are told that the Devil will get them if they’re not good,—or as an invitation out of darkness into light, out of tyranny into freedom, as when Benjamin Franklin came up to Montreal in 1775 expecting to draw down the Canadians as easily as he drew down lightning. But the Canadians, pretty well all French then, weren’t taking any. The United States, or rather, the American Colonies, seemed far too British, too protestant, for their taste. So annexation slept. But in the war of 1812 it was the other way. So many Upper Canadians by that time sympathized with the United States and wanted to join the republic that it has been estimated (see our Canadian Archives Q. 107, p. 236, or else take my word for it) that one-third of the population were on the American side. But as at least one-half of the New England people were on the British side, that only evens things up. That’s the queer way our history’s been conducted all through,—both sides on each side. By which means they were able to keep the war of 1812 going till they got word from Europe that it was over. Luckily they had time while the news was still on the ocean to fight the battle of New Orleans which gave us that moving picture that I mentioned.

So annexation slept again. In any case it didn’t matter much whether it slept or woke during the next generation (1815-45) because by that time the people were migrating out of the British Isles in all directions with ever so many places to go to and all good,—with a choice of the old flag or a new flag or no flag at all,—the States, or to British North America or Australia or New Zealand or the Cannibal Isles. The migration to British North America between 1820 and 1845, apart from an odd year of slump, was anything from 10,000 to 66,000: to the States from 10,000 to 63,000: to the Antipodes (apart from a banner year of 32,000 in 1841) from 1,000 to 15,000. The King of the Cannibal Isles kept no statistics of newcomers. He dealt with them as they came.

Then came (after 1845) the slump caused by free trade, free navigation and free competition, with such a big dose of freedom straight out of Manchester that it was just like the Kingdom of Heaven,—to those who had was given and from those who had not was taken even what they had. Canada, half developed and rickety, went under. “All the prosperity of which Canada is thus robbed,”—it is Lord Elgin, the Governor of 1849, who says this, not me,—“is transplanted to the other side of the line, as if to make Canadians feel more bitterly how much kinder England is to the children who desert her than to those who remain faithful. The conviction that they would be better off if annexed is almost universal among the commercial classes at present.” So there you were! No wonder that the commercial interests, along with a lot of other interests, presently got out at Montreal an Annexation Manifesto (1849) in favour of “friendly and peaceful separation”. We used to keep this wicked document hidden away in our archives, but now that it doesn’t matter we can admit that it was signed by a prime minister and three cabinet ministers of the later Dominion and with most of the best names in the city. We can laugh it off at that. That’s the beauty of our joint history. It all laughs off so easily.

But the Manifesto didn’t matter, because the wind turned round and blew the other way. There came the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 and the Crimean War and wheat at $2.50 a bushel, and then your Civil War, with hay and hogs for everybody to sell till the Upper Canada farmers got so rich that they built brick houses and frame barns (in place of logs), and then put mortgages on them and built more of them,—bigger and brighter,—till they got so far into debt that they have never got out of it; in fact so far into debt, that they had to put on more mortgages still. That’s the way with farmers. In a burst of prosperity, they put on mortgages,—that’s called expansion,—and when debt comes they put on more,—which is called contraction. The two together make the economics of large farming as opposed to small, or subsistence farming. In the latter, subsistence farming, you just live; in the big stuff, you just don’t. But of course there’s no need to tell Americans about that. It’s been part of your economic history as much as ours: only, being a bigger country you were able to do it on a bigger scale, especially in the west where there’s room. I’ve seen it. In one of the big agricultural states of the Mississippi valley I have been driven for half an hour over one and the same mortgage. The grand old estates in Scotland have nothing on us. But I only mention it to show the similarity of our history, and the sympathy of it.

Annexation came back in 1891, but it was just a shadow of itself, not much reality to it. We had all got hard up again in Canada with the premature break of the Manitoba Boom and a lot of our people turned again to Annexation as a sort of old family remedy,—just as farmers turn to Painkiller and Bloodbitters for pretty well everything. It was mostly for election use, anyway, but the cry didn’t work. So instead of joining the States we did the other thing and let down the bars of the northwest and advertised for American farmers, and we got the invasion that I spoke of above. . . . And this time we got such a “boom” in the northwest that the first one of the early eighties sounded like a whisper. While it lasted we had time to bring into the west, as I said, 600,000 of your people, and build half a dozen big cities and run railroads all over Hades in the prairie grass, ready for cities not built yet. That’s the way we do it,—like carpenters putting up a grandstand before the rain comes. There is going to be another big boom in the nineteen forties, and if we work fast we can build a metropolis or two and half a dozen universities while it’s still on.

So after that we never really needed to fall back on Annexation any more, and never have,—except once, more or less in fun, just to make an election. That was back in 1911, which begins to seem like ancient history now, all peace and sunshine and such a thing as a “World War” just a fanciful dream of the imagination. Elections in days like those had none of the grim reality of life and death in which we live now. They were made up of fifty per cent business and fifty per cent humbug. You had, of course, to start an “issue”, and if there was none in sight in a clear sky you had to make one, as an Alberta rain-maker makes rain. So this time the Liberals said to the Conservatives “How about annexation?”—and the Conservatives said, “First rate, which side do you want?”—because both sides had had each. It was like the way in which the “scholars” in the little red school house used to decide on who should have first innings by throwing a baseball bat and matching hands on it. So the Liberals took Annexation and lost out on it.

Looking back on it now after nearly forty years it all seems coloured with the evening light of retrospect. Nor do I remember any great angers over it at the time. One of our great arguments on the platform (I was a Conservative in that election) was to quote a letter of your good Mr. Taft, the President, in which he had spoken of our becoming an “Annex” of the republic. I think he meant it as a compliment, just as one speaks with pride of the expansion of a hotel. But naturally for us “Taft’s letter” became the target of heroic denunciation. We used to carry it round, copies of it, to election meetings and have it on the speaker’s table, beside the water jug, as Exhibit No. 2,—right after the telegrams from all the distinguished people who would not be at the meeting,—a little touch that lends class to a political gathering. It’s not who’s there, that counts, it’s who’s not.

Years after we gave a big dinner to Mr. Taft at the University Club in Montreal, when he had long finished being President and was up here as an “arbitrator” to decide whether the Grand Trunk Railway was worth nothing or less than nothing. In introducing Mr. Taft the Chairman read out from bygone newspapers those old denunciations of Mr. Taft and added “Look at him! The man has the face of a Mephistopheles!” And Mr. Taft, smothered with laughter, admitted that he had.

So what I mean to say is, that’s all that ultimately came of this bogey of Annexation, that frightened two generations in their sleep. It ended in a banquet and a laugh. And now all that’s left of it is that our local societies along the border annex pieces of the United States, the Rotarians of Buffalo annex St. Catherines for a day,—see the Stars and Stripes all over the place, “Welcome Rotarians!” The Girl Guides of Windsor annex Detroit (Union Jacks everywhere and “Welcome Girl Guides”). As I write these lines the American Hotel Men have annexed Montreal in such numbers that we’re short of flags. Indeed, if anyone wants to understand our relations with one another better than history can tell or statistics teach, let him go and stand anywhere along the Niagara-Buffalo frontier at holiday time,—fourth of July or first of July, either one,—they’re all one to us. Here are the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jacks all mixed up together and the tourists pouring back and forward over the International Bridge; immigration men trying in vain to sort them out: Niagara mingling its American and Canadian waters and its honeymoon couples . . . or go to the Detroit-Windsor frontier and move back and forward with the flood of commuters, of Americans sampling ale in Windsor and Canadians sampling lager in Detroit . . . or come here to Montreal and meet the Dartmouth boys playing hockey against McGill . . . or if that sounds too cold, come to Lake Memphremagog in July and go out bass fishing and hook up the International Boundary itself.

But all of such fraternization is only all the more fraternal because we know that we are satisfied on each side of the line to keep our political systems different. Annexation in the old bygone sense has vanished out of the picture. And in the other sense of a union of friendship that needs neither constitution nor compacts, we have it now and mean to keep it. Just once indeed,—last spring, you remember,—it looked almost the other way on, when we nearly annexed your republic, in fact we did annex it (and you with it, Mr. Roosevelt) for three days during the visit of the King and Queen. I believe we had to remind you that we saw them first and wanted them back.

What a wonderful visit it is to look back upon now,—like a break of open sky and sunshine in the gathering clouds. Up and down through Canada we dragged the King and the Queen, by the hand, like children anxious to show our treasures,—the apple blossoms of Annapolis and the peach-bloom of Niagara and the flowers among the ripening wheat of the prairies. “Take this, and this, and this,”—in handfuls and, “if ever England wants anything—“. And now England has sent over, not for the flowers of the gardens or the plains, but for the hard metal, nickel and copper and steel, from the rocks of our northern desolation. These are the grim blossoms that go out as the harvest from Canada, gathered for its army. Under the tramp of the marching feet of those that carry it, our ears can catch the undertone of music, like the subdued refrains of the theatres, half heard, half lost in the other sounds,—can catch the refrain of fifty years ago,—

till it fades and dies on the ear as the footsteps pass into distance.

I spoke of migration. But the shift of population back and forward that binds us most, has not meant the mass movement of any special exodus or influx, but the steady and continued outgoing of individuals, seeking their fortunes back and forward across the line. From this has grown the unity of our professions,—the law that follows the English common law in forty-seven states and in eight provinces,—with two honorable exceptions to remind us of the by-gone claims of France,—the profession of medicine that sends its students and its professors and its practitioners indifferently across a continent,—the engineers, the teachers, the artists, the architects. No one has ever counted, no statistics have ever shown, the volume of this export of brains across the line: or measured up the “unfavorable balance” of any community that dares trade in this with Nova Scotia. But the common experience of those of us whose lot it has been to come and go across the line among the colleges can bear witness to what an incalculable influence it must have had. I speak here of what I know. I “migrated” to the United States, to Chicago, forty years ago, as a wave all by myself, so penurious and friendless that even the thugs wouldn’t murder me. Of such single threads, insignificant in themselves, has our common garment been woven.

To the student, who represents the export of brains, we add the tourist who represents the import of wonder. The habit of leaving home is one of the latest phases of our rapid civilization,—as the wheel spins people fly off from the centrifugal force of it. Arizona marvels at Alberta, Alberta at Arizona. The sound psychological principle of “tourism” is that anywhere is better than home, and if you don’t buy a car you can’t go anywhere and if you do buy a car you must go somewhere. From which springs the enormous economic phenomenon of “tourism” as a part of international trade. Our latest figures show that American visitors crossing the frontier spend in our country nearly $300,000,000 a year, and our return visitors spend about $100,000,000 a year in the States. Who wins out on this, only Professor Quiz of the Radio could tell but at least it means that friendly little signs of “tourists”, “cabins”, and “fresh eggs” voice a welcome from every highway. Even in some lost corner in the broken bush where there is but a falling barn, a tumbled house, and a melancholy hen, a pathetic handmade sign, passes to the whispering corn that rustles in the corn patch the word of hope “tourists”. Better this, than the “keep out”, “keep off”, “military zone” of Europe. Our “demarcation” where the forests still fronts civilization has as its Siegfried Line the sign “Fresh Eggs”.

That brings me, easily enough, to talk as I said above I wished, about money,—you remember,—about that dime? After all, you know, in your country as in ours money talks: and when it doesn’t talk it whispers. So when I ask you about letting us have that loose dime, I am sure you won’t think,—that is, that you would fully understand,—well, let the dime talk.

What I mean is this. In a sense we don’t need any material aid. The war is going to make our fortune. It is an ill wind that blows no one luck and the storms of death and disaster let loose to blow over Europe will cast up on our shores as a part of its wreckage a golden harvest of opportunity, a marvellous development of our latent resources. Thus have the sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America. Bygone tyranny sent you the Pilgrim Fathers. Scotland sent you its Highlanders after the Forty-Five. Famine in Ireland gave New York its police force and hard times in Scandinavia redeemed themselves in Minnesota. Even Germany weeded out for you its best, its refugee Karl Schurzes and its Joseph Pulitzers. Every European cycle of hard times, famine or depression has washed its waves of newcomers to our plains and forests, and raised up in our sunshine a newer generation of hope that would have faded in the European shadow.

Now shall come the greatest of all, the vast migration out of Europe when this war as yet unnamed shall end. And this is ours first of all, this is Canada’s. We can and will take in half a million British a year, and still feel our country empty for a generation yet. French too, if they will come: but scarcely likely: once back on the leafy boulevards with a vin rouge and a fifth edition of an evening paper, they stay there till the next war. They ask no other consommation that just to get back to their “consommation”.

But the British! Once the example was made of evacuating the children out of London the pace was set. Children who started life by “evacuating”, will migrate all over the empire. What’s the Atlantic to a family that has been all the way to Devon?

But long before the tide, comes the ground swell: and that will be in the call for our resources,—men and material, matter and metal to pass over for our defence on the European front. This, in spite of taxes, in spite of disruptions and dislocations, in spite of the inevitable but brief post-war slump, will make the material future of our country, as the Napoleonic War made yours. We can’t help it. We’re going to be just as modest about it as we can. But it’s there. And, of course, if you people like to come in on it, why there’s lots for all of us. But if not, it’s all right anyway.

Take first our gold. From being nothing and nobody in the gold business fifty years ago we are now the world’s second in it, and if you count in the other stuff that comes out with the gold, we are the world’s first. Just before the Great War (1911), the world had a total gold stock in hand of about $10,000,000,000 (meaning by a dollar the twentieth part of an ounce), and a yearly production of $462,000,000. Canada only produced $9,000,000 and only held a negligible stock in its banks for glory’s sake. It coined no gold. Most people living in Canada never saw a gold coin. There had been the British Columbia mines and then the Klondyke (1898), but their glory passed. Then came the discovery of gold all round Hudson’s Bay,—God’s desolation that shore had seemed,—and changed all the face of our country. By the close of the Great War Canada produced (1919) $15,000,000 of a world’s output of $350,000,000: and just before the fall of the gold standard altered the calculation from hard money to soft paper (1931) Canada produced $58,000,000 of a world’s total of $460,000,000. Now, reckoning the ounce of gold at 35 paper dollars, Canada in the last fully reported year produced $165,000,000 worth of gold.

So that’s our interest in gold: and as our government buys all the output of the Canadian mines in terms of U.S. paper, the fall of our currency,—now at 10% discount,—doesn’t affect this part of the economic problem. . . .

Now every time that war comes back to the world gold comes back to its own. When the war is over, the economists begin to explain, as regularly as a chorus of frogs at sunset, that the world doesn’t need gold. They say that everything that gold does for commerce could be done without it; that as a measure of value you can hardly rely on it from one century to another. At the time of the Norman Conquest a dollar and a half in gold would buy a cow! Where is that cow now? When King Richard III (not mechanized) shouted, “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” he could have had a good one for five dollars. And now his kingdom is mortgaged for forty billions, and carries it easily. . . . That sort of economics worries the business world about as much as the astronomers do when they tell us that the sun is losing time,—half a second every thousand years,—and that the north pole star has shifted twenty minutes, or is it seconds?, since the Egyptians looked at it. The economists told us after the last war that gold was as “antiquated as the stage coach”, that instead of it we could use “index numbers” and “ratios” and “curves of demand and supply”. But with war, back comes gold as the only means of payment for people too ignorant or stubborn to accept a couple of curves in return for army mules or crude oil. A Turk won’t take an Index Number and will look a gift ratio in the mouth.

So when gold comes back all the war nations want it and must have it, and all the nations that have mines must make the best of them. If one price (in the paper dollars of the minute) won’t get the gold out of the mines, then the price in paper dollars has got to go up. The thing is as logical as a hydraulic pump. In the old days of free coinage the pump worked of itself: you dug up a dollar ($20.67 per oz.) and you got a dollar,—a stamped one with a milled edge, but really just what you dug up. But it comes to much the same thing now: if there’s need enough for gold the paper price has got to go up till the gold is forthcoming.

But here is the oddness of it. Economically gold is in reverse gear. In hard times, with low wages and low cost for materials and powers, gold beats out its momentary paper price and mining flourishes best when everything else flourishes worst. This at first sight looks like “Public Enemy No. 1”, but it isn’t. In fact it’s more likely the other way; it acts like the big flywheel in a machine that helps it to run when the running is hard, and helps slack it up when it needs it. “Compensatory action” is the engineer’s phrase, isn’t it? If not, they can have it.

So, inevitably, the first effect of war is to raise all prices of labour and materials and machinery, and for the moment knock the profit out of mining. Indeed the very anticipation of this is enough to knock down the stock exchange valuation of the mining shares as it has done right now. But you can no more hold them down for good than you can sit on a safety valve. The gold is needed, the paper price rises, and up they come! This is happening right now, as easy to predict as sunshine in California. Any one who wants to, can make a lot of money out of it. Only be sure to pick the right mines. There are three kinds in Canada,—established mines, prospective mines and flapdoodle. The established mines are the ones that are actually producing gold, lots of it, with lots more in sight (that means, technically, gold that you don’t see) and in some of them gold is piled up as in the Egyptian pyramids of the Rameses family, so much of it that the directors can hand down a dividend off the shelf as they hand down raisins in a country store, unless they fall asleep and forget to.

By the prospective mines I mean the ones that later are going to be, or were going to be, but for the war, established mines. The gold is there for certain, and, apart from changes of transport and conditions and taxes and charges,—prospective mines would have turned into established mines as properly as seeds turn into pumpkins. But war changes a lot of things. . . .

The flapdoodle mines outnumber the others as the blacks outnumber the whites in Barbadoes. Some of them are just a few stakes in the ground, or a claim, or a hole, or a hope or a false alarm. Some of them, not a doubt of it, would have turned into Eldorados of profit. And on this basis the flapdoodle mines have given us, in peace time, a cheerful element of chance in a monotonous world, too prim to allow sweepstakes and without enough time to play Italian loto or French dominos: a little element of northern adventure in a dull routine of work, with a dime sent out to seek an Elderado. Here’s to them and good-bye! They have sprung up like little flowers in their northern wilderness, but with the hot blast of war they perish, as the flowers do, in their own bush fires. But with peace again, and with the second growth of underbrush rising anew in the burnt forest, the flapdoodle mines, a new crop, will spring to life again, and their life go on as before.

Such is the gold stake in Canada. You Americans might care to come in on it. It’s better than sitting round in Oklahoma arguing on neutrality. But if not, that’s all right, you don’t mind my talking of it.

But gold is only the minor part of our mineral resources. That same rim of rocks that encircles the desolate shores of the James and Hudson’s Bays, is one vast treasure house of the world’s metals,—iron, copper, cobalt, nickel, lead,—and metals whose strange names and magic properties are known only to those whose business it is to forge the mechanisms of war. Our nickel represents 80 per cent. of the world’s supply. Till now 95 per cent. of it went into the arts of peace where its matchless property of hardening other metals puts it beyond competition. But in war the God Mars will claim his own.

But since we have started talking about this low business of gold and money and money getting, let us go a little further with it and recall how much our mutual trade means to each of us. The total of it in the last reported year ran to $900,000,000: but, as the Scotch say, never mind about the three cents. In fact, never mind about the figures at all. I may have got them all wrong: when I say millions, perhaps it was billions. I always feel that figures merely clutter up an argument. So instead of quoting them all in detail here I have put them into a table in the back of the pamphlet. People with statistical minds need just read the table without reading the pamphlet, and people without statistical minds can read the pamphlet and skip the table, and people with really bright intelligence needn’t read either,—just read the title and see it all in a flash.

But for those who do read the table,—please don’t add and subtract the columns to get at the “balance of trade”, to see who is cheating who. Of all the fool doctrines that have obscured the commercial outlook of mankind and injured peace and goodwill among the nations the balance of trade doctrine is the worst. What does it matter who sells and who buys as long as both are satisfied? If I buy a dozen eggs from my grocer he has, I admit, the balance of trade, but after all I have the eggs. But according to this fool doctrine the grocer has outdone me by thirty-five cents. Over those points statesmen on your side of the line and statesmen on our side of the line have shouted denunciation for generations. We had the “balance” on you during the Civil War period and cheated you out of so much that you had to shut down on trade with us and terminate the Reciprocity Treaty. Just now and for some years past you’ve been cheating us regularly every year (see the table) out of about fifty million dollars (or billion): in short we would be absolutely on the rocks if we hadn’t been able to turn round and cheat the British (who of course are easy marks) out of still larger amounts. The British, in fact, are such nuts, commercially, that they’ve been running an unfavorable balance of trade for nearly a hundred years and have never caught on to it. Don’t whisper it to them, or they might wake up.

The so-called unfavorable balance may mean glorious things for a nation. When this war ends, if there should ensue, as I am sure there will, a period of development for Canada such as few countries ever saw, a flood of immigration, a mass import of machinery and a vast development of natural resources,—then the balance of trade will be utterly and completely unfavorable, year after year, and the more rapid the development the heavier the adverse balance. The infancy of a nation spells an adverse balance, from the efforts made on its behalf: just as human infancy means an adverse balance of care and kisses. And if a nation turns old, so old that its efforts end, and it sits still and lives on its investments abroad, its feet in warm water and its gruel at its side,—then that again leaves the adverse balance, for the gruel. Thus in the life of trade as in the life of man, do youth and age contrast, and age presents its sorry parody of a second childhood.

So in this new period, first of our war and then of our rising industrial development and power, let the balance fall so heavy in the scale that it kicks the beam. Such a balance is measured visibly to the eyes, by its actuality of car loads of machinery and material, and is reflected from that into terms of money. But the goods are the substance, the money just the moonshine in the water. When you lend us money and we import material what has happened really is that you have lent us the material; and when we pay you interest, that also, at one remove, takes the form of handing over goods.

So that brings me, Mr. Roosevelt, to that question I asked away up above, whether you have a loose dime? You may have forgotten it but I’ve been thinking of it all through. If you haven’t got it, why that’s all right. But if you have, what about lending it to us? I needn’t talk to you about our credit and how fine it is because there’s a table in the back of this pamphlet that proves it. If you’ll look at it you’ll see that our credit is just wonderful, except of course in Alberta where they’ve got it a little too much socialized. But you know what they’re like in the west,—big-hearted,—a sort of effect of the big open spaces,—well, never mind them: we’ll pay their share.

Now if you were to ask me how much, I would say that depends altogether on what you have. We’ll take all you’ve got, but beyond that we don’t want to go. And when I say send us over money, I don’t mean, of necessity, send it over to buy the kind of bonds in the table I spoke of. We have a line of common stocks that we are showing this winter that I think we can absolutely “guarantee”,—as they say of the fresh eggs in our Bon Secours Market here. I hate to come down from the high level of this discussion to the low ground of political economy, but I know that I don’t need to tell Americans how beautiful is a dividend that is independent of the currency it’s paid in because if the currency goes down the dividend goes up. Our money has fallen, as compared with yours, by ten per cent: as a matter of fact all currencies are falling, like snowflakes coming down together, but some a little faster than the rest. Our snowflakes are wet and heavy just now with the gathering tears of war and fall a little bit the faster for it; but we like them none the less for that: and soon the gathered warmth of national effort, peace and victory shall float them up in the sunshine. . . .

But no,—never mind all that. It’s all right Mr. Roosevelt. If your people want to help and lend a hand or lend a dime,—why that’s fine! But if they can’t, it’s all right, we’ll manage. We’ve known hard years from our pioneer days down, hard times and mortgages, and the stress of war,—and never yet broken faith for a day. We’ll go down deep and deeper into our pockets till we turn them inside out into emptiness. Who could fail to do it, with the tramp of the marching feet in our streets to remind us that there are higher things than money, and worse things than poverty? It’s all right, Mr. Roosevelt.

So let me get back again from my discussion of money and commerce, to where I started from, the thesis that nothing that is to happen in Europe must disturb the peace and good will that prevails in North America. It has been fashioned in a mould that once broken can never be reset.

Those of us who study the past often think of the British people as the fortunate children of history; free from invasion for close upon a thousand years; their institutions struck deep into soil, ancient as the elms and oaks of their countryside: antiquity preserved in a hundred quaint and venerable forms, time’s chain upon the present; freedom so long established that it has bred a kindly tolerance that knows no cruelty: that merely touches crime upon the shoulder and says, “Come along with me”: lends a soap box to a communist to speak from: and fights and dies without hatred, calling its enemy “Fritz”. “That was a fine shot,”—so said the other day a British Navy Captain before going down with his torpedoed ship, and, saying it, added another line to the golden page.

This same happy destiny, on a still larger scale, of an uninvaded land and an undisturbed peace, is offered to us in North America,—as seen in the broad view of history, where a generation is but a day. Shaded and vexed as it is by fierce industrial conflict, it still has moved forward towards enduring peace. The light fights against the darkness. Already the twilight of the dawn is touched with the rising sun.

Over Great Britain for the moment a dark shadow has fallen. No one who knows the worth of the British people can doubt that it will pass. Such a people cannot die.

But when the shadow passes, they must not look across a clearer ocean to see that it has fallen over us. They must see that the broad daylight of peace and good will which came to us in America from the sunrise out of their islands, has been unshadowed and unvexed, and shall so pass to the noon-day of a larger future.

A series of short accounts of current international topics written by expert historians, economists, lawyers, and scientists. Average length 32 pages, price 10c. each.

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.

[The end of All Right, Mr. Roosevelt (Canada and the United States) by Stephen Leacock]