anged.

Some may be surprised at our contention to make an argument in favour
of separate schools out of the very point on which rests the
scaffolding of those who oppose them. They claim that the minority
school principle is the greatest enemy of Canadian Unity. What we
need, they say, is to standardize our schools, and bring all Canadian
children under one system. No genuine "Canadianization" is possible
without this unity of education. The advocates of these ideas are now
at work promoting through the country the "nationalization of schools."
The Conference of Winnipeg, 1919, was the first tangible result of this
movement. A National Bureau of Education--a non-government
institution, at least for the time being; a survey of school text-books
throughout the Provinces, a study of matters affecting the status of
the teaching profession--such are the duties that this National Council
of Education has assumed at its first gathering.

This movement towards Federal control of schools involves the denial
and the eventual suppression of the minority-principle in our system of
Education. This nationalization of Education, we claim, is erroneous
in its principle, anti-constitutional in its operation, and dangerous
in its consequences. Uniformity in education, as a source of
efficiency, is one of the fallacies of our materialistic age. Schools
to be successful have not to be submitted to the same laws of a
commercial or industrial combine. Ethnical and moral values do not
follow the laws of the mart and the stock exchange. If in our
extensive Dominion even a unity of tariff, readily acceptable to the
East and to the West, is Utopian, how much more so would be the unity
of the school system? Education, to be effective, must take the colour
of the environments to meet the needs of the community. The levelling
process would be most detrimental, for uniformity in education is the
seed of decay.

And it is on the plea of making better Canadians that the promoters of
"national schools" are drifting from the very basic principle of our
educational system, from the law and spirit of our Constitution. Our
form of Government, as we all know, is dual. Matters of education are
relevant to the Province. The more the Province will abdicate its
claims, and submit to the growing influence of the Federal powers, the
greater will be the danger of losing the political equilibrium of
Confederation. Unstable equilibrium, once dist