So far scarcely a cloud appears on the horizon of Canada's national
destiny. Like a ship launched roughly from her stays to tempests in
shallow water, she seems to have left tempests and shallow water behind
and to have sailed proudly out to the great deeps. In '37 she settled
whether she would be ruled by special interests, by a plutocracy, by an
oligarchy. In '67 she settled forever what in the United States would
be called "states' rights." That is--she gathered the scattered
members of her fold into one confederation and bound them together not
only with the constitution of the British North America Act, but with
bands of iron and steel in railways that linked Nova Scotia with
British Columbia. By '77 she had met the menace of the American high
tariff, which barred her from markets, and entered on a fiscal system
of her own. By '87 her system of transportation east and west was in
working order and she had begun the subsidizing of steamships and the
search for world markets which have since resulted in a total foreign
trade equal to one-fourth that of the United States. By '97 she was
almost ready for the preferential tariff reduction of from twenty-five
to thirty-three per cent. on British goods which the Laurier government
later introduced, and she had established her right to negotiate
commercial treaties with foreign powers independent of the Mother
Country. By 1907 she was in the very maelstrom of the maddest real
estate boom and immigration flood tide that a sane country could
weather.

In a word, Canada's greatest dangers and difficulties seem to have been
passed. The sea seems calm and the sky fair. In reality, she is close
to the greatest dangers that can threaten a nation--dangers within, not
without; dangers, not physical, but psychological, which are harder to
overcome; dangers of dilution and contamination of national blood,
national grit, national government, national ideals.

These are strong statements! Let us see if facts substantiate them!

Canada's natural increase of population is only one-fourth her incoming
tide of colonists. In a word, put her natural increase at eighty to
one hundred thousand a year, and it is nearer eighty than one hundred
thousand. Her immigration exceeds four hundred thousand. If that
immigration were all British and all American there would be no
problem; for though there are differences in government, both people
have the same national ideal--utter freed