o have ever graced Princeton, Cornell,
Oxford. She thinks she can not afford to keep these men. Is it a
matter of money, at all; or of appreciative intelligence? No matter
what the cost, can Canada afford to lose them from her young nationals?

It is a truism that to my knowledge has not a single exception that
Canada has never given the imprimatur of her approval to a writer, to
an inventor, to a scholar, to an artist, till he has gone abroad and
received the stamp of approval outside his own land. By the time Paul
Peel was acclaimed in Paris and Horatio Walker in New York each was
lost to his own land. It is an even wager nine Canadians out of ten do
not know who these men were or for what they were acclaimed. Try it as
an experiment on your first train acquaintance.

You can not read early records of Congress without the most astounding
realization that Washington, Monroe, Jefferson, Adams, big statesmen
and little politicians, voicing solemn convictions or playing to the
gallery--all were deadly in earnest and serious about the business of
building up a nation. They never lost sight of the idea of conserving,
up-building, protecting, extending their country. The national idea is
in Canada so recent that most men have not grasped it. "Build a navy?"
Canada hooted and made the vote a party football. "Canada should have
her own shipyards?" Men look at you! What for? "Panama will reverse
the world conduits of trade." Bah! Hot-air! I have heard these and
similar comments not once but a thousand times.

Americans say of opportunity--"How much can we make of it?" Canadians
say--"How little can we pay for it?" And each takes out of opportunity
exactly the amount of optimism put into it.

So one could go down the list enumerating symptoms, but beneath them
all, it is plain, lies a cause psychological, not physical. It may be
a psychology of discouragement and disparagement from long years of
hardship, but whatever it is, if Canada is to be as big nationally as
she is latitudinally, as great in soul as in area, she must get rid of
this negative thing in her attitude to herself and life. It makes for
solidity, but it also makes for stolidity. Nations do not grow great
by what they leave undone. Psychologists say all mentality divides
itself into two great classes: those giving off negative response to
stimulus; those giving off positive. One class of people stands for
carping criticism; the other, for