s in a wilderness of savages had scattered west as far
as the Rockies, south to California. They knew no law but the law of a
strong right arm and kept peace among the Indians only by a dauntless
courage and rough and ready justice. They could succeed only by a good
trade in furs, and they could obtain a good trade in furs only by
treating the Indians with equity. Every man who plunged into the fur
wilderness took courage in one hand and his life in the other. If he
lost his courage, he lost his life. Indian fray, turbulent rapids,
winter cold took toll of the weak and the feckless. Nature accepts no
excuses. The man who defaulted in manhood was wiped out--sucked down
by the rapids, buried in winter storms, absorbed into the camps of
Indian degenerates. The men who stayed upon their feet had the stamina
of a manhood in them that could not be extinguished. It was a
wilderness edition of that dauntlessness which brought the Loyalists to
Ontario and the French devotees to Quebec. This, too, made for a
dogged, strong, obstinate race. At the time of the fall of French
power at Quebec in 1759 there were about two thousand of these
wilderness hunters in the West. Fifty years later by way of Hudson Bay
came Lord Selkirk's Settlers--Orkneymen and Highlanders, hardy, keen
and dauntless as their native rock-bound isles.

These four classes were the primary first ingredients that went into
the making of Canada's national consciousness and each of the four
classes was the very personification of strength, purpose, courage,
freedom.

III

But Destiny plays us strange tricks. When Quebec fell in 1759, New
France passed under the rule of that English and Protestant race which
she had been fighting for two centuries; and when the American colonies
won their independence twenty years later and the ultra-English
Loyalists trekked in thousands across the boundary to what are now
Montreal and Toronto and Cobourg, there came under one government two
races that had fought each other in raid and counter-raid for two
centuries--alien and antagonistic in religion and speech. It is only
in recent years under the guiding hand of Sir Wilfred Laurier that the
ancient antagonism has been pushed off the boards.

The War of 1812 probably helped Canada's national spirit more than it
hurt it. It tested the French Canadian and found him loyal to the
core; loyal, to be sure, not because he loved England more but rather
because he love