Читать книгу The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions онлайн

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He has been called the Parnell of Canada, but these international metaphors are generally calculated to mislead. The most that Parnell ever demanded was Home Rule for Ireland—that small part of Great Britain, that fraction of the Empire. Mr. Bourassa does not only want Home Rule for Quebec. He wants it for Canada; only the Canada he sees thus self-ruling is a Canada permeated by French Canadianism. If Parnell had wanted Home Rule, so that England, Scotland, and Wales might be ruled from Dublin, he would have attained to something of the completeness of Mr. Bourassa's policy. Mr. Bradley, whose book on Canada in the Twentieth Century is as complete as any one book on Canada could be, and as up-to-date as any—allowing for the fact that Canada changes yearly—declared in in it, some years ago, that the French Canadians realised that for them to populate the North-West was a dream to be given up. It may be a dream, but I doubt if it is given up: and the dreams of a population more prolific than any other on the face of the earth may some day become realities. What is against these dreams? The influx of English immigrants? The rush for the land of American farmers? But these are only temporary obstacles. The Americans may go back again. They often do. The English immigrants are largely unmarried young men, and there are no women in the West. They are making ready the land, but the inheritors of it have yet to appear. It is not strange if Mr. Bourassa sees those inheritors among his own people—only it is not yet their time, not for many years yet—not for so many years yet that it seems almost unpractical and absurd to look forward to it. Even such a faith as that which Mr. Bourassa has confessed to in regard to the Eastern provinces—Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick—that 'In fifteen years they will have become French in language and Roman Catholic in faith,' seems highly unpractical. Ontario is not likely to become Roman Catholic any faster than Ulster. But on the other hand it will only increase in its anti-Frenchness and its anti-Roman Catholicism in so far as it is upheld and influenced by Imperialism. Imperialism to Mr. Bourassa is that bogey which goes about linking up all those small non-conforming, hustling, militant and materialistic communities which unaided would come into the Catholic French-Canadian fold. It is that odious system which prevents other nations within the Empire—such as French Canada—from developing along their own natural lines. It is something which easily causes Mr. Bourassa to forget that England and Englishmen—representing a distant sovereignty which keeps the world's peace—have been a boon and a blessing to French Canadians rather than otherwise; and causes him to remember that they may in a moment become an imminent sovereignty—imposing conscription, war, chapels (things that the Ontarian takes to like a duck to water) upon the whole Canadian community. Such impositions would not only strengthen the non-French Canadians, and ruin the natural progress-to-power of the French Canadians; but they would topple down like a house of cards those splendid dreams which might in a French-Canadianised Canada become realities. What dreams? Rome shifted to Montreal for one, and the Vatican gardens of the future sweeping down to the St. Lawrence. The whole vast wealth of the Dominion diverted to the carrying out of those traditions which are neither French nor English but Canadian ... started four hundred years before by the captains and the priests, voyageurs and martyrs, who in an age of unbelief went forth in response to miraculous signs for the furtherance of the glory of God.