Canada -- Foreign relations -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Foreign relations -- Canada
to Canada and been received with marks of loyal regard. Sir Henry Taylor
writes to the Duke of Newcastle—"As to our American possessions I have
long held and often expressed the opinion that they are a sort of
_damnosa hereditas_; and when your Grace and the Prince of Wales were
employing yourselves so successfully in conciliating the colonists I
thought you were drawing closer ties which might better be slackened if
there were any chance of their slipping away altogether." Sixty years
after that another Prince of Wales came to Canada; the ties had not
slackened much in the meantime, though we had had responsible government
all the time and self-government had been widening all these years
(applause).
What are the considerations which make for the unity of the empire...
Every influence that operated in August, 1914, is in full vigor today.
All those spiritual ties, the common flag, the common language and
literature and laws Which we had in August, 1914, we have still. This
is the morrow of the war. We are all exhausted by the strain and labors
of the terrible sacrifice and there is a temptation to disparage what
the war meant to us, but no one who has any imagination or any knowledge
of human nature or has read history with discernment can question that
the result of such a war, fought for such a cause, won by the valor of
citizen soldiers must mean a permanent enrichment of all the basic
qualities of citizenship, and must permanently reinforce the foundations
upon which the commonwealth rests (applause). Those memories of the war
are common to us all. Therefore all we had before the war in the way of
sentiment and spiritual ties are enormously strengthened today. We
have, therefore, the heritage of the past and the common sacrifice of
the present to unite us. More than that we have the common aspirations
of the future (hear, hear).
I know that it is rather the custom to speak of the war now as simply a
great catastrophe and to say that the world is as it was before the war
only worse; but I believe that looking back through the perspective of
the years we shall see that the war was a great turning point in human
history; and does mean a definite break in the old order. The
characteristic of the old order which I believe is passing away, though
it has not passed away and is dying hard, was the aggrandisement of
peoples, nations, in a military sense or in a commercial sense. It was
the nation which was first and everything was for the glory of the
nation and those persons who were more intimately connected with its
government. The new order is for the enlargement of individual life,
and the bettering of the life of the common people of whom Lincoln said
that the Lord must love them since He made so many of them; and this
common ideal by which the British dominions are animated will give us a
new bond of union which will reinforce those historic ties which have
proved their enduring worth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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