"I've come to the point," said a wholesale hardware man of a Canadian city, "where I won't employ a man if he has a cockney accent. I've tried it hundreds of times, and it has always ended the same way. I have to break a cockney's neck before I can convince him that I know the way I want things done, and they have to be done that way. He is so sure I am 'ownley a demmed ke-lo-neal' that he is lecturing me on how I should do things before he is in my establishment ten minutes. I don't know what it is. It may be that coming suddenly to a land where all men are treated on an equality and not kicked and expected to doff caps in thanks for the insolence, they can't stand the free rein and not go locoed. All I know is--where I'll employ an Irishman, or a Scotchman, or a Yorkshireman, on the jump, I will not employ a cockney. I don't want to commit murder." And that business man voiced the sentiment of multitudes from farm, factory and shop. I'll not forget, myself, the semi-comic episode of rescuing an English woman from destitution and having her correct my Canadian expressions five minutes after I had given her a roof. She had referred to her experience as "jolly rotten"; and I had remarked that strangers sometimes had hard luck because "we Canadians couldn't place them," when I was roundly called to order by a tongue that never in its life audibly articulated an "h." IV Before digging down to the subterranean springs of Canadian loyalty, we must take emphatic cognizance of several facts. Canada, while not a republic, is one of the most democratic nations in the world. Practically every man of political, financial or industrial prominence in Canada to-day came up by the shirt-sleeve route in one generation. If there is an exception to this statement--and I know every part of Canada almost as well as I know my own home--I do not know it. Sifton, Van Horne, MacKenzie, Mann, Laurier, Borden, Foster, the late Sir John Macdonald--all came up from penniless boyhood through their own efforts to what Canadians rate as success. I said "what Canadians rate as success." I did not say to affluence, for Canadians do not rate affluence by itself as success. Laurier, Foster, Sir John Macdonald--each began as a poor man. Sifton began life as a penniless lawyer. Van Horne got his foot on the first rung of the ladder hustling cars for troops in the Civil War. MacKenzie of Canada Northern fame began with a trowel; Dan Mann with an ax in the lumber woods at a period when wages were a dollar and twenty-five cents a day; Laurier with a lawyer's parchment and not a thing else in the world. Foster, the wizard of finance, taught his first finance in a schoolroom. And so one might go on down the list of Canada's great. Unless I am gravely mistaken the richest industrial leader of Ontario began life in a little bake shop, where his wife cooked and he sold the wares; and the richest man in the Canadian West began with a pick in a mine.