roll up their sleeves and get into the fight. There would be a lot of
mud-slinging; but the culprit would go--as not a few have gone in
recent years.

IV

Deeply grounded, then, so deeply that the Canadian is unconscious of
it, put the belief in the economic principle of vested rights! Still
more deeply grounded, put a belief in religious ideals as a working
hypothesis! Does any other factor enter deeply in Canadians' every-day
living? Yes--next to economic beliefs and religious beliefs, I should
put love of outdoor sport as a prime factor in determining Canadian
character.

Professional sport has comparatively little place in Canada, though
professional baseball has gained a firm foothold in the Northwest,
where the American influence is strong, while the International League
reaches over the boundary in the East. But it is the amateur who
enjoys most favor. If a picked team of bank clerks and office hands
and young mechanics in Winnipeg practises up in hockey and comes down
from Winnipeg and licks the life out of a team in Montreal or Ottawa,
or gets licked, the whole population goes hockey mad. This churchly
nation will gamble itself blue in the face with bets and run up gate
receipts to send a professional home sick to bed, and I have known of
employers forgiving youngsters who bet and lost six months' salary in
advance. Montreal will cheer Winnipeg just as wildly when Winnipeg
wins in Montreal, as Winnipeg will cheer Montreal when Montreal wins in
Winnipeg. It is not the winning. It is the playing of clean good
sport that elicits the applause. The same of curling, of football, of
cricket, of rowing, of canoeing, of snowshoeing, of yachting, of
skeeing, of running. When an Indian won the Marathon, he was lionized
almost to his undoing. When hardest frost used to come, I knew a dear
old university professor, who would have considered it sin to touch the
ace of spades, who used to hie him down to the rink with "bessom" and
"stane" and there curl on the ice till his toes almost froze on his
feet; and one Episcopal clergyman used to have hard work holding back
hot words of youthful habit on the golf links; and his people loved him
both because he golfed and because he almost said things, when he
golfed. They would rather have a clergyman who golfed and knew "a cuss
word" when he saw it, than a saint who couldn't wield a club and might
faint at such words as golf elicits.

In one of Canada's best r