that the people of Canada have not yet realized themselves clearly
enough to recognize or give articulation to a national literature. It
may be that Canada is living her literature rather than writing it. If
Scott had not found appreciation for his articulation of Scottish life
and history in poems and novels, he would not have gone on. In fact,
when Byron eclipsed Scott in public favor as a poet, Scott stopped
writing poetry. It may be that Canada has not become sufficiently
unified--cemented in blood and suffering--to appreciate a literature
that distinctively interprets her life and history. It may be that she
has been swamped by the alien literature of alien lands, for the
writers of English to-day are legion. Or it may be the deeper cause
beneath the dearth of world literature just now--lack of that peace,
that joyous calm, that repose of soul and freedom from distraction,
that permits a creator to give of his best.

One sometimes hears Canadians--particularly in England--accused of
crudity in speech. I confess I like the crudities, the rawness, the
colloquialisms. They smack of the new life in a new land. I should be
sorry if Canadians ever began to Latinize their sentences, to "can"
their speech and pickle it in the vinegar pedantry of the peeved
study-chair critic. Because it is a land of mountain pines and
cataracts and wild winds, I would have their speech smack always of
their soil; and I would bewail the day that Canadians began to measure
their phrases to suit the yard stick of some starveling pedant in a
writer's attic, who had never been nearer reality than his own
starvation. I can see no superiority in the Englishman's
colloquialisms of "runnin'," "playin'," "goin'," to the Canadian's "cut
it out," "get out," "beat it." One is the slovenliness of languor.
The other is the rawness of vigor.

VI

When one comes to consider woman in a nation's life, it is always a
little provoking to find "woman" and "divorce" coupled together; for
there never was a divorce without a man involved as well as a woman.
The marriage tie is not easily dissolved in Canada. Divorce pleas must
go before a committee of the Federal Senate. Without legal fees, it
costs five hundred dollars to obtain a divorce in Canada; with fees,
one thousand dollars; so that Canada's divorce record is 1,530 for
7,800,000 of population in 1913; or one divorce for every 5,000 people.
This seems a laudably low record, and Canada ta