ake the world safe for the kind of democracy of which we consider
ourselves a fair sample; created a small army of millionaires and had
bestowed upon us about an equal number of knighthoods as well as a number
of peerages, and four years ago petitioned the King through Parliament to
abolish the practice; gave a first mortgage on the country to one great
transcontinental railway, and a second and a third to two more which we
have since nationalized into government ownership because the roads were
bankrupt for the present and built for the future, which is yet a long
way off; developed a cycle of quite remarkable big industries and
federalized banks which a large element of our heterogeneous democracy
now consider a menace to the nation; and on the prairies which, shortly
after Confederation, we bought for a few millions sterling from the
Hudson's Bay Company, a Liberal Government, never contemplated by the
Fathers of Confederation, carved out two new great Provinces which for
ten years have tried to kill the Tory Party which gave the Northwest its
birth, all Liberalism that does not go back to the furrow, and aims to
abolish even the moderately successful economic system by which we have
come to our present state of comparative prosperity.

If that is the kind of thing that Stead meant by "every nation going to
the devil in its own way" it must be conceded that we have lost no time
over the going. We are among the forward nations, even though we are
less radical than Australia. No young nation ever accomplished visibly
and materially so much in so brief a period. We had the enormous
scientific resources of the 20th century to give us momentum. Perhaps we
were a little too fast on the down grade. We still take some inspiration
from looking at the map to reflect that no other part of the British
Empire occupies so strategic a position as Canada. We note that Canada
is not only the natural interpreter between Britain and the United
States--which it took some of our far-seeing statesmen a long while to
discover--but that we are also a transformer between the power-house at
Downing Street and the one at Tokio; that we are fair on the highway of
traffic and travel between London and Yokohama; that we have room within
a reasonable time for as many people as are now living in Britain, and
that if we are not too awfully anxious about going to the devil we can
make that population one of the most potential in the world for its