You Know How
At Any Gathering Of Our Men From All Quarters It Is Tacitly Conceded
That Canada Takes The Lead In The Imperial Game.
To put it roughly, she
saw the goal more than ten years ago, and has been working the ball
toward it ever since.
That is why her inaction at the last Imperial
Conference made people who were interested in the play wonder why she,
of all of us, chose to brigade herself with General Botha and to block
the forward rush. I, too, asked that question of many. The answer was
something like this: 'We saw that England wasn't taking anything just
then. Why should we have laid ourselves open to be snubbed worse than we
were? We sat still.' Quite reasonable - almost too convincing. There was
really no need that Canada should have done other than she did - except
that she was the Eldest Sister, and more was expected of her. She is a
little too modest.
We discussed this, first of all, under the lee of a wet deck-house in
mid-Atlantic; man after man cutting in and out of the talk as he sucked
at his damp tobacco. The passengers were nearly all unmixed Canadian,
mostly born in the Maritime Provinces, where their fathers speak of
'Canada' as Sussex speaks of 'England,' but scattered about their
businesses throughout the wide Dominion. They were at ease, too, among
themselves, with that pleasant intimacy that stamps every branch of Our
Family and every boat that it uses on its homeward way.
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