It Is True The Hope Was
Murdered Afterward, But - Multiply That Good Hour By A Thousand, And You
Will Have Some Idea Of How It Feels To Be In Canada - A Place Which Even
An 'Imperial' Government Cannot Kill.
I had the luck to be shown some
things from the inside - to listen to the details of works projected; the
record of works done.
Above all, I saw what had actually been achieved
in the fifteen years since I had last come that way. One advantage of a
new land is that it makes you feel older than Time. I met cities where
there had been nothing - literally, absolutely nothing, except, as the
fairy tales say, 'the birds crying, and the grass waving in the wind.'
Villages and hamlets had grown to great towns, and the great towns
themselves had trebled and quadrupled. And the railways rubbed their
hands and cried, like the Afrites of old, 'Shall we make a city where
no city is; or render flourishing a city that is dasolate?' They do it
too, while, across the water, gentlemen, never forced to suffer one
day's physical discomfort in all their lives, pipe up and say, 'How
grossly materialistic!'
I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, philosopher, dramatist,
or divine of to-day has to exercise half the pure imagination, not to
mention insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is accepted
without comment in what is called 'the material exploitation' of a new
country. Take only the question of creating a new city at the junction
of two lines - all three in the air.
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