of their cultivated people which can only be paralleled in France; also that the common folk have kept, along with the accent of Saintonge and Normandy, something of their old style in orderliness, love of home and of country.

But the vigorous civilization is English; more than the French it will mould the future of the Dominion. And the significant fact is that this language is used by the Americans. Indeed, in the very tones and words closer racial affinities are shown between Canadians and their neighbours than exist between the people of the south of England and those of the lowlands of Scotland. Experts in philology maintain that the present accent of the average people of large portions of Ontario has been derived mainly from Americans, either loyalist or later arrivals, who came from Pennsylvania and western New York. It has always differed from that which prevails in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which, on their western borders, resembles the speech of New England; though it must be admitted that there is a distinctive Canadian speech and tone throughout the Dominion.

The American has, of course, also made for himself a new vocabulary, retaining not infrequently an older word that has fallen into disuse in Britain. Not seldom it is a vigorous expression adapted to newer needs, often mere slang, the language of the vagabond, such picturesque phrases as a pioneer might

use, for refinements and shades of meaning do not interest his society; his native humour shapes itself in some parabolic nucleus. Then there is the deposit from the speech of immigrant foreigners who take the most direct way of making their wants known by a transliteration of their own idiom.

In most of this new language the Canadian finds much that he can adopt; phrases grow familiar to him in passing to and fro and in the press. But there is also a real difference between the two peoples. Immigration from Britain into Canada throughout the years has been so great that old English and Scottish pronunciations, methods of speech and ideas abound, and the visitor from the Old Land who comes to Canada by way of the United States often remarks that he finds himself half way home.

To sum up, it appears that the average Canadian, while adopting much from his neighbour, has through his own individuality modified what he has received, and at the same time has kept open the channels along which new power has been constantly brought from the British Isles to reinforce the ruling conceptions of his life.

CHAPTER VII

The World of Higher Education

EW worlds were further apart in the latter half

of the nineteenth century than the cultivated society of the eastern American cities and the educated circles of Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and the smaller towns of the provinces. But even during that period the Universities of the United States, true to their international character, attracted and graciously received the Canadian student in quest of learning. Courteous and hospitable, the American professor welcomed his academic colleague on terms of equality, opened to him his laboratory, and communicated unselfishly with him in the promotion of his researches, and the Canadian who sees his neighbour often and at close range will gladly confess that nowhere does he find a finer type of gentleman than in the universities, libraries, museums and scientific institutions of the United States. When a new day dawned for graduate study on the continent at Johns Hopkins University, aspirants from the provinces entered on an equal footing with others, and not a little of the newer Canadian scholarship and science is traceable to this source. Since the opening of the twentieth century a steady stream has been directed to other attractive

centres also such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Chicago, where the young graduates with Canadian degrees are given a generous share of scholarships and are accepted for advanced work in a spirit of genuine friendliness. Nor has the hospitality ceased with the award of a doctor's degree. Positions in American colleges and universities have been opened to Canadians as to Americans, even the highest places not having been withheld from them; and this not without reason, for though the Canadian is loyal to his own home and his native culture, he is more easily adaptable than most to surroundings so similar to those which he left. The rolls of Canadian colleges contain the names of nearly six hundred former students who hold academic appointments across the line. In addition to this there are possibly four thousand five hundred graduates of Canadian institutions, or about ten per cent. of the total number, who are making their living in the United States. This is not a high percentage relative to other walks in life, but in terms of quality the actual loss to Canada has been serious. Unfortun✓ately their own country has not been able to offer them such an attractive immediate prospect as opened before them in the South, and many have gone who still live in hope of a day when they will have opportunity to return. But this depletion of strength is on the other side a reinforcement of influences which

extend the intellectual and scientific constituency of those who remain at home, for in these days science and learning are not delimited by strict national boundaries.

Though American universities have adopted into their family so many of their neighbour's academic children after they have come to maturity, they cannot be regarded as the spiritual homes from which the

hearth fires were carried into the northern wilderness. In how few respects the Canadian universities may be said to derive from the American will be evident on a comparison of the rise and growth of the higher institutions of learning of both countries. Canadian universities bear the imprint of their own history; they indicate the type of character and intellect that belong to their provinces.

The American college came from England and for many generations it was little more than an offshoot in a new environment. Some of the finest sons of Cambridge emigrated and founded on the banks of the St Charles river in Massachusetts, Harvard College, "that eldest of the Seminaries which advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity throughout America1." The second college, that of William and Mary in Virginia, was founded by the Rev. James Blair, a graduate of Edinburgh, then a vital centre of learning, who reproduced its curriculum in the more 1 Tablet to John Harvard, Emmanuel College, Cambridge.