American Library Association. General Meeting

SIR WILFRID LAURIER:[4] Though I have no claim whatever to be here on this present occasion, still if my presence on this platform can further convince our American visitors how welcome they are amongst us, I can assure them that I would have traveled many and many a long mile to swell the greeting with the seal and hand of the Canadian government and the Canadian people. Welcome you are, not only for the good work in which you are engaged, not only for the intellectual labors which are your daily vocation, but also because whenever you cross our borders, and whenever the Canadian members of this association cross your borders, you and they are real missionaries of peace, apostles of civilization, and those visits tend further to improve our relations, to dispel old prejudices and to make us appreciate the blessings of the peace which hath prevailed between your country and my country for nearly a hundred years.

[4] Printed only in part.

May I take advantage of the present opportunity to remind you of the fact, which has been twice already brought to your attention, that today is the national holiday of Canada. We celebrate our national holiday on the first of July, you celebrate yours on the fourth of July,—but the resemblance goes no further. The day you celebrate on the fourth of July recalls the fact that your forefathers wrenched and violently tore asunder the tie which had bound them to the motherland. I think I can call upon your memory to confirm that history attests that this step was not taken lightly, that it tore the heart strings of many and many of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, but that it was forced upon them by the vicious policy that was followed toward the colonists by the British government.

Our history is a very different one. The day that we celebrate in Canada recalls no violence. On the contrary we celebrate the day when the authorities of England, King, Lords and Commons, delivered unto us a charter of union, of liberty and of local independence. Thus at the very start our courses were cast in different directions. You are a republic, we are a monarchy. We have kept the old monarchy of England. As to the merits of respective forms of government, republican institutions or monarchical institutions, I would not say a word on this or any other occasion, because this has always seemed to be an idle speculation. We know that the form of government is after all a matter of indifference; we know that there must be a virtue in republicanism, and we Canadians are here to testify that in the monarchy of England there is as ample liberty as there is in any part of the world, not excepting even the American republic.

Proud as I am to say that you have your democratic institutions, we are blessed with institutions more democratic, and we have what Abraham Lincoln called the government of the people, by the people and for the people. I do not mean to say by this, Ladies and Gentlemen, that the people never make mistakes. I speak for my country, not for yours. But speaking for my country, I would say that at that we must not be surprised nor angry, because it is an attribute of mankind, after all, to err.

Though, Ladies and Gentlemen, as I have told you, our lots have been cast apart, though you are one country and we are another, still, after all, we can say with some pride that we have been friends, and better friends we ought to be. Men there are in this country, I am sorry to say, who are rather afraid of you American people. They believe that you have some hostile design upon us; and some of your men have perhaps harbored that thought themselves. But if these views are scattered amongst some of my countrymen, they have not at all scared me; I have no fear at all of the American people. I am not afraid of contact with you. I would not be afraid to trade with you, to sell to you and buy from you, because I believe that after all, proud as you have reason to be of your own nation, we Canadians are just as good as you are.

But, if we cannot trade, if we cannot sell and buy,—and I would not enlarge on this, because I would perhaps trespass on politics,—if we cannot trade and buy from one another, at least we can exchange ideas, sentiments, principles, and this is the very thing which you have been doing in Canada during this last week. To this nobody can object. Ideas and principles can travel freely across the line, and I believe that everybody would be all the better for this interchange. So I have no fear whatever that there should be an absorption of this country by your country. And may I say what is my own ideal?

It seems to me that there is a greater future for Canada, and for the United States. You have your problems and we have enough of our own problems. We can afford to share the continent and we can be, you Americans and we Canadians, the pioneers of a new civilization, a civilization representative of the twentieth century. We can give to the world this example of friendship without hesitation and with perfect confidence in one another. The bane of Europe today is militarism. All the nations of Europe are distrustful of one another; they spend one-half their income for war, in military preparation one against the other. Thank heaven, on this continent, we never think of war with one another. We have the longest frontier that separates two nations, and I thank God there is not a fortress to be found upon it, nor a gun nor a cannon to frown across it. This is the example which we give to the rest of the world. It is certainly an achievement of which we have every reason to be proud; and when you, Ladies and Gentlemen, come over to our country, as you have, you are further instilling the truth of that sentiment, and my last word to you will be, as the first. Come again, come often, and the more often you come the more cordial and warm will be the welcome.

President ELMENDORF: I am quite certain that this audience would be unwilling that some reply should not come from itself. May I ask Mr. R. R. Bowker, whom I see in the box, to reply for the audience?

Mr. BOWKER said, that as he rose to propose on the part of the United States members of the American Library Association a vote of thanks, he wished to express the equal gratification of our fellow members that we have received the hospitality, so unbounded, of the administration of Canada, and especially that we had been thus welcomed by the man whose presence personifies and whose name is a synonym not only for his own party but for United Canada. He said the United States members took only one exception to what he had said, and that was that they used the word "American" in a broader sense than he. The American Library Association means, not the United States, not Canada, but both. We have no United States library association. We may almost hope that there shall be no Canada library association, but we hope that Ontario, with its library association, will be the pioneer to lead its sister provinces into the fellowship and affiliation in which our other associations stand in the American library association.

The speaker said it was not only in the brilliant and eloquent pages of Parkman that the history of the two sister nations was interwoven; that a man from Woburn, Massachusetts, was the first to see what the site of Ottawa meant; that our own Thwaites had brought anew to life the deeds of the Jesuit fathers and early explorers, and that Miss Plummer had personally conducted many thousands of boys and girls of the children's rooms through Canada with her "Roy and Ray."

Mr. Bowker said he supposed we did not rightly recognize Canadian writers in the United States libraries because they were so thoroughly a part of English literature, and that it would be very grateful if some one so good as Mr. Hardy, the secretary of the Ontario library association, could before the close of the meetings give a bird's-eye view of Canadian writers.

"It is a significant coincidence that on this very day there goes into operation throughout the British Empire a law which, if not for the first time, at least most explicitly, recognizes the relationship of the several English nations to the motherland, for the new copyright code which today goes into operation states in so many words that the self-governing dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa may adopt the imperial act, or modify it to meet their own judicial process, or legislate independently. It is interesting to some of us that this recognition should be so explicitly made in the field of letters."

In closing, the speaker proposed that we express our thanks to our Canadian brethren, our hosts who have been so hospitable, by a rising vote.

Amid hearty applause the entire audience arose.

The CHAIRMAN: Before it became necessary for Dr. Otto Klotz, who was and is chairman of the local committee, to be absent from the city, I had agreed to deliver an address to the convention on Conservation in Canada. The time having come, on the program, for that event, I propose now to tell you a little of what we in Canada are doing to conserve the best we have.