THE OLD KNOWLEDGE AND THE NEW 



This year marks the half century, the Jubilee, of the union of 

 the original Canadian Provinces into what is known as the Dominion 

 of Canada, and which now comprehends one half of America north 

 of the Gulf of Mexico. As a Jubilee year it would, under ordinary 

 circumstances, be fitly celebrated, as the passing of an era in our 

 national history, with a ceremony that in times of peace we would 

 observe at the passing of any lustrum of national life. We will, 

 indeed, celebrate it, but with a ceremony which will not engross all 

 our thoughts, for the advent of our Jubilee year has found us as a 

 nation engaged as one of a group of democracies in a gigantic struggle 

 against another nation with its allies, wholly dominated by palaeo- 

 lithic conceptions of humanity and warfare, a struggle which, un- 

 paralleled in history, has already cost enough in blood and tears 

 to make mankind hereafter look back upon it as a time of tragedy 

 and sorrow. The importance of our Jubilee year will, accordingly, 

 be dwarfed beside that in which everything we hold as making life 

 worth while appears at stake. 



And yet this Jubilee of our national life, submerged as it is in 

 the thoughts of the titanic struggle, must not pass without some 

 tribute to it for what it signifies to us as a stage in our national life. 

 From the union we have derived all the strength which we exert in 

 the great war of to-day. From it we have received and developed 

 by degrees in the decades as they passed a consciousness of unity 

 of purpose and a high aim which has molded and will mold our will 

 as a people to serve for the furtherance of human happiness and 

 liberty. Because of it to-day we have a steadiness of resolution, an 

 insight as to duty, and a desire to do our part in the maintenance 

 of the forces making for the progress of the world, which have won for 

 our country an unstinted admiration from the best elements in 

 the great democracy which has just entered as a combatant on our 

 side in the great war. It is, indeed, no mean achievement to have 

 gained the prestige of a virile, people, endeavouring to maintain at 

 an incalculable cost the priceless heritage of freedom which we have 

 received from our fathers. 



Had it not been for this union, we would have been ineffective 

 in this war for liberty. We would have been condemned to be, if 

 not interested spectators, at best only casual and uncoordinated as- 

 sistants in the struggle, and we would have had in our consciousness 

 the element of helplessness, the feeling that we were playing a very 



