APPENDIX A LXI 



teach new duties" and the world would not progress at all if our 

 statesmen were in all cases to cast the future in the inflexible molds 

 of the day. 



The Statesmen of Confederation, as we now see, builded better 

 than they knew. Unwittingly in high cabal with Destiny, they 

 founded a nation which is playing in this great crisis a worthy, en- 

 nobling part, and which may yet, as we hope, play a greater and 

 supreme part in the world drama of the future as a member of the 

 league of nations, which, when this great sacrifice of blood is made, 

 will impose a world peace. To them, for the great service to our 

 country they performed, we pay our tribute of appreciation, 

 appreciation which will be enhanced as the years pass, for the nation 

 in the making of which they performed such a fundamental service 

 will ever hold them in grateful remembrance. O, would that now 

 the import of our tributes in this Jubilee year were borne to them 

 across the Gulf of Silence! 



With the commencement of her second half century of existence 

 Canada begins a new age which the war has inaugurated. This new 

 age is not for Canada alone, for the war has made for the human 

 race an almost complete break with the past. The world will never 

 be the same as it was in the old care-free days when it was dreamt 

 that savagery was washed out of the human mind and that we would 

 never again see a resort to the brutality of prehistoric warfare or to 

 the type of it represented in the Thirty Years' War, which is ex- 

 emplified in the conduct of the German military power in this war. 

 The past with all its hopes and defeats of civilization is secure, but 

 what of the future ? 



Mankind to-day, as a result of this war, has parted with some 

 fondly cherished illusions. Four years ago he who would have pre- 

 dicted the occurrence of such a catastrophe would have been deemed 

 mad. No one did, indeed, foresee its character and extent. Now, 

 the appalling toll in human life that it has exacted, the degradation 

 of human character to that of the brute beast that the enemy in em- 

 ergencies exhibits, and the fact that mankind is undergoing a gigantic 

 struggle to save all that is worth while in civilization, have reacted 

 on the minds of all who look before and after, and the result is, if 

 not blank pessimism, at least, a greatly diminished optimism regard- 

 ing the present and the future of the human race. It is not too much 

 to say that for the next one hundred years less reliance will be placed 

 on the forces that make for sanity in determining right action amongst 

 the masses of mankind than was done in the past, and, accordingly, 

 less will be taken for granted in forecasting the action of races in 



