LXIV THE ROYAL. SOCIETY OF CANADA 
and of Britain,—the greatest that human genius has created; and no 
political party will ask that a tariff wall be erected to bar out their 
importation. It may be said we are now battling with the powers 
of nature. Yet in Homer’s time there must have been a strenuous 
struggle with nature; I suppose they decided it was an almost 
hopeless struggle—the Odyssey would suggest this—and out of hope- 
lessness and a mystic interpretation of nature sprang the poem. 
Ours is not a hopeless struggle, and we will hardly, as a people, be 
accused of being mystics. In Iceland life must be elemental, yet a 
remarkable literature sprung from its barren, icy, wind-swept rocks; 
and a recent translator of the Saga of Grettir the Strong says that 
the Icelanders had been for a thousand years the most literary nation 
in the world, and that in their own special branch, story-telling, 
they had no rival except in the Old Testament. A superior people, 
if still barbarous and uncontaminated, naturally and instinctively 
takes to literature. We Canadians are not wholly barbarous and we 
are not uncontaminated. We are scarcely ingenuous enough to write — 
Sagas. And yet, not always conscious of it, we are the characters 
in a vast unsung epic where forces greater than Cyclopean, or Titanic, 
or Jovian were conceived to be, are bound and made to do our bidding; 
where regions that before frowned with barrenness now smile with 
harvests; where some of the stablest supports of a great empire 
have been reared; and where two peoples, differing in race and lan- 
guage, have learned to struggle for the common good. Possibly 
here the poetry in our souls finds an adequate expression. 
Posterity, however, will know nothing of the mute inglorious 
Miltons; and we must modestly remember that in this field of 
intellectual achievement we have not as yet excelled; indeed this 
Continent has not excelled. With diffidence and hesitancy I offer 
an opinion; but if I had to name the really distinguished literary 
men this Continent has produced I should name Edgar Allan Poe 
and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and then stop, ready of course to receive 
enlightenment. Great literary achievement for Canada lies in the 
future,—we hope. Were we asked in what way can it be encouraged 
or realized, I believe most of us would have no reply. The celestial 
phenomenon we call genius has no calculable orbit. We can only 
wait for its appearance. We can, however, struggle to maintain a 
certain intellectual level. We can hope that the balance of trade 
in mental products will not always be against us; that the time will 
come when we return to humanity something for the vast treasure 
we have received. We speak of a country as advantageously placed 
which is self-contained, which has within itself everything necessary 
for its physical well-being. In like manner it is desirable that a people 
