APPENDIX A XLIII 
THE CANADIAN PARLIAMENT. 
But it needed also rulers who knew the inner life of our people, who 
sympathized withourdifficulties,andwho would not crush our aspirations 
—a governing body which would remember that we had to subjugate the 
earth, meet its wildness and make a living for ourselves. On the whole 
we have had a kind and wise nursing mother in our Canadian Parliament. 
It is just forty years since the Canadian Parliament began to legislate 
for western Canada. The Manitoba Act was passed under conditions 
of great stress, and a large amount of legislation since that day has had 
to do with Manitoba and its sister western provinces. Taken altogether 
the Dominion Houses have done this with caution, and yet in a pro- 
gressive spirit, and the legislation of the local governing bodies has been 
based very largely on Canadian models. 
Questions of land tenure and sale, forestry, agriculture, seed ad- 
vances, care of the Indians, native rights, immigration, education, 
banks and finance, customs, railways, provincial subsidies, post offices, 
lawlessness and insurrection, police and military, have supplied a 
fertile field for differences of opinion, and at times of angry remonstrance, 
for we are made up of many mixed races and varied interests. 
It is quite true that according to the jurists, “Government is 
founded on the rights of men.” According to the evolutionary phil- 
osophy, when races and communities are brought together, they must 
work out their struggle in the survival of the fittest. Fortunately that 
is not a complete philosophy. Benjamin Kidd has shown in his “Social 
Evolution,” and the late Professor Drummond in his “Ascent of Man,” 
that there are other principles deeply imbedded in human nature, such 
as religious feeling, humanity and affection, which modify the struggle 
which the stern bed of Procrustes would demand. 
Canada with its nine or ten communities, different races, different 
languages, different religious conceptions and different habitats and 
environments can only be successfully governed under this wider 
philosophy, by sympathetic dealing and patient forbearance, rather 
than by a hard and fast logic. 
The task of gathering the scattered units of Canada and welding 
them together in these forty years has been done chiefly by two great 
leaders, though they have been aided most ably by other men of the 
highest ability. 
These two men of different shades of politics agreed especially in 
one thing: they both believed in Western Canada. 
To deal with two insurrections in the west, to unite hostile and 
diverse elements, to allay discontent on railway questions, and to grapple 
with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway from the Atlantic 
