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undesigned record in the documents of your Land Surveys, and in the statisties 
of the spread of agriculture over what once was forest or prairie; and in time 
to come, something—though not, I fear, much—will exist to show what good 
(and as likely as not, also, what irremediable harm) this age of colonisation has 
done to the region as a whole. But what you do not keep record of is Nature's 
dealings with your immigrants; you do not kAnow—and as long as you omit to 
observe you are condemned not to know—the answer to the simple, all-important 
question, What kinds of men do best in Canada? What kind of men is Canada 
making out of the raw material which Europe is feeding into God’s Mills on this 
side? 
Over in England, we are only too well aware how poor a lead we have given 
you. We, too, for a century now, have been feeding into other great winnowing 
chambers the raw crop of our villagers. We have created (to change the metaphor) 
in our vast towns great vats of fermenting humanity, under conditions of life 
which at the best are unprecedented, and at their worst almost unimaginable. 
That is ow great experiment in modern English anthropology— What happens to 
Englishmen in City-slums ? and we shall hear, before this Meeting ends, something 
of the methods by which we are attempting now to watch and record the 
outcome of that experiment in the making of the English of to-morrow. We 
are beginning to know, in the first place, what types of human animal can 
tolerate and survive the stern conditions of modern urban life. We are learning, 
still more slowly, what modes of life, what modified structure of the family, 
of the daily round, of society at large, can offer the adjustment to new needs 
of life which human nature demands under this new, almost unbearable strain. 
We are seeing, more clear in the mass, even if hopelessly involved in detail, the 
same process of selection going on in the mental furniture of the individuals 
themselves; new views of life, new beliefs, new motives and modes of action; 
new, if only in the sense that they presuppose the destruction of the old. 
That is our problem in human society at home. And yours, though it has a 
brighter side, is in its essentials the same. Geographers can tell you something 
already of the physical ‘control’ which is the setting to all possible societies on 
Canadian soil. Scientific study of the vanishing remnants of the Redskin tribes 
may show you a little of the effects of this control, long continued, upon nations 
whom old Heylin held to be ‘ doubtless the offspring of the Tartars.’’ Sympathetic 
observation and friendly intercourse may still fill some blanks in our knowledge 
of their social state ; how hunting or fishing—or, in rare cases, agriculture —forms 
and reforms men’s manners and their institutions when it is the dominant interest 
in their lives. But what climate and economic habit have done in the past with 
the Redskins, the same climate and other economic habits are as surely doing 
with ourselves. In the struggle with Nature, as in the struggle with other men, 
it is the weakest who go to the wall; it is the fittest who survive. And it is our 
business to know, and to record for those who come after us, what manner of 
men we were, when we came; whence we were drawn, and how we are distributed in 
this new land. An Imperial Bureau of Ethnology, which shall take for its study all 
citizens of our State, as such, is a dream which has filled great minds in the past and 
may some day find realisation. A Canadian Bureau is at the same time a nearer 
object, and a scheme of more practicable size. In the course of this Meeting, 
information and proposals for such a Bureau of Ethnology are to be laid before 
this section by more competent authorities than I. My task has only been to 
show, in a preliminary way, what our science has done in the past, to stimulate 
political philosophy, and to determine its course and the order of its discoveries. 
‘Some men are borne,’ said Edward Grimstone just three centuries ago, ‘so 
farre in love with themselves, as they esteeme nothing else, and think that 
whatsoever fortune hath set without the compasse of their power and government 
should also be banished from their knowledge. Some others, a little more 
carefull; who finding themselves engaged by their birth, or abroad, to some one 
place, strive to understand how matters pass there, and remaine so tied to the 
consideration of their owne Commonweale, as they affect nothing else, carrying 
themselves as parties of that imperfect bodie, whereas in their curiositie they 
should behave themselves as members of this world.’ It is as ‘members of this 
world,’ I hope, that we meet together to-day. 
