58 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



cal, intellectual, and moral, by which the nation is inspired in its 

 onward progress ; by perceiving what in them is of universal truth and 

 beauty, what partakes of falsehood and decay. 



In our conceptions of the relative importance of nations as in 

 those of individuals we are too prone to be swayed by utilitarian 

 considerations, and to attribute to physical conditions phenomena 

 which often carry a far more spiritual signification. In the nation, 

 no less than in the individual, heroic actions will ever be found to 

 proceed from nobility of thought, while thought itself must draw in- 

 spiration from lofty ideas and sentiments. To rightly understand 

 the main springs of national life it is not alone nor chiefly necessary 

 to investigate is external or physical conditions. These, it is true, 

 have their part to play, but a more essential explanation of the spir- 

 itual force of a nation is to be found in her prevailing sentiments of 

 beauty and goodness, as found crystalized in the nation's religion, 

 literature, art, philosophy, and social life. 



This fact can be established by numerous illustrations. It is 

 the ancient classical world, whose religion pictured gods in the form 

 of heroes and made virtue synonymous with valour, that has given 

 the world its greatest examples of heroic action. In the case of our 

 own land, we know that our national life really dates from the time 

 when that heroic band of men, sacrificing the labors of the past, 

 began life anew amid the forests of Upper Canada for the sake of 

 Britain and British institutions. To-day the guiding star of our 

 national life is to repeat in the new world the glory of the motherland, 

 to establish here a second fountain head of British faith, enterprise, 

 valour and piety. Such is the well-spring of our national life and we 

 may be assured that all dreams of Americanization and French 

 republics will prove as visionary as the political success of those 

 who propagate them. Again, at our very door, we have a nation 

 whose birth throes were the expression of a demand for individual 

 liberty, and to such an extent has this ideal insinuated itself into 

 the fibre of the nation, that in this short time it has more than once 

 threatened by its intensity the soUdarity of that which it should 

 cement. 



But humanity is broader than the nation. " Her destiny will 

 on the way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs asunder." For 

 national life, then, to be permanent, it is not alone sufficient that 



