230 
Indiana University 
In the first place, Nova Scotia is a part of the Dominion of Canada, 
and, whether we like it or not, must continue as such while the Dominion 
stands. We believe that this Province was cunningly seduced, at the 
beginning, grossly deceived and unlawfully coerced, in the end, into 
Confederation. We believe that its interests were not foreseen, and not 
properly safeguarded by those who negotiated and procured the enact- 
ment by the British Parliament of the terms of Union. This, we have 
always believed and asserted; this, we still contend. But we recognize 
that, after nearly sixty years, it has become a matter of opinion con- 
cerning “ancient history”. We are in the Dominion, and we must make 
the best of it.*^ 
The Winnipeg Free Press has been a rather severe critic 
of the policies pursued by the Dominion government, evidently 
believing that the interests of the agricultural West are sacri- 
ficed to those of the industrial East. The Free Press believes 
that the “so-called national policies are in very large measure 
policies sectional in their origin and in their operation”. To 
these statements the Ottawa Journal makes the following 
reply : 
Nothing but gain can come to any part of Canada from prosperity 
in the West. It is the selfish interest of all of us, East as well as West, 
to see that the West prospers to the utmost. Nobody but a fool, or a 
newspaper blinded by sectional selfishness and misled by self-satisfaction, 
like the Winnipeg Free Press, could dream that any intelligent person 
in the eastern provinces of the Dominion could feel anything but pride 
in the West, and desire to go the limit to cooperate with it. 
This Canada of ours is a vast country. Many of our provinces are 
larger than the largest kingdoms of Europe. It is impossible, in such a 
country, that public policies of any kind shall be equally well suited or 
equally profitable to all parts. One part may benefit most by some public 
course, another part may benefit most by another public course. But 
what all of us in the Canadian brotherhood should look to and have a 
right to expect all to look to, is that in discussion of public policy, while 
each of us argues his own view, he shall not accuse those who differ with 
him of differing because they dislike him, want to hurt him, are narrow- 
minded, jealous, selfish. But this latter is the customary manifestation 
of the Winnipeg Free Press in its discussion of subjects in which the 
West is concerned with national action. Everybody East will agree that 
“'a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Red has just as much right to 
his view” as one who lives anywhere else; but it is reasonable to think 
also that he ought to have the common decency not to keep crying that 
Canadian citizens elsewhere hate him and want to murder him.^^ 
Just how it came about that two nations of the federal type 
of government, both based on English institutions, one with 
The Morning Chronicle (Halifax), July 11, 1925, 
The Ottawa Journal, July 24, 1925. 
