-

ym

; Bea

hist,

that

‘ tries Mr.

‘N

;

PE leading article in the No-

is Vember issue of New Liberty
headed: “Canadians ‘Good Sec-

ond Bests’.”

hare blurb beneath the title

Teads: “We're short-sighted, apa-

- thetic Copy-cats. As a people we

aula know we exist, or seem to
we We're kindly and faithful—
as unimaginative as they
Make them . . .”
The article is written by Dr.
ur R. M. Lower, professor of
Ory at Queen’s University and

sure — it was not invented in
Canada; it was thought up by
some ingenious Yankee.

“Leadership of American busi-
ness in industries calling for
large supplies of risk capital —
in oil, for example — is under-
standable. But what of a coun-
try that can hardly run its own
corner stores? 3

“Cross the line into the United:
States . . . and you will not have
gone far before you find yourself
in a land of well-kept farms and

Prof. A. R. M. LOWER

believes we are

ia of several books on Can-
~~ among them Colony To Na-

et Canada: Nation and

Feo Lower writes in his open-
ie erepbs that: “The major
-CUble with Canadians — Eng-
‘Vanadians, not French — is
ey don’t believe in them-
» are not interested in them-

Sely
Nes, hardly know that they
Mselves exist.”

a Makes it clear he is not
als, irae of particular individu-
he’s he of Mr. Canadian, and
be des € man it seems to me can
et as second best.” (We
ehagE he also includes Mrs.
dian.)
ki Canadian “doesn’t
ieee terms. He is hitch-
Whereon he oe to the spot

Want ty Lower says he doesn’t
able sh Tob him of the “honor-
have are in the big things that
Bu: it fen done in this country.
Who eee not the ordinary man
£0 * deat out our system of
tion, sya achieved Confedera-
istenca famed the CPR into ex-

ines’. -he men who did these

“Ings w,
db ere not second eh
Ut they w Sy oe best

tay,
nh p erofessor, who lived for
San Sn in the United States,
Canadiang no! things American.

“When ws, *f@ simply copying.

you go into a
MN Can store here
8aq a and buy some useful
>» Of one thing you can be

of towns with wide, tree-shaded
streets . ...”

The difference, Prof. Lower
writes, is that the Americans have
vision; we do not. “Now I know
that there is nothing the average
Canadian wants to hear less than
praise of his neighbors, the Am-
ericans. All he wants to do is
imitate them!”

And before his conclusion, he
writes: “I don’t want to run my
own people down, but it is plain
to me that as long as we are just
‘copy-cats,” fearful of working
things out for ourselves, taking
over from other people the things
they have invented for them-
selves — whether such things be
their songs or their slang—wear-
ing, so to speak, other people’s
hand-me-downs, we can never be
a first-rate people ourselves.”

It is in his conelusion that one
finds Prof. Lower’s heart likely is
in the right place, if his tongue-
lashing is misdirected.

“Our big job in Canada,” he
advises, “is to build a new coun-
try; a new community, if you like
that word better. It is a gigantic
task. It calls for all the effort, all
the imagination, that any group
of men can bring to it. On this
great half-continent of ours we
have to build our home. . .- -
Until Canadians can catch that
vision and put all they have into
it, it will be fair, it seems to me,
to go on describing them as ‘very
good second bests’.” e

_LYMAN P. JACKES

i.
Says we're tip-top

Brest qr’ to the recent
Isplay of our Canadian
any Complex, as
Rood er Bridge; this may
Out that °pportunity to point
Of y; anadians are not a race

pet onal I

Neo

no : mpOORs.. We just suffer
hept
“the
Bh ere *

ave Bone things that Canadians

Onie do i

ie dose of national
S that blinds our eyes to
ne —_
© — many of them with-

8 reward or recogni-

Th i933

Ment did the Canadian govern-

a Ting out a postage

‘Cy to raw :
“fing tian duit attention to the

“he . Royal William, the
er a. cross the Atlantic

Wh
i at about Benjamin Tib-
¥ Scricton, N.B., who in-
Ne and q Compound steam en-
‘ re the sailing-ships
‘Atiout jgibo knows any-
he native’son of

Saint John, N.B., who, in 1854,
invented the steam fog horn that

‘has been copied all over the

world? His name was Robert
Foulis. Do you find any mention
of him in our history books? No!
That’s too Canadian for Cana-
dians.

Newton Gisborne, of Halifax,
N.S., thought up the idea of in-
sulating a wire against the cor-
rosive action of sea water and
joined Prince Edward Island and
New Brunswick by submarine
telegraph cable. This was the first
demonstration in world history of
such a possibility. The success
of this experiment and his second
successful connection of New-
foundland with Cape Breton 1n-
duced him to approach Cyrus
Field for funds to construct the
Atlantic cable. Our school kids
never heard of Newton Gisborne.
We must keep his life a secret

ee

anadians ‘second best’ ?

we HTN Me

On November 7, 1887, Sir Donald Smith drove the last spike in the transcontinental railway that
linked Canada from sea to sea, symbolizing completion of the gigantic proiect that U_S. interests, eager

te grab the country’s wealth even then,

top is a re-enactment.

the old 5900’s, among the most p

had predicted would take a 100 hundred years.
Picture at bottom shows on2 of the modern diesels which have almost replaced
owerful steam locomotives in the world, on the run through the Rockies

Picture at

where, 66 years ago, Canadian skill and labor succeeded against difficulties never before experienced.

lest we commit the grave offense
of creating some national pride.

Seven years before Pullman
came out with the sleeping cars
that carry his name, John Sharpe,
the master mechanic of the Great
Western Railway, was building
sleeping cars in Hamilton. They
operated between Niagara Falls
and Windsor and it was from
them that Pullman got the idea
of making them in the United
States.

There was not a city in the US.
that could make an electric street
railway operate until Wright and
Vandepole invented the trolley
pole, in Toronto, Canada, in the
summer of the year 1883.

6

And while we are on the sub-
ject of the bursting genius as ex-
emplified south of the Great
Lakes let us take a quick glance
at the paper situation. During
the Civil War surplus rags had
been used up and as this was the
basic item in the manufacture of

paper the industry was In a panic.

But did the great super brains
of the .U.S. solve the problem?
They did not. The problem was
solved by John Thompson, of Na-
panee, Upper Canada; who was
the first man in the world to de-
monstrate that paper could be
made from wood pulp.

Perhaps the saddest part of this
little epistle concerns Ottawa. In
1893 the great engineering brains
of the United States proclaimed
that Ottawa could not success-
fully operate an _electric street
railway. The winters were too
cold Two young native sons,
Ahearn and Soper, thought other-
wise. They went ahead and built
a street railway and it worked in
the wintertime. In fact it work-
ed so well that more than ninety
experts (?) from the great United
States came up to Ottawa in the

spring of 1894 to ascertain how
this electric railway dared to op-
erate successfully against their

edict. They found that Thomas
Ahearn had invented an electric
heater — the first in world his-:
tory — and that these heaters
‘were the solution of the prob-
lem. :
These. so-called experts. sat

down to a meal in the Windsor
Hotel, Ottawa, and every item
was cooked by electricity. This
was done on the first electric
stove in world history.

Ask any Canadian school kid
today who invented the electric
stove and ninety-nine and seven-
eighths percent of them will tell
you it was either Tom Edison or
Henry Ford. To them the name
of the Canadian inventor, Thomas
Ahearn, might just as well be
printed in Arabic.

©

A few years ago the Canadian
Jewellers’ Association did mark
the site in Toronto where Sand-
ford Fleming invented Standard
Time in 1879; but who ever heard
of the Connon Brothers, the two
Canadian lads who first thought
out and produced the idea of put-
ting photographic film on spools
for use in cameras? _ :

The subject could be projected
through insulin, the electron mic-
roscope, Marquis wheat, the first
batteryless radio and a dozen
other items. We are talking about
our national stupidity in failure
to appreciate our own native
genius.

The crowning example of this
is found in connection with
helium. Helium was first isolat-
ed from the atmosphere by the
British chemist Sir William Ram-
say, in 1895. By 1914, the year
of the start of the First World
War, the process of preparing

helium had somewhat progressed

but the cost was very high.
Helium gas was valued at $15 per
cubic foot.

The British government asked
the late Sir John Cunningham of
the University of Toronto, to seek
a cheaper source of the much
needed gas. Within a few months
Sir John was giving them all the
helium they needed at seven cents
a cubic foot. He was knighted for
this. But what does the so-called
greatest encyclopedia in the
world have to say concerning this
great Canadian achievement?
“Helium—the main supplies are
however in the natural gas in
Texas and in Canada, near On-
tario.” ‘ : :

Sir John extracted his helium
from the natural gas flowing into
the city of Calgary, Alberta. It
was a. great Canadian triumph
which played an important part
in the collapse of the enemy in
the autumn of 1918.

But we must not let our school
kids or the Canadian public know
anything about it.

Uncle Sam might get mad and
the idea might get abroad, among
ourselves, that Canadian brains
are tip-top and that Canada is a
great country.

Any such influx of mental pro-
cess on those lines might jolt us
out of our national apathy and
that would bring out the great
dangerous idea that we have a
past that is worth knowing some-
thing about.

@ Lyman P. Jackes, wellknown
Toronto historian, wrote this
as a letter to the Toronto
Globe and Mail and subse-
quently gave the Canadian
Tribune permission to reprint
it. Jackes has written exten-
sively on the life of William
Lyon Mackenzie, with whom
the Jackes family was associ-

. ated in the 1837 Rebellion.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — NOVEMBER 27, 1953 — PAGE 9