JOHN F. CONWAY

Our development as a people has for many years been overshadowed in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world by the remarkable growth, and achievements of the American Union.

The break with and the rejection of Europe, decisive in the making of the American people, did not take place in Canada. In the formative period of Canadian history the immigrant's arrival in North America represented not a rejection of Europe and its values but an affirmation of them. This is the deepest and most meaningful difference between Canada and the United States.

The Crown as a symbol of sovereignty encourages British Canadians to ignore their own failure to build a united nation by allowing them an illusory participation in a history and a greatness not properly theirs.

… to the Canadian, the American is an absolutist in his political philosophy. His history from the beginning has made him so. The first Puritan settlers had crossed the ocean to found their city set upon a hill, an example to other nations, a chosen people, the grain that God had sifted from a whole nation to plant in the empty continent. This sense of special selection, of possession of a new and higher truth, became secularized, but it did not diminish.

The Crown as a symbol of sovereignty encourages British Canadians to ignore their own failure to build a united nation by allowing them an illusory participation in a history and a greatness not properly theirs.

… to the Canadian, the American is an absolutist in his political philosophy. His history from the beginning has made him so. The first Puritan settlers had crossed the ocean to found their city set upon a hill, an example to other nations, a chosen people, the grain that God had sifted from a whole nation to plant in the empty continent. This sense of special selection, of possession of a new and higher truth, became secularized, but it did not diminish.

The break with and the rejection of Europe, decisive in the making of the American people, did not take place in Canada. In the formative period of Canadian history the immigrant's arrival in North America represented not a rejection of Europe and its values but an affirmation of them. This is the deepest and most meaningful difference between Canada and the United States.

Our development as a people has for many years been overshadowed in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world by the remarkable growth, and achievements of the American Union.