modified by the local patriotism and the less emotional qualities of their members.

There is, on the other hand, in every city and large town of the Dominion an organization which has no counterpart in the United States-the Canadian Club distinctively so called, most branches being composed of men, though there are some Women's Canadian Clubs. They eschew partisanship, and only allow politics in the larger sense, but they offer an intelligent audience, without subsequent discussion, to any lecturer who has anything to say on current affairs, domestic or foreign. It is a compliment paid to a distinguished visitor to invite him to address the club, and a large number of the leaders of the modern world have given a message through it to the Canadian people.

Conventions for social work are international. Americans are asked to speak on Canadian platforms and Canadians to take their places on American programs; the similar environment of both makes the experience of the one, especially the larger, of great advantage to the other. All this is greatly furthered by the wide circulation in Canada of American journals and magazines which set forth for their larger constituencies the most recent and venturesome experiments in moral reform and social welfare.

But it is the theater, the moving-picture show and the radio which are exercising the most penetrating and subtle influence upon the social standards of Canadians. The plays and the films emanate from American sources, the plays that are presented on the Canadian stage having been chosen to suit American audiences, and the films, as well as the cuts in the illustrated papers, having been designed to please the average American constituency. Every night thousands of young Canadians listen to addresses and talks directed to the people who live in the central cities of the United States. As immigrants from Europe of precisely the same character and outlook as have made their way into the United States pour into Canada, they will, through the constant repetition of similar ideas in picture, play, illustrated paper and radio, soon be molded into a type that will no longer be Canadian, but a product of European ideas toned to the manner of life that prevails

among the people of their own origin in the American cities.

Another factor in this process is the internationalization of sport. Both peoples have the same athletic heroes whose doings are chronicled in the daily papers, though Canada still retains her own style of football, and hockey is almost a national game. The greatest and best of all influences, however, in molding the life of Americans and Canadians to similar issues has, of course, been the possession in common of a rich language. A crude and meager tongue may be sufficient for the few wants, chiefly material, of barbarous tribes; but a highly developed language, precise, opulent and strong, the instrument of noble literature and glorious common history, cannot but create a consentient impulse in the minds of the several peoples who employ it, and fashion them into some similitude to one another by their common heritage of ideas and emotions. Ancient words are freighted with suggestions of struggles, failures, hopes and attainments-individual and national, moral and religious. They call heroism to memory, they express ideals, they appeal to the noblest motives. Fortunately, also, the language and literature which these peoples possess in common were shaped and most richly charged by the genius of the race before the breach made by the Revolution. Virtues were clarified and moral and political experience took shape in the earlier epochs of British history. By instinct the Canadian grasps the meaning of the American: the greatest words convey to both at once their deepest thought.

The broad-minded English-speaking Canadian will readily grant that his country is the richer for being the inheritor of two civilizations. He realizes that in Quebec there are fine fruits of the Latin mind, and that there is a delicacy in the thought and manners of their cultivated people which can only be paralleled in France; also that the common folk have kept, along with the accent of Saintonge and Normandy, something of their old style in orderliness, love of home and of country.

But the vigorous civilization is English; more than the French it will mold the future of the Dominion. And the significant fact is that this language is used by the Americans. Indeed, in the very tones and words closer racial affinities are shown between Canadians and their neighbors than exist

between the people of the South of England and those of the lowlands of Scotland. Experts in philology maintain that the present accent of the average people of large portions of Ontario has been derived mainly from Americans, either loyalist or later arrivals, who came from Pennsylvania and western New York. It has always differed from that which prevails in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which, on their western borders, resembles the speech of New England; though it must be admitted that there is a distinctive Canadian speech and tone throughout the Dominion.

The American has, of course, also made for himself a new vocabulary, retaining not infrequently an older word that has fallen into disuse in Britain. Not seldom it is a vigorous expression adapted to newer needs, often mere slang, the language of the vagabond, such picturesque phrases as a pioneer might use, for refinements and shades of meaning do not interest his society; his native humor shapes itself in some parabolic nucleus. Then there is the deposit from the speech of immigrant foreigners who take the most direct way of making their wants known by a transliteration of their own idiom.

In most of this new language the Canadian finds much that he can adopt; phrases grow familiar to him in passing to and fro and in the press. But there is also a real difference between the two peoples. Inmmigration from Britain into Canada throughout the years has been so great that old English and Scottish pronunciations, methods of speech and ideas abound, and the visitor from the Old Land who comes to Canada by way of the United States often remarks that he finds himself half way home.

To sum up, it appears that the average Canadian, while adopting much from his neighbor, has through his own individuality modified what he has received, and at the same time has kept open the channels along which new power has been constantly brought from the British Isles to reinforce the ruling conceptions of his life.

JOHN HUSTON FINLEY

THE CITY AND THE FLAG

John Huston Finley was born in 1863. From 1903 to 1913 he was President of the College of the City of New York and commissioner of education in the State of New York from 1913 to 1921. Since then he has been associate editor of the New York Times. Mr. Finley is the author of many books and is well known also as a public speaker of unusual grace. The present address was given in New York at the exercises of Adoption of City Flag and 250th Anniversary of the Installation of First Mayor and Board of Aldermen, June 24, 1915. Another speech is printed in Volume II.

Ir is a rare honor and privilege for one who has known the lonesomeness of the furrows, the nearness of the skies, the allurement of the open road, the silences and distances of the prairies, the procession of the seasons (with no attendant music save for frogs and birds and lowing cattle) to be asked to speak unofficially for those who love the city-this city, who received me an utter stranger, gave me her noblest friendships and at last entrusted to me her highest care, the tuition of her sons. Yet dear is she to me, and to millions of alien birth or parentage, as ever she can be, even to those whose first dim memories are of her face and her voice.

Eternally young she is. "Novi Belgi," New Belgium, was inscribed upon her first shield. New Amsterdam was her first corporate name. New York she became. And a new city she is always to be, not in name alone but in that youth which will endure, so long as the fresh water runs from the hills to her lips, and the brine of the ocean washes her feet.

But she is old with the memories of all the cities that have been since hunters and shepherds, tired of the terror of the fields or forests, or longing for human companionship, huddled

themselves behind walls, on the edge of the meadows or by living waters, became citizens, instead of wanderers, and began to be civilized social beings (for "civilization" and "city" have the same etymological origin). The pre-Noachrian cities, swept away by the flood and forgotten of name; Sodom and Gomorrah, burned with fire and brimstone; Jerusalem, whose exiled children wept beneath the willows of Babylon; Babylon, who saw her own fate written on the walls of a banquet hall; Thebes and Karnak, buried in the sands; the courts of Pharaoh, kept by lion and lizard; ancient Athens, whose myriad mouths are choked with dust; these all, from Zoar, the little city, to Nineveh, the great city, which now "crouches in time's corner unrenowned," though famed for a day-these all are remembered in the heart of this new city of the New World, who in these memories is as old as the oldest city in the Old World.

Forever young, forever old, the soul of the generic city dwells in her. Cities have sprung up on hillside, shore and plain, blos. somed for a time, drooped, withered, died, slept in their own dust; preachers since Jonah have cried against them; poets since David have sung enticingly of the green pastures and the still waters; reformers have come out of the wilderness since the days of John the Baptist, calling to repentance and to baptism in streams outside the city. Still the city, the generic city, has persisted, rising often from its own ashes or climbing upon the ruins of its own towers, surviving rapine, famine, pestilence and every ill of human association, human passion and human ambition, and receiving into mansion and tenement those driven of some "divine, if obscure" instinct, some "irresistible urge," as it has been called by that noble American, one time mayor (Brand Whitlock), who has lately saved from devastation the capital city of the Belgium that was old when this new Belgium was but an uninhabited island-has persisted to make here a new attempt to solve the time-old problem of civilization, the problem whose solution is "the hope of democracy."

And the children of every nation under the sun are assembled here to solve it. It is a city predominantly of aliens, of migrants, even as was the celestial city of ultimate happiness which John of Patmos saw in his vision. Like that city, it, too, has foundations that are not of one stone, nor of concrete,