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The border is like a mighty heart
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Though the organism seems outwardly tough and muscular, inwardly it is as delicate as any human body. The very intimacy of the American-Canadian friendship makes it _ brittle and supersensitive—as the closest friends will ignore a stranger’s offenses but will be wounded by the smallest slight from one another. Thus the border is marked by many secret scars, slowly healed, and by a few recent scratches.
They are hardly surprising when many of the greatest North Americans have resisted the continental division. Did not Jefferson, in 1812, proclaim again the wholeness and indivisibility of America? Did not Henry Clay lay down the dictum that the United States should “take the whole continent and ask no favors” for “I wish never to see peace till we do?” Did not the United States, indeed, hold a “mortgage” on every inch of Canadian soil, solemnly filed by Senator Zachariah Chandler in 1871? And even in 1911 did not the Honorable Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives, affirm that he expected “to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole?”
Those thinkers regarded the contrary notion—that America must be sundered by a scrawl of ink on a fictitious map—as a heresy, an aberration from the human norm, a repeal of reason, an insult to self-evident truth, not to be borne by rational men.
Nor were they obliged to bear it, at least in the past century. Grants Grand Army of the Republic could have taken Canada in an easy march, as an afterthought to the civil war, and Canadians listened anxiously for the tramp of that third and final invasion. At any time since then the conquest of Canada would have been a fairly simple military operation.
Given the two quarrelsome breeds on either side of the border, the wonder is not that they fought so long but that they halted their struggle short of final conquest. On both sides, the advances and retreats, the broken truces, blunders, deceptions and crimes were beyond reckoning. So were the heroism, agony, patience, labor and ingenuity.
These peoples threatened continental war because a worthless little ship had been burned and sent flaming over Niagara Falls, and again because an aged pig had been stolen and eaten on a Paciific Island.
Even a man as sensible as, the first Canadian Prime Minister was suggesting on April 9,1867, that India attack San Francisco to divert the United States when it attacked Canada.
All these alarms have passed. The great change-little more than half a century old and hardly to be judged decisive until the last two decades-has followed a long and fitful fever.
Madness and sanity, greed and generousity, quarrel and reconciliation, sin and forgiveness, loss and gain have welled along the border of America in tidal flow.
They have left behind, in firm sedimentary layers, the continent we now inhabit, the only continent surely at peace and divided by agreement.
The joint future of the two American nations can be understood if we put our minds to it. That we have hardly begun to do. In the eyes of most Canadians the United States, for all its devices of information, remains a caricature compounded of Broadway, Hollywood and the dark underside of Washington politics. To most Americans the people of Canada are pioneers on a lonely northern frontier, suburban residents just outside the walls of the Republic or exiled Englishmen, and in any case good, honest folk, reliable in the pinch, safely to be taken for granted and indistinguishable from their neighbors, except for their tricks of accent or silence.
The two-sided caricature contains enough truth to make it mischievous. Americans are usually not angry but deeply hurt when Canadians misunderstand and criticize them. Canadians, being even more sensitive under a placid exterior, cannot bear to be taken for granted. So, in an age of mechanical communication, the real lifestuff of both peoples fails to come through the radio waves, the television boxes, the speeches and the printed word.
How many Americans have yet distinguished the hard facts of the border from among the genial myths? The fact that two peoples, so alike in their outer habits, differ fundamentally because their historic experience is different.
The Americans spiritually whole after cutting their ties in Europe; the Canadians refusing to cut those ties and thus spiritually split.
The Americans devoted to their written doctrines, fixed principles, self-evident truths, iron-clad Constitution and government by laws, not men; the Canadians sceptical of all theory, deliberately pragmatic and inconsistent in great concerns, compelled to live, hugger-mugger, by compromise in a society of two races, yet grimly attached to their curious institutions, their folkways and their Queen who happens to live in London.
The Americans lively, humorous, articulate excited, sertain of man's essential equality and truly democratic; the Canadians superficially stolid, apparently humorless, silent, unruffled, yet full of hot inner pride, always aware of man's inequality and convinced that democracy has its limitations.
Two poeple, infact, who have been exposed to the same American environment but sees it through divergent angles of refraction.
How many Ameri fact that no foreign : intimately, persistently and : the course of American history as a few million Canadians who only wished to only wished to be left along?
How many Canadians have grasped the fact that they have built their nation mainly by the consent and co-operation of the United Sates, despite its occasional gestures to the contrary; that Canada not only began as a child of the American Revolution but is viable today under American protection: and that if Canada cannot contract out of American power and American mistakes, yet no nation of its size and strength has ever received generous treatment from a giant on its undefended flank?
Such paradoxes have long roots. They come out of an endless adventure, a combination of men, geography, natural forces and sheer accident—the unbelievable story of the 49th parallel.
It is a story at first dominated by outsiders but essentially the story of peoples striving to subdue the American environment in their own separate fashion.
Though all the innumerable bunglers of Europe attempted to print the Old World's image on the New, the America nations quickly took their own from the earth around them.
When Frontenac gloatingly reported his massacres of New England settlers when LaSalle announced a new empire awaiting France on the Mississippi, and the La Verendrye brothers mistakenly registered their first sight of the Rockies, they wrote in French.
When Mackenzie recorded the white man's first crossing of the continent, when Simpson noted the secrets of the fur trade in his private code, when the Founding Fathers devised the American Constitution, they wrote in English>
All of them were thinking, unconsciously, in a language of new meanings.
Their minds had taken on an American dimension. They might regard themselves as transplant or Englishmen, but they had been transformed by the continental environment, by the wilderness and far places,by the spectacle of river, lake, prairie and mountain, by the very air, the fierce sun, the cruel winter, the loneliness of their land—and not least by their struggle to unify or divide it-