Ohio History Journal

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GOOD WILL IN FIELDS OF PEACE

GOOD WILL IN FIELDS OF PEACE

 

By Louis BLAKE DUFF

 

We hear in these September days the clock of destiny click,

the clock of your destiny, the clock of Canadian destiny, the

clock of world destiny. A momentous month draws to a close.

In it your role and ours has been changed. By one stroke there

has been made a new relationship and may no evil fate ever dis-

turb it. There sprang up, overnight almost, a new doctrine that

the defense of the North American continent is one single defense,

and cannot be divided into a defense of Canada, and a defense

of the United States. Of the immediate practical value of fifty

destroyers to Great Britain (by the way we Canadians peeled

off half a dozen of them as they passed through), it is not

necessary to say anything. It is so self-evident. It is more

profitable to assess the moral gain. It was no mere bargaining

of bases for bottoms. It was a new, a most powerful, a most

striking symbol of the essential unity of the English-speaking

peoples. Proof again that though we travel each in our own way

it is to the same goal, guided by the same eternal stars of liberty,

of human freedom, of truth, of justice.

The greatest of all Britishers the other day made comment

on this new relationship of ours and yours. He did not view

the process with any misgivings. He had no wish to stop it.

"No one," he said, "can stop it." Like the Mississippi it "just

keeps rolling along."  Let it roll. Let it roll on in full flood,

inexorable, irresistible, to broader lands and better days. In those

words speaking for every son of Britain, for every Canadian, for

every citizen of the wide Empire he put the seal upon our new

relationship. We are all on the note. Long ago when he was

a young man the prime minister wrote a motto for his country.

It is so like him and so like his country! "In war--resolution;

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