2110-7-9-9

COPY

Government House, Ottawa

24th March, 1936.

The Rt. Honble Stanley Baldwin, M. P. 10, Downing Street, London. S.W.l.

My dear Stanley,

It was a great pleasure to me to get your letter of 10th March. This line is merely by way of salutation and good wishes, for you must have been having a terrible time in recent weeks. We have all be thinking a great deal about you. Canada has been stirred out of her apathy about international affairs, and has been really anxious. I do hope it may be the beginning of some serious attempt on Canada's part to consider her whole international and imperial position.

Meantime we have plenty of problems of our own, some of them quite big; but I feel rather like a Scots laird at the end of the eighteenth century, who cultivated his estate in the wilds of Sutherland, while Pitt and Fox and Burke were hard at it in the House of C'ommons, and the Revolution was blazing away in France. It is uncommonly easy to slip into the parochial habit of mind.

I think Canada is doing pretty well. Three mornings in the week I hold a reception at my room at the House, and I am greatly flattered by the way Members want to come and see me - Members of every group. I fancy that they are more confidential and

2.

frank with me than they are with their own leaders, for my office is now blessedly free of any ordinary political colouring. Then every evening between tea and dinner I give to seeing young men - also of every type; and uncommonly good most of them are. There is a yeast working in youth here, which I did not find on my last visit. These boys are also very confidential with me, for they have no one else to go to, and I hope I may be of same use to them.

We had a wonderful tour a fortnight ago in Quebec, where I had to make a terrible number of speeches in bad French! But I think I got fairly near the French-Canadian mind, and they certainly gave me a splendid welcome. They are a most valuable element in Canadian life, and if we do not possess it we would have to invent it, for, with all its parochialism and clericalism, it is an influence both for stability and gentility.

Then we have had a big conference of mining people , which I have addressed, and I have also had many talks with its members. Mining is Canada's chief asset at present, and its practitioners are the salt of the earth. I have always had a passion for travel and exploration, and I think I may be able to do some good work in awakening Canada to the real meaning of its possessions in the northern wilds. Our biggest problem here is the way everybody thinks in compartments. This will go on, I fear, until Canada gets some national leader who will really touch its imagination, and that can only be a gift of the gods.

3.

I am amusing myself by going on, at odd moments, with my book on [underline]Augustus[/underline]. It is extraordinary how that great man , the only dictator who ever kept his head, anticipated so many things in the modern world. A good deal of Mussolini's corporative state comes straight out of his policy - only badly misinterpreted.

The spring is just beginning and the birds are coming back, which is a great comfort to me, for, as you know, I am a crazy ornithologist. In a few weeks I shall begin to get some fishing.

My eldest boy, whose coming-of-age dinner you attended, has been invalided back from Uganda with dysentery, but they seem to have got him pretty well cured at home, and he is coming out in a fortnight to convalesce here.

May every blessing go with you, for at this moment you and Anthony have the future of civilization in your hands.

Yours ever , (signed ) JOHN.