2110-19-3-2

Toronto

Address in reply to the Acting-Prime Minister of Ontario. November, 1935

Sir, I would ask you to accept on your own behalf, and on behalf of your colleagues in the Government of Ontario, our warmest thanks for your most generous words of greeting. It might well fire the imagination of any lover of history to be so welcomed by the representatives of a great province, which, in its time, has made so much history. From the earliest days of the French pioneers, through the long story of Indian wars and frontier quarrels, through the heroic days of 1812, and down through later times, when history was made, not on the battlefield, but in Parliament and Convention, Ontario has a record of which she may well be proud. She has drawn to her the best stocks of the New World and of the Old - the heroic band of United Empire Loyalists, the cream of English and Irish settlers, and my own folk in the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands - so that she is, in a full sense, today a miniature of the British Empire. She has produced many men famous in Canadian and Imperial history, and many notable leaders in the spheres of commerce and scholarship and science. Your boundaries run from the temperate shores of the Great Lakes far into the distant North, so that you have that priceless asset for a nation, great tracts which still await development and still call for the adventurer.

I thank you most sincerely, Sir, for your kindly words about my wife and myself. My knowledge of Canada is still slight but my appetite for further knowledge is immense. I look forward with enthusiasm and delight to my time of office here when, as Canadian by adoption, I can get to know you better.