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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.