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books which have been selected by some committee of pundits. Still, reading should have the purpose of satisfying an eager curiosity and not of killing time. Too many of us confine ourselves to devouring novels. Novels, no doubt, are excellent things - I am not very good at reading them, though I occasionally write them - but an exclusive diet of novels is like making your dinner off hors d 'oeuvres and the wafers which are served with ices. The right kind of curiosity and the right kind of intellectual vitality demands a good deal more. I believe a voracious taste in books is the proper thing to cultivate. I do not mean that we should not read critically, but that is only one side of reading. Becausae you can discriminate between the finest vintage clarets there is no reason why you should not also like beer, and there are occasions when beer is a more acceptable drink than claret. The kind of reader I would hold up for your imitation is someone like Charles Lamb, to whom hardly any book came amiss, or like my old friend Professor Saintsbury, who could extract nutriment alike from Divina Commedia and from the Newgate Calendar.
What I have said, of course, is especially true about old books, because there, in the process of time, there has been a kind of winnowing, so that what remains is certain to have some kind of value. But I should like to see the same catholic point of view applied to the reading of new books. New books have this special advantage - one is an adventurer among them, one has to find out merits for oneself, with none of the snobbery of reputed classics to guide one. We have to back our fancy. A great deal of fun is to
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be got by having no guides, but doing our ovm pearl fishing for ourselves. No doubt we shall get a great many empty shells, but when we do find something that pleases us we have the delight of the discoverer.
I have suggested to you some of the things that will be part of your new campaign. It is a campaign which seems to me of vital importance to the future of this land of ours. There is a famous passage in a speech of Disraeli's when he was Lord Rector of Glasgow. "A civilised community," he said, "must rest on a large realised capital of thought and sentiment; there must be a reserved fund to draw upon in the exigencies of national life. Society has a soul as well as a body ... Its valour and its discipline, its venerable laws, its science and erudition, its poetry, its art, its eloquence, and its scholarship are as much portions of its life as its agriculture, its commerce and its engineering skill." There is no such thing as a steady advance towards material prosperity, if we have no other object before us than material prosperity. To attain that we have to shape our tools, and the chief tool is a vigilant national spirit and an acute and intelligent national mind. A. It is to that great purpose that your work is directed, and I and every lover of Canada must wish you God speed.
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The following is to be included towards the end on page 7 - marked A.
I am happily forbidden to speak about politics, but there is one political ideal that I have cherished all my life, which, indeed is outside parties for it is held by men of every party - that is the ideal of a property-owning democracy. There is a phrase which our fathers used to use, which I have always liked- "a man of means". I want to see everyone a man of means - the means to realise his personality and his freedom. But such means must be spiritual as well as material; the property must not be only a physical thing, but a possession of the mind. A property-owning democracy must be based upon an educated democracy.
