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Women's Canadian Club. Toronto. 28th November, 1939.

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I have had the privilege of addressing Canadian Clubs up and down the Dominion, but this is the first time since I became Governor-General that I have addressed a Women's Canadian Club. But it was an old promise of mine to come one day to you in Toronto, and the fact that we are now at war makes no difference to that promise. Indeed, it makes it easier to fulfil. A Governor-General, as you know, is very limited in his choice of subjects. There are many matters on which he dare not touch, matters of controversy, above all, matters of party controversy. Politics in the ordinary sense are forbidden him, and that does not make it easier for a person like myself, who was a Member of Parliament at home, and to whom politics was a principal topic. So I am afraid - I am very much afraid - that in my many speeches since I came to Canada I may have sometimes bored my audience by harping on the same subjects. There is a story of a new minister in a Scottish village who preached his first sermon there, and an old woman in the congregation, a celebrated critic of sermons, was asked what she thought of him. Her answer was "I thoeht nothing of him. He was neither edifyin' or divertin' ". I fear that too often I have been neither edifying nor diverting!

But today there is one subject of profound topical interest on which a Governor-General is permitted to speak freely. It is the question of the war. He is at liberty to speak because whatever may be our differences of view on the incidents which led up to the

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war I fancy there is very little difference of opinion on the necessity of winning that war. Now that we are in it we have to see it through. The issues have clarified themselves into something very simple which anyone can understand. We and our Allies are fighting to maintain decency and order in the world. No one has put it better than Mr. Churchill when he described the present rulers of Germany as gangsters who are trying to shoot their way out with their loot through the "G" men of civilisation. If we were defeated it would mean the loss in life of most things that we hold dear. But we are not going to be defeated.

To win we must have the determination to win. We must have courage, and we must have hope. We must keep a stout heart. That applies not only to our armed forces, but to every man, woman, and child in this Dominion. In old days war was a contest of armies and navies. Today it is a contest of peoples. In the last war it was the breakdown of Germany's national morale lwhich led to her defeat. In this war it is the maintenance of our national morale, our civilian morale, which will bring us victory. I remember in the last war a famous French general who, whenever he prophesied ultimate victory, always added, "Provided the civilians stick it out" - Pourvu que les civiles tiennent.

So this afternoon I want to offer you a few reflections which should conduce, I think, to stoutness of heart and cheerfulness of spirit. We have to face great difficulties, but we have also great assets. We are living in a confused and tragic world, but from that very confusion and tragedy we may win certain shining bene-

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fits. Among old-fashioned people in Scotland I have often heard the advice given that when things look dark it is a good plan to "count your mercies". So I venture to offer for your consideration, and in order to cheer ourselves up, a few mercies which I think we can count.

II.

First, as a student of history I want to remind you that in our long history we have lived under skies equally dark, and our forefathers did not lose heart. There are one or two special cases to remember. In March 1918 Germany had no eastern front to fight on, for Russia was in chaos, Rumania and Serbia were prostrate, and Bulgaria and Turkey were on her side. She could move every man from the east against the Allies in the west. She could get supplies of food and oil from the east, certainly as easily as she can get them today. Her people had been living for more than three years under a heavy war strain, on narrow rations and with an insufficient supply of war material. She was, indeed, very much in the position then in which she has begun the present war. What happened? Well, she attacked violently in the west, and Britain and France went through a very trying time. Eventually the American armies were in the field beside us, and in seven months Germany was beaten to the ground. The situation of course is not quite the same today; today Germany has a powerful army of young men, and America is not in the field. But it was not only the pressure in the field that defeated Germany in 1918; it was even mroe the fact tht the long strain had told upon her internal morale, and that the nerve of her people broke. There is precisely the same

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danger for her today.

Then cast your mind back to the beginning of last century after the battle of Austerlitz, when the dying Pitt said, "Roll up the map of Europe." Russia had "run out" and was an ally of our enemies. The whole of Europe was against us, and it was under the iron heel of a great genius, Napoleon, compared to whom the present German leaders are the merest pygmies. But Britain did not lose heart. We stuck to our cause, we refused to make peace until tyranny had been defeated, and we won.

The truth is that we have come through many bad times, and often any able and public-spirited men have lost heart. Early in last century William Wilberforce thought the outlook for the country so dark that he refused to marry. In the 'forties Lord Shaftesbury, the great philanthropist, declared that "nothing could save the British Empire from shipwreck". And the Duke of Wellington just before his death thanked God that "he would be spared from seeing the consummation of ruin that was gathering round." But the ordinary citizen never took that view, and, because he did not, disaster never came.

But I do not want to refer merely to famous historical episodes. I want you to consider how hard and difficult life was in earlier times for our own people, and how in the darkest moments they never lost either their courage or their cheerfulness. The fact is that in our own day, and in our fathers' day, life had become unbelievably secure and easy - an ease and security which can scarcely be paralleled except perhaps for a few decades in the early Roman Empire.

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In the nineteenth century we thought this the normal state of affairs which was going to last for ever. But it has never been the normal state of affairs. Today in our troubles we are back again in what in history has not been the exception but the rule.

I need not remind you of the hard and dangerous life which your own forefathers had here in Canada, dangers arising from the savagery of man and the cruelty of nature. It is instructive to read the record of some of the earlier settlers here and across the border, and to compare it with the kind of conditions we live under now.

But I want you to look further back in history. Even the most unfortunate of us at the present time have an easier and safe life than the most fortunate of our forefathers. As you know, all through the Middle Ages Europe was ravaged by wars and pestilence. Do you realise that in one of the visitations of the Black Death two-thirds of the whole population died? Right up to the last century epidemics were to be looked for every few years, and there were very imperfect methods of dealing with them. Let us take the seventeenth century in England - a great century in our history. All through it there were wars on the Continent of Europe, in some of which we were engaged, and which constantly threatened to extend to our shores. In the course of it we had ten years of civil war in England and in Scotland, and there is no more terrible kind of war. Also, every few years there was an epidemic of disease - different kinds of plague, typhoid, small pox, dysentery, and a mysterious thing called the "sweating sickness". Every now and then people had