I doubt very much if I can effectively shovel any more platitudes on the huge heap of them that have been piled on Canadian-American relations in the past. I will, however, do my best to produce a few more. I have been lured on to this platform by nothing more worthy than personal vanity, and, since accepting the invitation, I have been regretting my weakness. There is nothing I can add to this subject that has not been said, in one or another form, a score, a hundred times, before. Yet here I am, pretending to have a thesis, and I suppose I had better produce one.

What I have to say, such as it is, is addressed to persons my own age or older, and I was 59 last April. Younger persons, or most of them, will wonder what all the shouting is about—if there is any shouting; and I would suggest to the programme committee of this association that they might consider having a repetition of this paper next year, or the year after, read to them by somebody who is 29, and not 59 years of age. The effect, at least on the older members, might be salutary and perhaps even startling.

The reason why I make this suggestion is that I was brought up in an old school, a school which thought about Canadian-American relations in a context very different from that which has become necessary now. It was a school in which one of the great teachers was John W. Dafoe, who was my master for 20 years and whose memory I will honour for whatever years are left to me. But the cardinal thesis of that school was that, at all costs, Canada had to fight its way out from under the traditional influence of British imperialist and colonial rule; and that one of the best ways of doing it was to use the influence of the United States as a counter-balance against the pressure from Westminster.