The column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Dec. 31, 1938.
I have before me a summary of the wars since 1918, and note the number is 20.
It is no use computing the number of deaths or the money spent. No use tracing the trouble back to its source — the men are dead. The money is gone. The damage is done, and there is no recompense for all this waste. The situation, is more disturbed that it was in 1914.
This being the case, it is hard to write bright and cheerful New Year’s message — to appear in print, on the last day of the year. We cannot view the year with complacency.
So I look around me for comfort. The lavender bed has a few late blooms, sweet still, with memories of clean towels and sheets. The winter jasmine hangs in yellow stars, defiant of wind and fog and frost. The snapdragons are still blooming. They never know when they have done enough.
A fog is rolling in from the sea, and I can hear a foghorn sounding hoarse and troubled. The cover crops are green. So are the laurels, and the fuchsia shrub still swings its tiny red lanterns. Raindrops bead the outstretched fingers of the monkeytrees.
The path to the sea is dripping wet today, but the smell of dead leaves and rotting wood, the green of the Oregon grape and the moss on the fallen logs comfort my heart. There’s peace in the heart of the deep woods when the wind makes a sighing in the treetops, gentle and wistful like the music of distant violins.
But that is not the stirring message that should be given at the close of the year, when the books are closed and the doors are shut in the house, and we sit here solemnly leafing over the ledger of life, to see what we have learned.
We might court the future, even at this late hour, by one small offering. There is still time to square a few accounts. If we owe the milkman, or have not paid the overdue postage to the mailman, we can get it ready tonight to lessen the fury of the gods, who sharpen their darts against those who enter the New Year with unpaid debts.
There is a matter of books, too, which lie on your shelves forgotten, while the owner searches for them in vain. These can be sought out and notes of apology written.
I have made only one resolve for the New Year. It concerns the business of talking. I am convinced there is too much of it. We are all pretty handy with the eight parts of speech. Talk is pleasant and neighbourly, but has one grave danger — it gives us a spurious feeling of having done something about the matters we discuss.
Just now the plight of the Jews in German is saddening everyone’s heart, and furnishes the topic of conversation all around the world. But much of the talk is useless, and worse, for it leads nowhere. The emotions are awakened and excited, and no outlet is given.
We, in Canada, can do something for the Jews. We have room that we will share. If we are true to the tradition of our ancestors, who never shut the door on a cold night against a homeless man.
The countries that give sanctuary to the Jews will not lose by it. The Jews make good settlers. They will go on the land. In Palestine they have shown that. In Blackwood’s Magazine for November, a British Army officer tells of the transformation they have brought there. There is evidence that they love the land.
Let us acquaint ourselves with the history of the Jew in our own country, and to this end a new book has just come to hand, Canadian Mosaic, by John Murray Gibbon, which has an illuminating chapter on the Jews in Canada. In it, he tells that the expedition in 1492 was probably financed by a Jew who hoped that Columbus might discover in the west a sanctuary for his people, who at that time were being persecuted in Spain.
He tells also of one of the farming districts in Canada, peopled by Jews at Edenbridge, Sask., which in 1906 was a wilderness of marshes and woods. In 1930, there were over 7,000 acres under crop, and the people are contented. A letter received by the Jewish Colonization Company from one of the farmers of Edenbridge reads like a Psalm of David.
Here is a portion of it:
“I sit on the plow and my eye is enchanted with the sight of the brown earth being turned upward furrow by furrow. Later, when one runs after the harrow, the work draws like a magnet. The field behind takes on another appearance. From a piece of coarse common cloth, it becomes like linen, and another stroke of the harrow makes it into velvet, silk, or a piece of smoothly polished furniture. It serves as an enchantment which prevents the feet from feeling tired.”
“And who can describe the rhythm of the binder, especially when you have feed enough for the horses, and the machine is in good repair. You sit up on the binder, and you become one with the machine, and the joyfulness of the horses passes through the binder to you, and you become a part of them. Should the field be good and the straw straight you cannot distinguish between the iron of the machine, the blood and bone of the horse, and the man!”
