Quotes from Richard Gwyn

The military, moreover, made one major cultural breakthrough: on the frozen lake, members of the Royal Canadian Rifles developed, by hit and miss and bump and grind, a new game using skates, field hockey sticks and a lacrosse ball.

In fact, Herman never resolves satisfactorily why this achievement should have happened in the particular society of Scotland, so small and backward. The nearest he comes is to argue that, after union with England in 1707, Scottish intellectuals had to cope with the challenge, today common, of "deal[ing] with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one's own heritage and oneself with it.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith unveiled one of the most liberating of modern ideas—that the interests of the community could be advanced better by the self-interest than by the "benevolence" of the butcher, the baker and all the other upwardly clambering capitalists.

Hume decreed that "Liberty is the perfection of society," but believed equally that "authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom's] very existence.

Nor were there many nation-builders like him in his day: Bismarck, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Simón Bolívar. His achievement may have been the more demanding because none of the others had to create a country out of a crazy quilt.

Within the range of Macdonald's accomplishments, there are sizable gaps. The largest, surely, is that, unlike Lincoln, he never appealed to people's "better angels." He was a doer, not a thinker, although highly intelligent and omnivorously well read. He lacked the certitudes of a moralist, instead taking human nature as he found it and turning it to his purposes.

And although he was in no way the first to use patronage and election funds for partisan purposes—a cherished and well-embedded Canadian tradition (which still thrives)—Macdonald gave the practice credibility and durability by his masterful exercise of it. That's a shoddy legacy for the father of a country to leave behind.