On the whole, there have been enough good poems, histories, and essays, written and published in Canada during the last four or five decades, to prove that there has been a steady intellectual growth on the part of the Canadian people, and that it has kept pace at all events with the mental growth in the pulpit, or in the legislative halls, where, of late years, a keen practical debating style has taken the place of the more rhetorical and studied oratory of old times. The intellectual faculties of Canadians only require larger opportunities for their exercise to bring forth rich fruit. The progress in the years to come will be much greater than that Canadians have yet shown, and necessarily so, with the wider distribution of wealth, the dissemination of a higher culture, and a greater confidence in their own mental strength, and in the opportunities that the country offers to pen and pencil. What is now wanted is the cultivation of a good style and artistic workmanship.
Much of the daily literature of Canadians--indeed the chief literary aliment of large numbers--is the newspaper press, which illustrates necessarily the haste, pressure and superficiality of writings of that ephemeral class. Canadian journals, however, have not yet descended to the degraded sensationalism of New York papers, too many of which circulate in Canada to the public detriment. On the whole, the tone of the most ably conducted journals--the Toronto _Globe_, and the Montreal _Gazette_ notably--is quite on a level with the tone of debate in the legislative bodies of the country.
Now, as in all times of Canada's history, political life claims many strong, keen and cultured intellects, though at the same time it is too manifest that the tendency of democratic conditions and heated party controversy is to prevent the most highly educated and sensitive organisations from venturing on the agitated and unsafe sea of political passion and competition. The speeches of Sir Wilfrid Laurier--the eloquent French Canadian premier, who in his mastery of the English tongue surpasses all his versatile compatriots--of Sir Charles Tupper, Mr. Foster and others who might be mentioned, recall the most brilliant period of parliamentary annals (1867--1873), when in the first parliament of the Dominion the most prominent men of the provinces were brought into public life, under the new conditions of federal union. The debating power of the provincial legislative bodies is excellent, and the chief defects are the great length and discursiveness of the speeches on local as well as on national questions. It is also admitted that of late years there has been a tendency to impair the dignity and to lower the tone of discussion.