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350 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
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“The infrequency of intercourse between the two peoples is illustrated in Canada’s largest city, Montreal. About 63 per cent of the population is French and 24 per cent British. Here, if anywhere, is ample scope for association, but in fact they remain apart and distinct except where business and politics force them together. They have their own residential sections; their own shopping centres, and if either is more notable for racial reserve, it is the English.”
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“The English-speaking residents of Montreal, as a whole, have made no effort to know their French-speaking fellow citizens, to learn their language, to understand their traditions and their aspirations, to observe with a keen eye and a sympathetic mind their qualities and their defects. The separation of the two peoples is encouraged by the barrier of language. There is a wealth of significance in the fact revealed by the census of 1921; viz., that about 50 per cent, of the Canadians of French origin were unable to speak English and 95 per cent, of those of British origin were unable to speak French. Even in Montreal, 70 per cent of the British could not speak French and 34 per cent, of the French could not speak English. The absence of a common language maintains a chasm between the two nationalities and prevents fusion.
“The significance of Confederation is that it provided an instrument of government which enabled the French, while retaining their distinct national life, to become happy partners with the British and attain a Canadian super-nationality, embracing a loyalty extending beyond their own group to that of the Dominion as a whole.”
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“While the federal system successfully opened the path for a wider nationality in Canada, the co-operation which it sponsored has at times been subjected to severe strain by the violent clash of opinion between the French and the British. The super-nationality has indeed often been reduced to a shadow.”
What about South Africa ? Let those who do not know the relationship between the Boers and the British ponder over what Mr. E.H. Brooks* has to say :—
“How far is South African nationalism common to both the white races of South Africa ? There is, of course, a very real and intense Afrikander nationalism ; but it is, generally speaking, a sentiment confined to one of the white races, and characterised, significantly enough, by a love of the Afrikans language, the tongue of the early settlers from Holland, as modified slightly by Huguenot and German influence, and greatly by the passage of time. Afrikander nationalism has a tendency to be exclusive, and has little place for the man who, while in every way a devoted son of South Africa, is wholly or mainly English-speaking.”
- The Political Future of South Africa, 1927.