True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff Page B

parish pump or the province. Canada itself was always a dream for him, never just a reality. It achieved grandeur in his mind when it took its place in a larger design.
    These conceptions were no abstraction. He was a man who lived ideals to the full. He never had a vision but set out immediately to experience it in practice. In 1887, worn out by a decade of work at Queen’s, he was rewarded with a sabbatical, and he took it in a typically ambitious form: a world tour of the British Empire.
    The tour took him to Scotland, of course, but also to his home away from home, the Colonial Institute on Northumberland Avenue near Trafalgar Square in London. There he met all the worthies who believed in imperial federation, the ruling idea of the last decades of his life. The federation he sought would leave the dominions in full possession of their domestic independence and sovereignty and, in addition, would give Canada a stronger voice in world affairs because it would have a seat at a federal imperial parliament with jurisdiction over foreign affairs, defence and transportation. Grant was by then a sufficiently senior propagandist in this cause to gain the confidence of British politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain, who were then promoting imperial federation in the British Parliament.
    The empire for Grant was both a cause and the most exclusive club to which a provincial Canadian could ever belong. As he prepared to sail for Cape Town, he collected letters of introduction from the leaders of the imperialist cause to their counterparts in the other British colonies. Shipowners gave him free passage around the world on their steamers, so great was the prestige then associated with his cause. Everyone received him, including the greatest living custodian of the English language itself, Dr. James Murray, directing the compilation of the first edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, in a scriptorium—a greenhouse-like shed—constructed in the back garden of his Oxford house.Murray sought Grant’s assistance with Canadian terms and idioms, though we do not learn what they were.
    Globalization was well underway in Grant’s time. Letters from Kingston, Ontario, could reach London, England, in two weeks. Grant could tell his wife to write him care of the governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa and expect to have the letters awaiting his arrival, three weeks later. The ship that took him south of the equator was carrying frozen New Zealand carcasses of lamb. Sandford Fleming was organizing a global time system, based on the Greenwich meridian, to bring coherence to railway timetables, ship sailings and all the other activities that needed to be coordinated through standard time in a global economy. The leading technologies of the day—such as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, then just entering commercial application—were already pointing the way to undersea cables, and Fleming was already envisaging their use as a way to link the empire in instantaneous communication. This was globalization with a very reassuring face, not under the sovereignty of a market, with a centre everywhere and nowhere, obeying no laws but its own, but a globalization under the sovereignty of a queen, a flag and a navy, a globalization advancing under the language of Shakespeare and under the benediction of a Protestant God.
    If other empires were then joining in the scramble for resources and possessions, if Britain was actually fastapproaching imperial twilight, nothing gave George Grant any sign of this. As he travelled into the southern latitudes, dining at the captain’s table, conducting Sunday service for passengers in the lounge, pacing the decks at night, with the stars above and the ship rolling beneath his feet, he wrote home to Jessie and confessed, a little shamefacedly, that he had never felt so well in his life.
    The trip was a stupendous adventure encompassing South Africa, Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines