Sensible and Sane, Albeit a Century Old, Words from the Left on Immigration

I am, as you may be aware, neither a fan nor a friend of either liberalism or the left. If forced to choose between the two, I would pick the classical, nineteenth century, form of liberalism – individual rights, economic freedom, limits on government – over the left any day, but my instincts have always been conservative, that is to say, inclined towards order, tradition, and institutions that have been tested, proven, and honoured by time. A Tory is a specific kind of conservative, for whom the most cherished of time-honoured institutions are royal monarchy in the political sphere and the Apostolic Church in the religious sphere. Politically, I have been a Tory all my life, and as my theology has developed in a high church direction over the years, I have become so religiously as well. Unlike liberalism and leftism, neither conservatism nor Toryism, properly understood, is an ideology – a formula that purports to provide the political solution to all our problems. Indeed, the conservative and Tory are fundamentally anti-ideological, respecting the lesson of the past, that institutions, tested and proved by time, are to be trusted, over the formulations of intellectuals, however well-intentioned, for these never deliver the Paradise on earth they promise and more often than not do a great deal of harm in the name of doing good.

The non-ideological bent of the conservative and Tory allows him both to reject the foolishness and nonsense of liberalism and the left and to acknowledge the rare occasion when an idea coming from those quarters has merit. While, as indicated above, in my eyes nineteenth century liberalism produced more such ideas than any form of leftism then or since, I believe in giving credit where credit is due. While I disagreed with the late editor of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn on the vast majority of matters, I thought he was dead on right when it came to his opposition to American military interventionism in the Balkans and the Middle East. The late Gore Vidal had a lot of sensible things to say on such matters as well. Although I don’t agree with much that Noam Chomsky has to say when it comes to politics, his analysis of how the mass media shapes and limits thought in democratic societies is essential reading and I have always respected the consistency of his stand for free speech. Whereas most liberals and leftists switch from free speech mode, when they are defending subversives and terrorists, to become censorious witch hunters when anyone touches their sacred cow, the Holocaust, Chomsky, a consistent advocate of free speech, defended French professor Robert Faurisson, braving the wrath of loud mouthed fools on both the left and right to do so.

Admittedly, I find it easier to give credit to leftists for good ideas when those ideas are left over from a Tory upbringing. The Honourable Eugene A. Forsey, although raised a MacDonald-Meighan Conservative, was for the most part of his life a man of the left, a social democrat who, before accepting a seat in the Senate as a Liberal, had worked for both the labour movement and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Despite this, and through all of this, he remained a man of deep Christian principles, and a patriotic defender of our country’s constitution, parliamentary monarchy, Common Law legal system, and traditional heritage and symbols, for which I admire and respect him. Other prominent Canadian social democrats who to one degree or another shared Forsey’s residual conservatism included Tommy Douglas, Stanley Knowles, and even, at least on the point of the monarchy, the late Jack Layton.

I say all of this by way of introduction to the following essay, which looks at an early twentieth-century leader of the Canadian left, who expressed sensible views that are completely verboten among the left of the present day, on the subject of immigration. Consider this quotation:

When it has become necessary in the United States to form an Immigration Restriction League, it is surely high time that we examined closely the character of our immigration, and shut out those whose presence will not make for the welfare of our national life.

These words are the opening paragraph to chapter twenty-one, entitled “Restriction of Immigration”, in Strangers Within Our Gates: Or Coming Canadians, originally published in 1909, the author of which was the Rev. James Shaver Woodsworth, a Methodist minister who at the time was superintendent of All People’s Mission in Winnipeg, an outreach ministry that worked with the poor and especially new immigrants. Woodsworth would later be elected to Parliament as the representative of Winnipeg North. He ran as a socialist, initially for the Independent Labour Party, later for the CCF of which he was the first leader. The CCF was a party that combined prairie populism with social democracy, and which was undergirded by the theology of the Social Gospel. While that theology is not sound from the perspective of historical, traditional, and Scriptural orthodoxy, the CCF outlook was much to be preferred over the hard-left, secular Marxist, ultra-politically correct perspective of its successor, today’s NDP.

Woodsworth went on in the next paragraph to quote approvingly two American Presidents, including Roosevelt (Theodore) who said “We cannot have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind. The need is to devise some system by which undesirable immigrants shall be kept out entirely while desirable immigrants are properly distributed throughout the country.”

Can you imagine Jagmeet Singh or anyone in the party he leads quoting anything that sensible approvingly today?

Woodsworth contrasted the way Canada “eager to secure immigrants, has adopted the system of giving bonuses” with the way the United States “levies a head tax that more than defrays the cost of inspection.” In other words, we were paying for our immigration, the United States was making it pay for itself. He then quoted extensively from the Immigration Act of 1906, specifically clauses 26 through 33. Clauses 26 through 29 prohibited the immigration of anyone who “is feeble-minded, an idiot, or an epileptic, or who is insane, or who has had an attack of insanity within five years…is deaf and dumb, blind or infirm, unless he belongs to a family accompanying him or already in Canada”, “who is afflicted with a loathsome disease, or with a disease which is contagious or infectious, and which may become dangerous to the public health or widely disseminated”, “who is a pauper, or destitute, a professional beggar, or vagrant, or who is likely to become a public charge”, “ who has been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude, or who is a prostitute, or who procures, or brings or attempts to bring into Canada prostitutes or women for purposes of prostitution.” Clause 30 authorized the Governor-in-Council to further prohibit “any special class of immigrants” when deemed necessary, and clauses 31 to 33 specify the procedures whereby all of this is to be enforced. After quoting all of this material Woodsworth commented:

No one will quarrel with the provisions of this Act, but it should go further, and provision should be made for more strict enforcement.

Among his suggestions for improving the Act, are the prohibition of other classes that were then barred from immigrating to the United States – “polygamists; anarchists, or persons who believe in, or advocate, the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States, or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials” etc., - and “the prohibition or careful selection of assisted immigrants.” Take note of the latter, which he says “is of the greatest importance.” Rather than prohibit or carefully select assisted immigrants, the new immigration regulations of 1967 do the exact opposite of this and make the sponsorship of immigrants into a backdoor by which the requirements of the points system that these regulations introduced can be bypassed altogether.

As far as provision “for more strict enforcement” goes, Woodsworth says the following:

The trouble is that we are working at the wrong end. The examination in every case should be not at the ports of entry, but at the ports from which the immigrants sail – or better still at the homes from which they come. Such a course would be at once kinder to the immigrants and much safer for our country…Again, the examination where the people are known is the only effective method. Diseased, paupers, criminals, prostitutes and undesirables generally are known in their home neighborhood…The Canadian Government should insist on the immigrant presenting a satisfactory certificate from the Government officials of his own country. If the foreign governments would not co-operate, if they are too despotic or corrupt to make such an arrangement practicable, then we should appoint our own agents in Europe who would make most thorough investigation.

As with the careful selection of assisted immigrants, a major problem with the post-1967 immigration system is that we have gone in the exact opposite direction of what Woodworth proposed. Until then, a prospective immigrant had to go to a Canadian visa officer in one of our embassies, consulates, or High commissions abroad, and apply from outside of Canada. In October of 1967, a regulation was passed waiving this requirement and allowing legal visitors to Canada to apply from within the country. Charles M. Campbell, who served on the Immigration Appeal Board for ten years, eight as vice-chairman, explained that this, together with the establishment of the Immigration Appeal Board and the right to appeal a negative decision, led to the situation in the early 1970s where the system was completely swamped. Since this change had been made by regulation and was not part of an actual Immigration Act it was easily repealed in 1973, about the time that the Liberal government passed a general amnesty to deal with the backlog. It was only on paper, however, that we went back to the old rules. Today, the right to apply from within Canada is supposedly limited to select groups, like spouses of Canadians, but in reality, this is nullified both by the absurdity that “outland applications” can be made from within Canada and by the policy of making broad exceptions for “humanitarian and compassionate” reasons.

Woodsworth’s ideas would make him persona non grata today in the successor to the party he once led, as well as in the Green, Liberal, and, sadly, Conservative Parties. They are, however, basic plain sense. Governments are established for the common good of the countries they govern, not for the common good of all people, everywhere. Until quite recently, only American liberals with their naïve notion of their republic as the “first universal nation” were foolish enough to think otherwise. Governments, therefore, owe it to the countries they govern, and the people who already live in those countries, to be selective as to who they let in. It is their duty, not just their right, to allow desirable immigrants in and keep undesirables out. Those who disagree with this will try to argue that “desirable” and “undesirable” are entirely subjective and based upon irrational prejudice, but it is pretty obvious that the classes Woodsworth speaks of as undesirable – those who are subversive of government, law and order, criminals, or who because of poverty or mental or physical conditions are more likely to be public expenses than contributors – are objectively undesirable from the standpoint of a government looking out for its nation’s interests.

Today, the first, and usually only, response of the liberal-left to those who call for selective, restrictive, immigration that lets the desirables in but keeps the undesirables out is “racist.” This is their response even if the immigration restrictionist has gone out of his way to avoid bringing race, ethnicity, and culture into his arguments. Rev. Woodsworth had the following to say about this aspect of the immigration question, speaking specifically to immigration from Asia:

The advocates for admission argue that we ought not to legislate against a particular class or nation, and that the Orientals are needed to develop the resources of the country. Their opponents believe that white laborers cannot compete with Orientals, that the standard of living will be lowered, and white men driven out, and they claim that a nation has the right to protect itself… Perhaps, for some time, the presence of a limited number of Orientals may be advantageous. But it does seem that the exclusionists are right in their contention that laborers working and living as the Orientals do, will displace European laborers. It is generally agreed that the two races are not likely to ‘mix.’ Ultimately, then, the question resolves itself into the desirability of a white caste and a yellow, or black caste, existing side by side, or above and below, in the same country. We confess that the idea of a homogenous people seems in accord with our democratic institutions and conducive to the general welfare. This need not exclude small communities of black or red or yellow peoples. It is well to remember that we are not the only people on earth. The idealist may still dream of a final state of development, when white and black and red and yellow shall have ceased to exist, or have become merged into some neutral gray. We may love all men, and yet prefer to maintain our family life.

These words, written a hundred and ten years ago by the man who went on to lead the Canadian left for the first half of the twentieth century, would immediately bring down the charge of racism upon their author’s head today. Thirty years ago, the ideas contained in those words were enough to get people kicked out of the Reform Party of Canada, and indeed, as far back as 1972, when the University of Toronto Press put out the reprint edition that I have been quoting, they saw a need to stick an introduction by Marilyn Barber, explaining away Woodsworth as a product of his times.

While there are those who would say that this is a positive development, showing that we have come a long way as a society, and are so much more enlightened now than we were a century ago, the reality is that accusations of racism have, since the late 1960s, been primarily a means for stifling discussion, discouraging rational thought, and silencing dissent to ideas that could not bear up under scrutiny for a second.

Is it racist to take questions of race, culture, nationality, religion, and ethnicity into consideration in selecting immigrants?

Before giving the knee-jerk answer of “yes”, note that there is more than one way in which these questions can be taken into consideration. A government could make it its policy to preserve its country’s ethnic status quo and so refuse to admit immigrants that would alter that status quo. A government could make it its policy to ignore these matters altogether in selecting immigrants. A third possibility is that a government could make it its policy to deliberately and radically alter its country’s ethnic status quo by discriminating in favour of immigrants who differ from the majority of its population and bringing as many of them in as fast as it possibly can. Let us call these Options 1, 2, and 3.

Option 2 is the only policy that is racially and ethnically neutral. It is, therefore, the least susceptible to the charge of being racist. Option 1 is the policy that is most frequently condemned as racist. Of the two non-racially neutral policies, however, it is the only one that can be defended morally. The known negative effects of altering a country’s ethnic status quo include a weakening of social cohesion and communal feeling, a decrease in confidence in one’s neighbours, fellow citizens, government, and society, and, perhaps ironically, an increase in racial and ethnic negative feeling, hostility and strife. When, just over ten years ago, Harvard political scientist, Robert D. Putnam, published a paper, originally a lecture, that interpreted data that he had gathered in a study on the relationship between diversity and social capital as saying that “In the short run…immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital” and that in diverse neighbourhoods “residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’” and that “Trust, (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer,” he was not telling us anything that had not already been known and recognized from time immemorial. If you introduce one or two newcomers into a homogenous community who differ from the majority ethnically, they may indeed have the much lauded effect of improving the community in the way that is often expressed in the cooking metaphor of adding flavor or spice. This effect decreases, however, in inverse proportion, as the diversity increases. There is a relatively low saturation point – decades ago, Daniel Cappon of York University’s Department of Environmental Studies told the Globe and Mail that the “critical mass” was ten percent – beyond which, the negative effects of ethnic diversification take over. The larger the change and the faster it is accomplished the greater will be these negative effects. The wish to avoid these negative effects is sufficient reason and justification for Option 1, the policy of preserving the status quo. It requires neither irrational racial prejudice nor some ideological notion of racial purity – just plain, old-fashioned, sense.

Over the course of her history, the government of the Dominion of Canada has gone through three basic phases with regards to these policy options. From 1867 to 1962, Option 1 was reflected in federal immigration policy. This was true regardless of which party was in power, Conservative or Liberals, and, as we have seen, it had a supporter in the first leader of the CCF as well. In 1962, Ellen Fairclough the Minister of Immigration in the Cabinet of the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker, introduced what was basically a combination of Options 1 and 2. Racial, cultural, and ethnic preferences were eliminated for individuals applying to immigrate to Canada, but the rules which prohibited people from countries other than traditional source countries from sponsoring their extended families were retained. This reflected the thinking of the Prime Minister at the time, who wanted to be fair and non-discriminatory to individuals, Option 2, without radically changing the country’s demographics, Option 1. This, arguably the best of the phases, was also the most short-lived. It lasted until 1966-1967. In 1966 the Liberal government put out a White Paper recommending a new Immigration Act that would radically overhaul the immigration system. In October of the following year that overhaul took place, albeit through a change of regulations by Order-in-Council, as Diefenbaker’s changes had been, rather than through the new Immigration Act, which came nine years later. Thus began the phase of practicing Option 3 while pretending that it is Option 2 that has continued to this day. If Diefenbaker’s policy combined the first two options in the best possible way, this was and is the worst possible combination.

Here is how this was accomplished. The new regulations in October 1967, first, established the points system by which individuals now apply to immigrate to Canada, and second, eliminated the remaining racial and cultural restrictions so that everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, and culture could sponsor the same number and range of relatives. On paper, this looks like pure Option 2. The points-system, on its own merits, is quite fair. The prospective immigrant is awarded points towards entry for his ability to speak English and/or French, his level of education, his skilled experience in a trade for which there is a need of labourers, his age (maximum points for 21-49), his having an offer of employment in Canada, and miscellaneous similar factors. The problem is that two large back doors were put in place by which the points system can be bypassed. This is how Option 3 was snuck in and disguised as Option 2.

One of those backdoors is the sponsorship of relatives. Assisted or sponsored relatives, do not have to meet the strict requirements of the points system like individuals who apply on their own merits. In traditional source countries, the trend for the last couple of centuries has been towards the small, nuclear, model of the family. Couples have fewer children than before, and their ties to extended family – relatives beyond the nuclear model – are much weaker than they were before the Second World War, let alone prior to the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, in non-traditional source countries, the tendency is still towards large families, with many children, and strong, binding, ties to the extended family. This is not said by way of criticism of those cultures. Indeed, as I have argued in the past, in the modern transition to the nuclear model we can see the early stages of the social unravelling of the West and the “war on the family.” The point is that people from non-traditional source countries will be far more likely to want to bring a huge number of relatives over with them than people from traditional source countries, and both the Diefenbaker Conservatives and the Pearson-Trudeau Liberals, knew this. This is why the former, not wanting the country to be radically and rapidly transformed, retained racial and cultural restrictions on sponsoring relatives when they removed the other racial and cultural preferences. This is why the later, removed those restrictions. It is not that they wanted to be fully racially and ethnically neutral in their policy. They wanted to make Canada as diverse as they could, as fast as they could – Option 3 – while pretending to be neutral – Option 2. When they passed their new Immigration Act in 1976, the emphasis was on “family reunification”, by which wording Canadians were sold a bill of goods. A streamlined immigration application process for the purpose of family reunification makes sense when we are talking about bringing in the spouses and children of Canadians who have married abroad. What the Trudeau Liberals meant by it was making it easier and quicker for people from the Third World to bring their entire extended families into the country so as to change the country’s demographics – or, as the Liberals themselves put it, “change the face of Canada” – as fast as possible. This is not a racially neutral policy, nor is it a policy that has Canada’s interests at heart.

Remember that Rev. Woodworth said that “the prohibition or careful selection of assisted immigrants is of the greatest importance.”

The other backdoor is the refugee system. We had foolishly signed the United Nations’ Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, giving that body, established by an evil and insane American President as a monument to his own ego, the General Assembly of which exists only to provide a soapbox for the voices of every tin-pot dictatorship, military junta, kleptocracy, and failed state on the planet, the Security Council of which exists merely to rubber stamp the decisions of the American government, the right to dictate our refugee policy. Unlike the other signers, however, we have used the Convention as an excuse to make ourselves the laughing stock of the world, by pretending that illegal aliens are asylum seekers who have a “right” to cross our borders without going through the proper channels, and accepting a high percentage of “self-selected” refugees, of whom only a very small percentage are actually fleeing for their lives. Chapter seven, “How Canada Fails Refugees”, of Toronto writer, Daniel Stoffman’s, Who Gets In, is a must read on this matter. Stoffman shows how our corrupt refugee system, which primarily serves to line the pockets of immigration and refugee lawyers, actually makes it harder for real refugees to get in, by showing preference for the fakes and frauds. Reforms were made after this book was published but these all went out the window when Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in 2015 and the system is now worse than it ever was before. Trudeau, a supporter of the previous American administration’s policy of intervention in Syria that produced a Civil War that has killed half a million people and displaced millions of others, insists that we have a responsibility to bring those who have been displaced over here. Sensible people would question the sanity of bringing thousands of people, whom you have helped murder and displace with your irresponsible interventionism, and who would have cause to hold a grudge against you even if they were not predominantly of a religion in which holy war is one of the core tenets, over to live in your own country. Especially, when you promise to bring them over in such large numbers and such a short period of time that you cannot possibly vet them properly. The folly of all of this has been matched only by its corruption – the Trudeau government did not go to actual refugee camps to find the “asylum seekers” it brought over, but rather found the majority of them in apartment buildings in cities in Turkey, Jordan, Oman, and Lebanon where they had been living for years and bribed them to come over and get their picture taken with Trudeau before being put into refugee camps here!

Through these two large back doors, Option 3 became Canada’s official immigration policy, under the guise of practicing Option 2. While it was the Pearson-Trudeau Liberals who started this, it has remained the policy of our government ever since, even in the periods in which the Mulroney and Harper Conservatives were in power. That Option 3 was intentional on the part of the Grits is evident from the results. At the start of Pierre Trudeau’s premiership, English Canadians, French Canadians, and white ethnics, taken together, compromised over 95% of Canada’s population. If trends continue, they will be a minority in Canada in 2050. A change that large does not happen that fast unintentionally. Perhaps those who introduced this phase of Canadian immigration policy did not foresee the scale of the change but demographic transformation was their intention.

This policy has never been popular. Polls conducted, from the beginning of this phase until the present day, have shown that the majority of Canadians do not and have never wanted immigration that radically changes the ethnic makeup of the country. Now, let me be clear, the modern democratic dogma that “the majority is always right” is false – it would be more accurate to say the majority is usually wrong – and government has a duty to do what is right, even when this is not what the majority wants. In this case, however, majority opinion corresponds with what we know to be true about large scale, rapid, demographic transformation being bad for established communities and countries, and the reason for this correspondence is clear – the majority are those who have to live, every day, with the results of immigration policy, whereas the politicians who make that policy, and their academic and media supporters, have largely isolated themselves from the consequences of their ideas, living in controlled, largely homogenous, communities, just as they have isolated themselves from all criticism of their ideas, by shrieking “racist” whenever anyone questions – or even dares to take notice of – the transformation that is quickly taking place before their very eyes.

Today, the Canadian left is all on board the “let’s make Canada as diverse as we can, as fast as we can” train, even though the brunt of the negative consequences must be borne by working class Canadians, the poor, and basically all those for whom the left until fairly recently professed to speak. The Canadian left of the twenty-first century would have no room for the likes of the Reverend J. S. Woodsworth. Indeed, if he were still ministering in the Winnipeg of the current year, expressing the same views as he did in 1909, in all likelihood Mayor Duckie would wring his hands in despair and order a police investigation, Helmut-Harry Loewen would seize the opportunity to get his name in the newspapers on a regular basis by warning of the imminent threat he posed, David Matas would consider initiating legal proceedings against the “Hitler of the North End” on behalf of Binai B’rith, and the ironically-if-unawarely-named Fascist Free Treaty One would seek to prevent his views from being heard through crude intimidation tactics, whereas I, on the other hand, would find myself in the odd and unusual position, of having to cheer the old socialist on.

Works Referenced

Charles M. Campbell, Betrayal & Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration, West Vancouver, Jasmine Books, 2000.

Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program – and how to fix it, Toronto, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002.

J. S. Woodsworth, Strangers Within Our Gate: Or Coming Canadians, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972 (original edition 1909)

State of the Dominion – 2018

Today, on the 151st anniversary of the founding of the Dominion of Canada, let us take a look at the state of the Dominion. We will start on a positive note – contrary to what liberals would like us to believe Canada still is the Dominion of Canada. This is because the Fathers of Confederation gave our country the title of Dominion – as a substitute for their original choice of Kingdom – and the name Canada. This happened decades before the word Dominion became a more general description of self-governing bodies within the Empire as it evolved into the Commonwealth. When the Liberals repatriated the British North America Act in 1982 and renamed it the Constitution Act they did not excise the section and article that titles our country Dominion (II.1) and so we remain the Dominion of Canada. The late, great, Canadian constitutional expert, the Honourable Eugene A. Forsey, was fond of pointing this out as one of the inadvertently positive results of the repatriation process of which he was overall, and quite rightly, critical. Another observation of Forsey’s is worth mentioning at this point – that the BNAA, albeit under a new name and with some bells and whistles added –remains our constitution. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not itself our constitution but a set of amendments to it. The common liberal notion that Pierre Trudeau gave us a “new constitution” in 1982 is a myth. Last, but not least, among the positives, Queen Elizabeth II does indeed still reign over our country as Head of State. It speaks very poorly of the intelligence of Justin Trudeau’s supporters that one of them chose to deride me for saying this in a recent essay even though it is an easily demonstrated statement of fact. Perhaps this liberal does not understand the difference between “reign” and “rule.”

Now we must turn to the negative side of the leger. Sadly, there is much more to be found here than on the positive side. There has been a growing tendency among true Canadian conservatives, i.e., those who wish to conserve the legacy of Confederation and the Loyalist tradition behind it, since the end of the Second World War to focus on the negative. This tendency stands in marked contrast to the more optimistic tone in the writings of the leading such Canadian conservative man of letters from the era that ended with the War, economist, political scientist, and humourist, Stephen Leacock. This is because the post-War conservatives have had much that is negative to focus on due to the success of a series of “revolutions within the form” that have been perpetrated by the Liberal Party. The first such revolution took place in the 1920s during the premiership of William Lyon Mackenzie King. John Farthing, in his posthumously published (1957) Freedom Wears a Crown, noted how this revolution seriously undermined Parliament’s ability to hold the government accountable leaving the Prime Minister and Cabinet with the near-dictatorial powers with which they have plagued Canada ever since. The book for which George Grant will forever be remembered, his Lament for a Nation, was published in 1965, two-years in to the second “revolution within the form” (1) that took place during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. Lament was a jeremiad based upon the author’s conviction that the fall of the Diefenbaker premiership two years previously, due to its insistence on not allowing Canadian policy to be dictated by Washington D.C., spelled the failure of the Confederation Project of building a conservative country that could withstand the continental gravity pulling it towards the orbit of American liberalism. Diefenbaker himself sounded the alarm about the radical changes being introduced in the early years of the Pierre Trudeau premiership in his Those Things We Treasure: A Selection of Speeches on Freedom and Defence of Our Parliamentary Heritage published in 1972. The same year, historian Donald Creighton’s collection of essays – in many cases originally lectures – Towards the Discovery of Canada, was, if anything, more pessimistic in tone than Lament. Creighton, although the son of a Methodist minister, did not allow Christianity’s optimistic view of history as ultimately culminating in the Kingdom of God to moderate his nationalist pessimism in the way Grant did. Towards the end of the Trudeau premiership and the completion of the second revolution, Winnett Boyd, Kenneth McDonald, and Orville Gaines published a series of books under their BMG label demonstrating how Trudeau’s policies were further subverting Canada’s parliamentary form of government and Common Law rights and freedoms, moving us closer to Soviet Communism, and, in the final book in the series, Doug Collins’ Immigration: The Destruction of English Canada, deliberately engineering radical changes to the demographic makeup of English Canada and in the process unnecessarily importing racial strife that would make it impossible to maintain order without a more authoritarian, if not totalitarian, style of governing.

The fact that all of the above books, with the exception of Grant’s, have been allowed to go out of print and that the leadership of the present Conservative Party shows little to no interest in their contents is itself a good reason for negativity and pessimism among traditional Canadian conservatives.

Today, we are in the midst of the third “revolution within the form”, being carried out under the leadership of the son of the architect of the second, a man operating without the benefit of either brains or a brain trust, even as we continue to be hit with the repercussions of the second revolution. As an example of the latter, consider the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent ruling in the Trinity Western University case. Trinity Western University is a conservative, evangelical, Christian university in British Columbia. It requires, as schools of this nature generally do, that its students agree to a Christian lifestyle covenant for the duration of their study. For some time now TWU has been working towards establishing a law school. While the law societies of most provinces have agreed to accredit the school and admit its graduates to the bar, the law societies of Ontario and BC have refused to do so. They consider TWU’s covenant to be discriminatory towards the alphabet soup gang, apparently holding the position that members of that group are incapable, unlike heterosexual singles who are also required to practice chastity by the same covenant, of refraining from acting upon their desires for the number of years it takes to get a law degree. The law societies’ decision has nothing to do with the quality of the legal education that would be available at the proposed school. What the law societies are doing is, ironically, exactly what they are complaining that TWU is doing – making their religious ethical convictions, in this case “thou shalt not discriminate”, into a standard that excludes others from membership in their community. There is a huge difference, however, in that the law societies are not the same kind of organization as TWU. TWU is a self-confessed, faith-based institution and the right of such institutions to require their members to adhere to the standards of their faith is well-established and time-honoured. The law societies are not institutions of that kind and have no such well-established and time-honoured right. The Supreme Court ought to have ruled in favour of TWU and prior to 1982 would have done so. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, however, transformed the Court into an agent of moral, social, and cultural revolution, which agrees with the law societies' efforts to force TWU to abandon either its Christian principles or its efforts to establish a nationally-accredited law school, because it ultimately shares their Cultural Marxist agenda of replacing the Christian principles of the old Canada with the modern, secular, pluralistic ideals of the new.

To many liberals today it would come as news that Canada ever had Christian principles to begin with. Former Liberal Party strategist Warren Kinsella and Mike Harris – the journalist not the 22nd premier of Ontario – are among the liberals that I have seen claim that Canada is a secular country that believes in separation of church and state. This absurd claim confuses the Canadian political tradition with its American counterpart but Kinsella and Harris are hardly the first liberals to be so confused. The Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History – what Donald Creighton mockingly called “the Authorized Version” – has always been based upon the false notion that Canada’s story is a repeat of America’s story – a former colony struggling to gain independence from the British Empire – rather than the truth that the those who built our country deliberately chose not to go down that path but to build our country within the evolving Commonwealth on a foundation of loyalty and continuity. This truth does not sit well with liberals – but then no truth ever has.

It is not just the Supreme Court. Justin Trudeau, who duped the Canadian electorate into voting his party a majority government in 2015, has been another aggressive promoter of the Cultural Marxist agenda. Not that he possesses the intelligence to actually understand the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault. Cultural Marxism seems to be instinctual with him. He has made it a policy, starting this year, that employers receiving grants to hire student workers under the government’s Summer Jobs program must attest to their agreement with Liberal Party ideals including his crackpot notion that women have a right to murder their unborn babies. In other words “orthodox Christians need not apply.” The best that can be said about this is that it is merely an attempt to use the taxpayers’ money to bribe the faithful into giving up their convictions rather than dragging them before Human Rights tribunals and fining them or forcing them to attend the re-education camps euphemistically known as “sensitivity training classes” if they refuse to do so. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this means that Trudeau is less of a soft-totalitarian than his father. It just means that these other methods of cramming far-left views down Canadians throats are being reserved for new battles, like his war against “transphobia” and “Islamophobia”, rather than ones seen by the Liberals as having been won long ago.

It is, of course, only orthodox believers in the religion of the old Canada that the Liberals intend to press to give up their traditional beliefs. Neo-conservatives have recently called attention to the fact that the Islamic Humanitarian Service of Kitchener, Ontario, whose Sheikh Shafiq Huda was recorded calling for violent action against Israel at a recent al-Quds day march in Toronto, has been approved for a grant under the Summer Jobs program despite its leader’s conduct being as out of sync with the ideals employers are expected to sign on to as the pro-life views of Christians. When the neo-conservatives accuse the Liberal government of hypocrisy, however, they miss the point altogether. The Liberal Party’s Cultural Marxist agenda is one of replacing the old Canada with the new. Christianity, the faith of the old Canada, has to be forced to bow the knee to the idols of the new. Practitioners of other religions do not have to because they are part of the “diversity” that is one of the chief of those idols. In the 2015 election campaign, Trudeau campaigned against the previous neo-conservative government’s use of the expression “barbaric cultural practices.” The practices in question – forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and the like – are in fundamental conflict with the feminism that Trudeau espouses but to call anything that people from other cultures do “barbaric” is to sin against diversity. While Trudeau wastes millions of our tax-dollars on schemes for promoting “gender equality” around the world, at home the only throats he will shove it down are those of orthodox Protestants and Catholics and traditional English and French Canadians. The neo-conservatives, since they share most of the same ideals as the liberals – their objection to “barbaric cultural practices” was based upon the inconsistency of those practices with egalitarian liberalism – are reduced to pointing out the inconsistencies in Liberal practice, having no resources with which to resist and combat the Liberals’ increasingly radical left-wing agenda.

A large part of Canada’s trade has always been with the United States. For decades, however, the old Canada resisted the Liberal Party’s call for free trade with the United States. There were several reasons for that. Confederation took place only a few years after the Republican Party had come to power in the United States and put into place Alexander Hamilton’s “American system” of growing a strong manufacturing base through tariff protectionism and internal infrastructure improvements. Sir John A. MacDonald’s Conservatives knew better than to waste their time trying to negotiate reciprocity with a country that was not interested in it and furthermore recognized that due to the larger population and economy of the United States a free trade arrangement would lead to the subjugation of Canada – economically, culturally, and perhaps eventually politically. Goldwin Smith, the nineteenth century Manchester School free-trader and Liberal intellectual, made no effort to hide the fact that this was exactly what he desired for Canada in his Canada and the Canadian Question (1891). Confederation, Smith maintained, was a mistake - the formation of an unnatural country against the natural north-south trade flow of the continent, an argument which was amply refuted by Harold Innis in The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930) and Donald Creighton in The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence 1760-1850 (1937). Canada, Smith argued, should apply for entry into the United States. To allow this to happen would go against the very purpose of Confederation – uniting the provinces of British North America into a single country that could resist the expansionism of a United States that was preaching its “Manifest Destiny” to rule all of North America and which had threatened Canada with annexation more than once. The Tories introduced, therefore, their National Policy, which was a similar sort of protectionist nation-building to what the Republicans were engaged in south of the border at the time. In 1891 and again in 1911 Sir Wilfred Laurier sought election with promises of free trade – and both times he was soundly defeated. Sir John A. MacDonald, denouncing the "veiled treason" of reciprocity, defeated him in 1891 despite the collapse of his health that led to his death shortly after the election. In 1911 the poet Rudyard Kipling, in a front page editorial against reciprocity for the Montreal Daily Star that was reprinted across the Dominion wrote: "It is her own soul that Canada risks today. Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social, and ethical standards which will be imposed on her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States" and the Canadian voting public evidently agreed. By 1988, however, Canada had already undergone the first two “revolutions within the form” and the objections to free trade were largely forgotten or regarded as having no abiding relevance in the late twentieth century. When the Free Trade Agreement was negotiated between Canada and the United States it was Brian Mulroney, the leader of what had been Sir John A. MacDonald’s party, that did the negotiating and signed the treaty into law. The Liberals were forced into temporarily disavowing their historic pro-free trade position in 1988, but they quickly resumed it when they returned to power led by Jean Chretien in time to oversee the evolution of the Free Trade Agreement into NAFTA. In the decades that followed, as free-trade opponents predicted, Canadian businesses were bought up by American ones and Canadians increasingly came to resemble Americans in the places they worked, shopped, and ate at. Many Canadians, however, seemed to think this was a small price to pay for cheap consumer goods and economic growth - a further indication of the Americanization of our culture feared by the Fathers of Confederation. Twenty-five years after the initial Free Trade Agreement, American-born Diane Francis of the Financial Post revived Goldwin Smith’s arguments with her Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country, demonstrating that the kind of annexionist thinking that had led the old Canada to fear free trade was not quite dead after all. For the history of the resistance against just such an outcome see David Orchard, The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. (1993, 1998)

We have just been reminded of another reason why free trade was considered unwise - that we would be that much worse off if free trade were entered into and then rescinded than if we never agreed to it and became dependent upon it to begin with. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States on a populist platform that included, among other things, a revival of the Republican Party’s old economic nationalism. Trump vowed to put the interests of his own country ahead of international and global concerns, promising that if he could not renegotiate NAFTA to his liking he would "scrap it." The attitude Trudeau and his Trade Minister took, in entering into the renegotiation talks, was clearly not that of leaders who cared a fig about the interests and well-being of their country. They insisted on bringing into the talks all sorts of trendy, left-wing, nonsense that had no relevance to trade whatsoever but appealed to Trudeau's international liberal fan base. Trump, evidently sick of having to put up with this, has begun slapping tariffs on Canada. Things were made much worse when, after the G7 Summit in which the leaders, including Trump, had agreed to a united communication, Trudeau seized the opportunity to gloat, provoking a barrage of insults from the American President and a hardening of his trade policies. In response, the Liberal government has declared that it will impose retaliatory tariffs against the United States, but this is not the same thing as protective tariffs incorporated into a larger National Policy as MacDonald had put in place. It amounts to a trade war being fought against a country with a much larger economy than ours by people who are fundamentally emotionally and intellectually incapable of placing what is best or even good for their own country ahead of their global, international, popularity. That is a recipe for disaster.

The Laurentian political class behind Trudeau has, behind its mask of indignation, been rejoicing over Trump's verbal assaults on Trudeau because they have been bolstering up his support which had been declining drastically due to his own incompetence and egotism. The greatest fear of said political class, however, is of a populist revolt similar to the one that put Trump in power. That such is possible in Canada was demonstrated at the provincial level in Ontario with the election of Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives and the decimation of Wynne's Grits. The political class has every reason to fear because the arrogance and contempt they have displayed to ordinary Canadians has long exceeded even that with which Hillary Clinton dismissed ordinary Americans as a "basketful of deplorables." In Canada, as in the United States, the most important issue over which the political class and the average citizen are at odds is immigration. In the 1960s the political classes of every nation within Western civilization adopted liberal views of immigration - that border laws should be lightly enforced, if at all, that immigrants should be accepted in larger numbers than ever before, and that restrictions based on race, religion, and ethnicity were not acceptable. Dissent from these views was condescendingly taken as evidence of irrational racial and cultural prejudices that would have to be eliminated through education. In Canada, the Diefenbaker Conservatives had removed racial and cultural restrictions on admission in the early 1960s, but the Liberals in the late 1960s gave the immigration system a complete overhaul. They introduced the points system of evaluating individual immigrant applications, a fair and ethnically neutral system, that nevertheless contained a large backdoor in the "family reunification" policy that allowed them to operate an ethnically biased policy under the guise of an ethnically neutral one. This policy, which Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau seemed to believe to be the solution to the existing tension between English and French Canada, was to make the country as diverse as possible as fast as possible. This was never a popular policy, as polling has always shown, and they took a particularly heavy-handed approach to dealing with dissent. (2) Laws which severely limited what could be said publicly in criticism of this were added to both the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act. Twice, to my knowledge, government agents actually helped found and lead neo-Nazi groups (the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1970s and the Heritage Front of the 1980s and 1990s) for the purpose of creating a public fear of resurgent Nazism that could be used to tar all criticism of unpopular liberal immigration with the Nazi brush. Under Brian Mulroney's leadership the Conservatives refused to criticize any of this and indeed embraced it all. The result was that by the end of the 1980s anyone who expressed the same restrictionist views of immigration that Conservative Stephen Leacock had expressed in his final book While There is Time (1945), that Liberal leader William Lyon McKenzie King, who led the Dominion in World War II, had held, and that the Rev. J. S. Woodsworth, first leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation had defended in the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of his Strangers Within Our Gates (1909) was suspected of Hitlerist sympathies. Even Preston Manning's neo-conservative/right-populist Reform Party refused to challenge the Laurentian class's manufactured and imposed consensus.


Skip ahead to the present day. In the United States, Donald Trump, fighting against the political establishments of both American parties, has been trying to stop the flood of illegal immigrants into the United States across the Rio Grande. Justin Trudeau, however, last year tweeted an open invitation to all those rejected by the United States. Surely it does not require more than a modicum of intelligence to see that those rejected by another country are not the ideal pool from which to draw your own country's immigrants? That thought appears never to have crossed Trudeau's mind, however, obsessed as he is with his image as the "compassionate" anti-Trump. This is an image he has been cultivating since the election that brought him to power which happened to coincide with the year in which the plot of Jean Raspail's 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints came true and Europe was swamped with an invasion of those whose most effective weapon was Europe's own liberal humanitarianism. Trudeau promised to bring thousands of these over here, which he did upon winning the election, after which he had his picture taken with them, and then promptly forgot about them as they were now the problem of ordinary tax-paying Canadians. After Trudeau's ill-conceived open invitation tweet Canada suddenly found herself with her own brand new border crisis just like the American one. Trudeau and his Laurentian backers are deceiving themselves if they think the average Canadian is any more pleased with this than the average American.

Our political, academic, and media elite classes, fearing that they have built up a massive reservoir of resentment against their arrogantly imposed consensus which a populist reformer could easily tap into if he were willing to defy all their rules, have been going bananas with a Trump Derangement Syndrome that exceeds that of the American Left. Luckily for them no such reformer has yet appeared on the federal horizon. Unluckily for Canada, even if one were to appear, the best we could hope for would be that he would stop the third revolution dead in its tracks. What we really need is for the previous two revolutions to be rolled back and our country put back on the course set for it by the Fathers of Confederation.

Much as I would like it to, I am not going to be holding my breath waiting for that to happen. So, to avoid ending on a negative note, I will quote the thought with which George Grant ended his Lament fifty three years ago:

Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place. Whatever the difficulty of philosophy, the religious man has been told that process is not all. “Tendabantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.” (3)

Happy Dominion Day,
God Save the Queen

(1) I have borrowed this expression from Garet Garrett’s essay “The Revolution Was.” Garrett used it to describe the American New Deal in the 1930s.

(2) Not coincidentally, the men who dreamed up this draconian scheme of silencing their opponents were admirers of the totalitarian police state of the Soviet Union. According to Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony to an American Congressional Subcommittee about the Soviet spy ring she had operated in the United States during the Second World War, Lester Pearson, who was attached to the Canadian embassy in Washington at the time, was one of her informers. This part of his ignoble career is often overlooked because of his toadyish attitude towards the Soviets’ rivals, the Americans, as when he engineered Diefenbaker’s downfall to please Kennedy, but when the man won his Nobel Peace Prize in the 1950s for selling out Britain, whose side Canada had traditionally always taken as a family matter, along with France and Israel, it was to both the United States and the Soviet Union that he had prostituted himself. Pierre Trudeau’s sympathies with Communism were well known. He led the Canadian delegation to a Communist conference in Moscow back during Stalin’s dictatorship, prior to his disastrous entry into Canadian federal politics as editor of the far left Cité Libre he engineered the Marxist revolt against the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec known as the Quiet Revolution for which, for some reason, he was never excommunicated, and while in power federally made no attempt to hide his admiration for Mao and Castro. Since Pearson and Trudeau’s leadership of the Liberal Party took place smack in the middle of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union both men were able to fend off criticism over all of this by writing off anti-Communism as a kind of “American paranoia” as if the old Canada had not been solidly anti-Bolshevik long before the Cold War, and indeed, before the period just prior to the Cold War, when the American President whose policies ensured that the Second World War would end with the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, was kissing Stalin’s backside.

(3) The Latin quotation is from the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. The English translation given by Grant in a footnote is “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.”

Contemporary Compassion is not Christian Compassion

When you read or sing the Psalms you cannot help but notice how frequently God is described as being “full of compassion”. In the Authorized Version this expression occurs no less than five times in Psalms 78, 86, 111, 112, and 145. Furthermore, the Psalms are hardly the only place in the Bible where the word compassion is used as an attribute of God. The Synoptic Gospels frequently speak of Jesus being “moved with compassion” or “having compassion” on someone or some group of people.

These are verses which are very difficult for contemporary readers to understand for the reason that the word “compassion” has become completely and utterly debased in our day and age. It has been stripped of all that made “full of compassion” an expression of praise in the Psalms and reduced to a mere sentiment.

Something similar could be said about the word “charity”. In the Authorized Version of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians charity is the greatest of what are traditionally known as the three theological virtues – the other two being faith and hope – of which a famous, extended description is given in the thirteenth chapter. The English word charity is derived, through the French, from the Latin word for this virtue, caritas, which in Latin versions of the Scriptures is frequently used to translate the Greek agape. Today, however, the first thought the English word suggests is that of “giving to the needy” and it seldom expresses anything beyond that. Organizations that provide help and relief to those who are poor, sick, or otherwise in need are called charities. No-one, unless he is reading the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians in the old AV, is likely to associate charity with long-suffering, seemliness, bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring all things, and all the other qualities listed in the fourth through seventh verses, and verse three which reads “ And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” would be incomprehensible to anyone reading it with the contemporary meaning of charity in mind.

It is for this reason that the translators of most of the more recent English versions of the Holy Scriptures use the word love instead. This can hardly be said to be an improvement, however, as the word love has been as debased as the words charity and compassion. In Greek and Latin, the basic word for love was closely related to the word for friend and Greek had several other words when a more precise concept of love was called for. In English today, the word love would almost never be used of friendships – at least male friendships – thanks mostly to the imposed new acceptance of homosexuality. Sexual love has eclipsed all other concepts of love – and not the exalted eros discussed in Plato’s Symposium, either, but a version of the latter that has been stripped of all of its higher connotations, and reduced to a romantic affection tacked on to animal lust. So substituting love for charity in translations of 1 Corinthians 13 produces no net gain in comprehensibility.

While the decay of the English language is obviously what I have been describing here, it is also the rot and ruin of Western ethical thought and, for that matter, Western thought in general. That thinking and language stand and fall together ought to go without saying. Language is the medium through which we communicate our thoughts and, what is more, words are the very building blocks out of which we build our thoughts in the first place, at least if we are talking about the kind of thinking necessary for a civilized life that goes beyond the merely animal and mechanical. The Cultural Marxists, who have been so effective over the last sixty years or so, in tearing down Western civilization from the inside out, clearly understand this, which is why there is so much emphasis on linguistic theory and literary criticism on the intellectual side of what was accurately called the New Left forty-five years ago, and why their most devastating instruments, such as the phenomenon of so-called “political correctness”, involve the manipulation of language.

Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré who became a godfather of sorts to American neoconservatives, and George Grant, Canada’s greatest conservative thinker and patriot of the old British Canada as she was before the evil Trudeau gang first got their hands on her, were among those who a generation or two ago observed that Western ethical thought had taken a turn for the worse in the twentieth century, as modern Western man had come to think in terms of “values” rather than “virtues”, and traced this shift back to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. Virtues were central to the old, pre-modern, Western tradition of ethical thinking, with roots in both the ancient Athens of Plato and Aristotle and Jerusalem, birthplace of Christianity. Virtues, were praiseworthy habits of behaviour, that manifested themselves in praiseworthy acts or deed, and which presupposed the existence of an established, transcendent, hierarchical order of good, that was not created by man, but to which man must conform himself through the cultivation of virtue, to achieve happiness. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of the modern philosophers who had preceded him and the discoveries of modern science had rendered belief in this order impossible and had left man with two paths open to him, that of a “last man”, content to live out his mediocre existence as a cog in the great societal machine modernity is building, or that of an “overman” who will create a new set of values to fill the void left by the collapse of the old order. That we have come to speak of values rather than virtues, demonstrates how pervasive the Nietzschean version of modern thought has been. Virtues, point to an unchanging order beyond ourselves, values we create for ourselves.

This can clearly be seen in the “Canadian values” of the Trudeau Liberals. People have been driven from their careers, in Canada, for expressing ideas on immigration and multiculturalism that were no different from those held by Stephen Leacock, Conservative economist, social critic and humourist, W. L. Mackenzie King, Liberal Prime Minister, and J. S. Woodsworth, Methodist clergyman and founder of the CCF, the predecessor to today’s NDP, on the grounds that these ideas are contrary to “Canadian values”. “Canadian values”, therefore, have little to do with what real Canadians thought or think, but are rather what Pierre Trudeau decided and declared they would be.

Social conservatives, tend to express their opposition to abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and the like as a defence of “family values.” George Grant, himself an outspoken opponent of this kind of moral decay, argued that this was a mistake, because it is self-defeating to use the language by which the modern replacement for the old moral order has been effected, to defend the old order.

If the replacement of virtues, grounded in a transcendent order, with man-created values, was a step down the stairway of moral and ethical decay, their further replacement with sentiments, of the sorts represented by the current meanings of “compassion”, “charity” and “love”, was a slide down the bannister in comparison.

When the Psalmist says that God is “full of compassion” he is not singing about God’s feelings so much as about His actions. Similarly, whenever the Gospel writers speak of Jesus “having compassion” or being “moved by compassion” they are describing something He does, whether it be healing the sick (Matt. 14:14), casting out a demon (Mk. 5:19), or feeding the multitude (Mk. 8:2). Compassion in the Bible is that within God which motivates Him to act in a benevolent way towards people. It is far more, then, than a mere feeling. This is further evident in the way the Scriptures enjoin compassion upon men. They are clearly telling people how to act, not how to feel, because it would be pointless to do the latter, as feelings cannot be produced at will or in obedience to commands.

Today, however, the word compassion denotes a feeling. Worse, it is a feeling for which people demand and expect all of the praise and credit that is due to a virtue. Jesus in His earthly ministry condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. In His famous Sermon on the Mount, after going through three pairs of Old Testament verses and expounding them in such a way as to show that the righteousness God demands of people is an internal righteousness and not just an external adherence to His Commandments, Jesus warned those assembled to hear Him against practicing their alms “before men, to be seen of them”, as the hypocrites do, drawing an amusing hyperbolic picture of a hypocritical Pharisee walking into the synagogue blowing a trumpet to announce that he was giving alms, but to give their alms in secret, for “thy Father which seeth in secret Himself shall reward thee openly.” What He was here condemning in the Pharisees, was doing something good – giving alms, for the wrong reason – to be praised by men. The Pharisee who was blowing his own horn, was at least doing the alms-giving for which he received the praise he wanted. Today, the “caring” and “compassionate” expect credit for shedding a few tears for the plight of the unfortunate and having warm fuzzy feelings towards them, whether or not they actually do anything to alleviate their condition. The Pharisees had nothing on them when it comes to hypocrisy.

Perhaps, however, I am being too hard on them. When you look at what has actually been done in the name of the huggy-feely type of compassion these days, you will find that much of it falls into two basic categories. One of these is harm done under the guise of helping, such as all the “poverty relief” money that was funnelled into the support of Third World Marxist guerillas in the twentieth century by the kind of churches who have reduced the “Christian” message to nothing but the debased, sentimental, kind of compassion by getting rid of more trivial aspects of the faith, such as the idea that the Son of the true and living God, came down to earth from heaven, was born a man by the Virgin Mary, died on the cross to take away the sins of the world and reconcile fallen man to God, descended to hell, shattering its gates and releasing the captive spirits of the saints, before rising in triumph from the grave and ascending back into heaven, to sit at His Father’s right hand. The other is to make other people pay the costs of your supposed “compassion” while you get all the credit. Most, if not all, government policies and programs that are labelled “compassionate” are examples of this.

If this is what modern “compassion” looks like in action, perhaps it were better that it be nothing more than a feeling after all.