This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on May 23, 1941.
A teacher, who left Vancouver a year ago to help the war work in England, writes to a friend in Victoria: “Last night was my fire-spotting night (I go on every third night) and we had it fairly quiet. The ‘All Clear’ went about midnight, so I fixed myself up on an evacuee’s bed, a bit short for me, but with a chair I managed. It’s just as well to be a bit uncomfortable when you have to be on the alert.
“The helmets are great. I gave one to a Yorkshire lad, a nightwatchman, and he was very pleased. He has chilblains on his ears from the cold — getting rundown from loss of sleep, I fear. Tell your friends who knit the helmets that it is still cold at night and the helmets and scarfs are a real comfort.”
That one sentence, about discomfort in time of danger, sticks in my mind. We know it is true. Comfort does bind and throttle us down, and here in Canada we have grown into a state of security that we have accepted as our right, especially those of us who have worked hard in our youth.
It is easy to say like the man in the parable: “Take thine ease, Soul!” But that is a wrong assumption, and to hold it now is to confess blindness. The whole world is a battlefield and we are all engaged.
These words will appear in print on May 24, when our thoughts are directed to our empire, and our own obligations to it.
The gay, old, carefree 24th of May, when we planted potatoes in the morning and packed up our salmon sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and black tin pail to boil coffee, and ran races for nutbars, and watched a baseball game down at the agricultural ground, and sang O Canada by way of grace before we began to eat. All that is over.
The 24th of May for me stretches back through the years in little pictures, running all the way from sunny afternoons to snow storms, but with one dominant factor. It was a holiday, and a celebration. We never let it pass without doing something. I am not sure that we remembered the empire, and rejoiced in our liberties, but we at least observed it with gladness.
This year, we must do something, too. We never faced so grave a situation, and we must be wakened to our responsibility. There need be no illusions as to the issue. It is light versus darkness — liberty versus slavery.
As Dorothy Thompson, that great Voice of Democracy, said over the air a few days ago: “He who makes no choice, has already chosen,” and then she illustrated this by instancing the person who cannot make up his mind whether to leave the sinking ship or stay on it.
The sinking ship is the old life of ease and unconcern, and isolation. We can see the foolishness of this point of view when we think of the Lindbergs and Wheelers. But nearer home, we have people who think they are discharging their whole duty to their country when they pay their income tax and buy a few tickets for a Red Cross concert.
A good Canadian cannot get by as easily as this. We must do everything we can do. We must defend our ideals of life. Morale is everything. The morale of the British people has held the fort up to this time. If the British people had wavered, doubted, quarrelled, the lights of freedom would have been blown out. But they held together, and so must we.
We could do more giving. None of us has suffered any privation yet. Nowhere does money go so far as in China, and China is holding back our enemy of the Pacific. If we of the Western Hemisphere fail to help China, that great country with a population three times as great as that of the United States might become a nation of serfs under the command of a tyrant power, unfriendly to us.
Empire Day is a good time for us to look beyond the boundaries of our own country, for we have learned surely that no nation can make itself safe. We have seen the policy tried. The world is at our door, and no wall is strong enough to promise immunity. China still stands, our ally, holding back the powers of darkness. Fifty million Chinese have been driven from their homes, yet they carry on, with courage — with faith — with a heroism that can never be told.
Two dollars a month will feed, clothe and shelter one Chinese child. No one who has seen them will forget the pictures in LIFE of the desolation in China, but it is not enough to be shocked and grieved. We must turn that emotion into assistance. Indeed, that is the way to reduce shock. Do something. Twenty-four dollars will give a whole year of food, protection and education to a Chinese boy or girl — just the price of a new suit.
Why does everyone love a pioneer story, or any other tale of adventure when men and women pit themselves against incredible conditions and win? Some cynics say it is because we are so fond of comfort, we enjoy our own cushioned chairs more when we can contrast them with the hard and thorny roads over which our hard-pressed hero travels; as a cat enjoys its warm window seat when from its safe shelter it sees another cat enduring the hardships of an unfriendly street.
I do not believe this. I believe we are more heroic than this. I believe there is something deeply planted in our hearts that responds to gallantry and courage.
So, on this day of national pride, let us be proud to belong to the country that went to the aid of Greece, though the odds were all against victory; glad that we belong to a country where prisoners of war are well fed and comfortably housed; glad that we live in a land where church bells ring, and the name of God is reverenced.
I can think of many causes for rejoicing on this Empire Day. I believe there will be much quiet, tender thought this year as we consider the meaning of this day. The sacred things of our lives are being threatened, and under that threat they are growing dearer and dearer to us.
I believe there will be people thinking today of what we owe to Christianity, with its great leavening of kindliness and generosity. We see what happens to a nation that denies the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man. Surely the Nazi doctrine of cruelty, falsehood and injustice will drive us to protect the essence of our faith.
To return to this matter of comfort. Our danger, at this distance from the war, is in the matter of complacency. We can’t believe Great Britain could be defeated. The flag that braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze.
We read about all the tons of clothing that are going over to Britain from the Red Cross, the Overseas Clubs and all the supplies the United States is sending; and we are disposed to turn over in our lotus-slumber and say: “Thank God! Someone is working — they really do not need me. I can’t do much anyway,” and off to sleep again.
Britain will never surrender, but every person’s help is needed for victory.
Some of McClung’s columns from the 1930s and 1940s have been collected in a book, The Valiant Nellie McClung: Selected Writings by Canada’s Most Famous Suffragist, by Barbara Smith.
