True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff

Vimy—one of his closest friends died there—and he followed the course of events from the Hampshire camp, reporting to his wife on the evening of the 10th of April, “isn’t the news from France terrible and splendid?” His battalion was in the thick of the action and its men won eighteen battle honours and two Victoria Crosses in the course of the war. No Canadian unit had a prouder record of service. Eight hundred and fifty-five of the men that Grant trained with, and briefly fought with, never came home.
    Ypres, Vimy, Passchendaele. In the horror of these places, Canada’s soldiers earned their country its final independence from the British Empire. At the Imperial War Conference of 1917, Canada was recognized as one of the “autonomous nations of the Imperial Commonwealth,” and its independent voice in war councils, as a major contributor of men and munitions, was affirmed.
    Canadians like Grant entered World War I as loyal colonials. Having fought for the mother country, they slowly realized they were actually fighting for Canada, for its right to be considered a sovereign nation. In thecauldron of war, a new identity was born and an old identity died away. Imperial federation, the ideal for which William’s father and his father-in-law gave all their energy, did not survive World War I. In the Imperial conferences of 1926 and in the Statute of Westminster of 1931, Canada secured the right to conduct a fully independent foreign policy and the right to decide for itself whether it would ever be at war again.
     
    By the summer of 1917, William, still in the training camp in Hampshire, received an intriguing offer. Through the intermediary of Vincent Massey, he was offered the principalship of Upper Canada College. At first he told Massey that he couldn’t take up the offer until the war was over. In late October, General R.E.W. Turner released him from duty. He had done his part. In November he sailed for Canada, and, in December 1917, having driven a hard bargain with the board of governors—requiring sales of college land in order to boost masters’ salaries, plus a substantial salary for himself and housing—he accepted. Maude and the children arrived after him.
    Upper Canada College still had its reputation, but by 1917 it was in debt and in decline. Before the war, Grant might have wondered whether he was up to the challenge. But the war had given him confidence. The school turned out to be the place in which he found his true vocation. In his first speech on his installation in December 1917, hemade it clear that he was going to transform UCC, beginning with a determined attack on its habit of imitating British ways: “We are and must be a Canadian school and if to be so, we must in any way or in many ways depart from the Etonian tradition, then the break must be made.”
    The school must borrow from the French methods of language teaching he had admired in Paris. There must be less Latin and Greek, more science and mathematics, less empty exam writing, more sports, more current and world affairs, more scholarships for poor boys. His mind was teaming with ideas. The school must break with the idea that the only thing that mattered was the number of university candidates it graduated. “The boy in whom I take the deepest interest,” he said, “is the boy who leaves the school to enter business or industry.” He left the school in no doubt that he meant to lead. “I intend to be master in my own house; I intend to rule this school.” His goal, he concluded, was to create a school that would mould the men who ruled the nation. And what kind of nation did he dream of?
    “A nation of prophets, sages and warriors.”
    This vision, however overblown it may seem now, would not have seemed so to the boys and masters who listened in the school auditorium that December day. The colonial Canadians who had swept to the top of VimyRidge had proved to the whole world that Canada was indeed a nation of