Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ///.—Literature and Education in America IT may be well to remind the reader at the outset of this article that Canada is in America. A Canadian writer may therefore with no great impropriety use the term American, for want of any other word, in reference to the literature and education of all the English-speaking people between the Rio Grande and the North Pole. There is, moreover, a certain warrant of fact for such a usage. Canadian literature,—as far as there is such a thing,—Canadian journalism, and the education and culture of the mass of the people of Canada approximates more nearly to the type and standard of the United States than to those of Great Britain. Whatever accusations may be brought against the literature and education of the American republic apply equally well—indeed very probably apply witheven greater force—to the Dominion of Canada. This modest apology may fittingly be offered before throwing stones at the glass house in which both the Canadians and the Americans proper dwell. Now it is a fact which had better be candidly confessed than indignantly denied that up to the present time the contribution of America to the world's great literature has been disappointingly small. There are no doubt great exceptions. We number at least some of the world's great writers on this side of the Atlantic. American humour, in reputation at any rate, may claim equality if not pre-eminence. And the signs are not wanting—they are seen in the intense realism of our short stories, and the concentrated power of our one-act plays,— that we may some day come into our own. But in spite of this, the indictment holds good that up to the present we have fallen far short of what might have been properly expected of our civilisation. I am quite aware that on this point I shal...