Canada: THE DOMINION: First Rank

To help make his beloved Ottawa a capital “worthy of . . . the Canada that is to be,” Mackenzie King pleaded in the House of Commons last week for an initial town-planning appropriation of $2½ million. Ottawa, said he, should be to Canada what London is to England, Paris to France, Washington to the U.S. For good measure, he rang in the Athens of Pericles and the Rome of the Caesars. His clincher: “Canada may have a future greater than that of the countries I have mentioned . . .* It has possibilities of development that no other country begins to possess.”

*A distant echo of the unfulfilled prophecy of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Mr. King’s longtime leader and friend: “The 19th Century was the century of the U.S.; the 20th Century will be the century of Canada.”