The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1968, Síða 12

10
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Spring 1968
EDITORIAL
Canada’s New Century
by Caroline Gunnarsson
An infant among the nations, Can-
ada toddled into the 20th century at
going world speed. Geared to the pace
of horses and men, progress moved
slowly and time was a costly com-
modity.
Under pick and shovel, activated by
human muscle, roads grew haltingly,
foot by painful foot, and traffic moved
over them at a snail’s pace.
Many a road stopped far short of
the traveller’s destination, too. Fie
roughed it on foot over primitive
trails and unchartered wilderness for
many weeks of his journey. The people
who opened up the land kept ahead
of the roads. They settled in islands
of isolation, beyond easy reach of the
changing world and toiled quietly
toward a civilization that shaped it-
self into a rugged, somewhat insular
way of life.
When the new century hurled the
world into its first “war to end wars”,
the first stages of that war were fought
with primitive weapons such as can-
nons, rifles and bayonets. But in the
throes of a desperate conflict, human
genius produced such brutal tools of
death as armored tanks that mowed
down life before them, explosive
bombs and the subtle device of gases
to poison the air.
And sometime during those early
teens of the 20th century, while the
Canadian nation was still in its forties,
horses were hitched to the kind of
road-building equipment shown on the
cover of this magazine. For a haul of
500 feet, each of these drag scrapers
moved about ten yards of earth a day.
Still a snail’s pace by the standards
of the sixties, but the arteries of travel
were expanding at a quickening
tempo. Telephone lines were making
their way across the country and other
new modes of communication were
drawing together the scattered com-
munities. Young men were crossing
thousands of miles of prairie and other
thousands of sea miles to fight a war
on another continent. They were
learning to fly airplanes, and the wall
of isolation was crumbling. The Can-
adian nation was one with a world
convulsed by violent armed hostility.
This century of $peed has wiped out
distances. Railways, highways and air-
ways span this vast country from
corner to corner, and supersonic jets
link it with all parts of the outside
world in a matter of hours. There is
no outside world and no faction of the
human race is a stranger to the other.
There is no escape from the great
or small problems of modern living.
Wherever .in the world they occur,
they land on our doorsteps within
minutes. News of a drowning in Aus-
tralia reaches us more rapidly than
news of a neighbor’s death reached
our parents at the turn of the century.
And the wars that did not end are
fought before our eyes. Television
carries us like a magic carpet onto
battlefields on other continents. We