Free True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff

that he should attach equal importance to the French fact in the making of Canadian distinctiveness. British Columbia school districts refused to use the book because of its francophile bias.
    He was ambitious and hoped, for a time, he would become famous. For a Canadian of his generation, fame meant success in England, and when a chance for academic advancement offered itself, he took it. Alfred Beit, a business partner of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, endowed a lectureship at Oxford and Grant put his name forward. He had reason to be hopeful. In 1894, he had been the first Canadian to win a first-class degree in classics at Oxford. In 1906, he was named the first Beit Lecturer in Colonial History and quickly settled back into life in his old college, Balliol. He proved to be a productive scholar, completing worthy tomes on Canadian constitutional development and an edited volume of the
Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series
. Scholarly pursuits had some appeal to him. He was a shy man by nature, convivial in company, but never happier than when reading. He was also shrewd enough to realize that while he might lack his father’s self-confidence, he surpassed him in scholarship.
    He would make his own mark as a scholar, but he was too full of life to be satisfied with the musty joys of the Colonial Office archives. He once said there were few sights more joyless than a library full of scholars buried in forgotten tomes. Boring academic papers could rouse himto scathing acts of mimicry. He was a scholar all right, but a restless one.
    At Oxford, an unusual experiment in education was just then starting—the Workers’ Educational Association, or WEA, an alliance between labour and the universities to provide tutorial classes for working-class adults. Grant went to the meetings at Ruskin College and became an enthusiastic tutor for the WEA. Later in life, he was to become a founder of the WEA in Canada, as well as a supporter of Frontier College, a pioneering initiative to take university education to the logging camps and mining sites of northern Ontario. There was a certain
noblesse oblige
in this idea of university men teaching the working classes, but there was something admirable in the idea, too. He really did believe the class divisions of an industrial country could be healed by good teaching.
    Being Beit Lecturer offered Grant a further means of escape into a wider and more influential world, since it brought him into contact with the leading British imperial figures of his day. The colonial governor of South Africa, Lord Milner, was now back in Britain, assembling around him a group of bright young imperialists known as the Milner Kindergarten. Grant delivered academic papers with Milner in the chair and befriended Milner’s intense acolyte Lionel Curtis, a Boer War veteran turned imperialist intellectual.
    The Boer Wars left unclear what duties the dominions owed the mother country in a European conflict. Lionel Curtis pressed this issue especially hard. Were the dominions—South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—sovereign over issues of peace and war? If they were truly sovereign, would they come to the aid of the mother country if she were attacked by Germany? If they were not sovereign, would they be automatically at war if Germany attacked? Curtis and Milner created the Round Table, an informal circle of bright young men from around the empire, to hammer out an answer. Grant took part in these debates but refused to be drawn in too far, arguing that Canada couldn’t make commitments until the threat from Germany and other states materialized.
    One of the places where these questions were discussed was an imposing three-storey brick house modestly called the Cottage, in Goring-on-Thames, near Oxford. This was the home of George R. Parkin, now secretary of the Rhodes Trust. An elegant, handsome, supremely self-confident, pious Victorian always photographed in a wing collar and frock coat, Parkin