Free True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff Page A

was the most influential living exponent of imperial federation and was such a devoted admirer of William Grant’s father that he kept a photograph of George Monro Grant hanging on the wall of his study. Despite their mutual admiration, the contrast between Parkin and Grant was interesting. Grant remained the doughty, persevering Scottish Canadian,while Parkin had passed himself off as more British than the British. William took a respectful but ironic view of Parkin, once remarking that “I don’t think he got God and Oxford and the British Empire wholly separated.”
    The Grants’ vision of empire was less romantic than Parkin’s. While the Grants thought Cecil Rhodes was a rascal, George Parkin was carrying out the old rascal’s dying wish to create a scholarship that would create a new English-speaking elite among the empires of the day.
    Nobody meeting the very British Parkin could have guessed that he had begun life amidst the farms and lumber mill towns of New Brunswick’s St. John River valley. He had started out as a rural schoolmaster and had managed, by sheer force of personality, to get himself to Oxford in the early 1870s. There he astonished audiences at Union Debates with his vision of the British Empire as the bearer of Christian civilization to the lesser breeds. Alfred Milner attributed his dedication to the imperialist cause to the impact of the young Parkin. After his miraculous year at Oxford, Parkin returned to schoolmastering in New Brunswick, but he had made such a vivid impression that when the Imperial Federation League was looking for a spokesman, they sought out the tall and impressive young man from New Brunswick. Through the late 1880s and early 1890s, he became the movement’s chief representative, travelling to Australia and New Zealand and across Canada preaching that the dominions should seekrepresentation in the imperial parliament in London. In this way, they could affirm their national identity and their imperial destiny.
    Parkin was a master of the podium, but he did not convince every audience. Imperial federation proved controversial in the Antipodes. Most Australians and New Zealanders didn’t like the idea that their citizens might be taxed and sent to die in imperial wars. Imperial federation drew a warmer hearing in Canada because of the threatening proximity of the United States. Parkin, like Grant, felt certain that Canada could not survive unless the British connection was paramount in Canadian national life.
    For William Grant the Cottage at Goring-on-Thames would have felt like the old family house in Kingston, if on a grander scale: carpeted with Afghan and Persian rugs, the shelves of the study library crammed with history, philosophy and theology, the drawing rooms filled with the sounds of piano, all available surfaces crowded with the African knickknacks the
paterfamilias
had brought back from his travels. On becoming secretary of the Rhodes Trust, Parkin had journeyed to southern Africa to visit Rhodes’s grave. At some dusty roadside stand, he brought as presents for his daughters, Maude, Alice and Marjorie, and his son, Raleigh, a set of wooden carvings of a wildebeest, an ostrich, a leopard, a hippo and a giraffe. These endearing carvings were to follow the Parkin children and their descendants through every twist and turn of their lives.
    In 1909 and 1910, William returned again and again to Goring to enjoy the company of the Parkin girls, especially Maude. She was six years his junior, a vivacious and accomplished blue-stocking. She had graduated from McGill, still a relatively rare achievement for a woman of her time, and, after following her father to England, was serving as a warden at a woman’s residence at the University of Manchester. In the photographs of her as a young woman, with hair piled up on top of her head and prim white blouse buttoned up to the neck, the striking features are her thin pursed lips and the set jaw. She was a thoughtful,