Across the Great Divide‪.‬

JOHN RALSTON SAUL is the author of Voltaire's Bastards, The Doubter's Companion, and The Unconscious Civilization, an edited version of his Massey Lectures. In September he will publish Reflections of Siamese Twins, an examination of the Canadian condition. This text is an edited version of his Dunning Trust Lecture, delivered at Queen's University, 9 October 1996. Kingston, Ontario, played a founding role in the history of Canadian democracy. It was here that a great humanist pact was sealed, one that lies at the heart of what Canada was intended to be, and can still be. This was a pact among nineteenth-century reformers -- and these individuals embraced "reform" in its real sense. The reformers of Upper and Lower Canada forged an alliance of French and English, of Catholics and Protestants -- the beginning of that wonderful fracturing of Canada which makes us such an interesting and complex place.