E-text prepared by Al Haines
THE CANADIAN COMMONWEALTH
by
AGNES C. LAUT
Author of
Lords of the North, Pathfinders of the West,
Hudson's Bay Company, etc.
Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers
Copyright 1915
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS II FOUNDATION FOR HOPE III THE TIE THAT BINDS IV AMERICANIZATION V WHY RECIPROCITY WAS REJECTED VI THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH VII THE COMING OF THE FOREIGNER VIII THE COMING OF THE ORIENTAL IX THE HINDU X WHAT PANAMA MEANS XI TO EUROPE BY HUDSON BAY XII SOME INDUSTRIAL PROBLEMS XIII HOW GOVERNED XIV THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE XV EMIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT XVI DEFENSE XVII THE DOMAIN OF THE NORTH XVIII FINDING HERSELF INDEX
THE CANADIAN COMMONWEALTH
CHAPTER I
NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
I
An empire the size of Europe setting out on her career of world history is a phenomenon of vast and deep enough import to stir to national consciousness the slumbering spirit of any people. Yet when you come to trace when and where national consciousness awakened, it is like following a river back from the ocean to its mountain springs. From the silt borne down on the flood-tide you can guess the fertile plains watered and far above the fertile plains, regions of eternal snow and glacial torrent warring turbulently through the adamantine rocks. You can guess the eternal striving, the forward rush and the throwback that have carved a way through the solid rocks; but until you have followed the river to its source and tried to stem its current you can not know.
So of peoples and nations.
Fifty years ago, as far as world affairs were concerned, Japan did not exist. Came national consciousness, and Japan rose like a star dominating the Orient. A hundred years ago Germany did not exist. Came national consciousness welding chaotic principalities into unity, and the mailed fist of the empire became a menace before which Europe quailed. So of China with the ferment of freedom leavening the whole. So of the United States with the Civil War blending into a union the diversities of a continent. When you come to consider the birth of national consciousness in Canada, you do not find the germ of an ambition to dominate, as in Japan and Germany. Nor do you find a fight for freedom. Canada has always been free—free as the birds of passage that winged above the canoe of the first voyageur who pointed his craft up the St. Lawrence for the Pacific; but what you do find from the very first is a fight for national existence; and when the fight was won, Canada arose like a wrestler with consciousness of strength for new destiny.
II
Go back to the beginning of Canada!
She was not settled by land-seekers. Neither was she peopled by adventurers seeking gold. The first settlers on the banks of the St. Lawrence came to plant the Cross and propagate the Faith. True, they found they could support their missions and extend the Faith by the fur trade; and their gay adventurers of the fur trade threaded every river and lake from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia; but, primarily, the lure that led the French to the St. Lawrence was the lure of a religious ideal. So of Ontario and the English provinces. Ontario was first peopled by United Empire Loyalists, who refused to give up their loyalty to the Crown and left New England and the South, abandoning all earthly possessions to begin life anew in the backwoods of the Great Lakes country. The French came pursuing an ideal of religion. The English came pursuing an ideal of government. We may smile at the excesses of both devotees—French nuns, who swooned in religious ecstasy; old English aristocrats, who referred to democracy as "the black rot plague of the age"; but the fact remains—these colonists came in unselfish pursuit of ideals; and they gave of their blood and their brawn and all earthly possessions for those ideals; and it is of such stuff that the spirit of dauntless nationhood is made. Men who build temples of their lives for ideals do not cement national mortar with graft. They build with integrity for eternity, not time. Their consciousness of an ideal gives them a poise, a concentration, a stability, a steadiness of purpose, unknown to mad chasers after wealth. Obstinate, dogged, perhaps tinged with the self-superior spirit of "I am holier than thou"—they may be; but men who forsake all for an ideal and pursue it consistently for a century and a half develop a stamina that enters into the very blood of their race. It is a common saying even to this day that Quebec is more Catholic than the Pope, and Ontario more ultra-English than England; and when the Canadian is twitted with being "colonial" and "crude," his prompt and almost proud answer is that he "goes in more for athletics than esthetics." "One makes men. The other may make sissies."
With this germ spirit as the very beginning of national consciousness in Canada, one begins to understand the grim, rough, dogged determination that became part of the race. Canada was never intoxicated with that madness for Bigness that seemed to sweep over the modern world. What cared she whether her population stood still or not, whether she developed fast or slow, provided she kept the Faith and preserved her national integrity? Flimsy culture had no place in her schools or her social life. A solid basis of the three R's—then educational frills if you like; but the solid basis first. Worship of wealth and envy of material success have almost no part in Canadian life; for the simple reason that wealth and success are not the ideals of the nation. Laurier, who is a poor man, and Borden, who is only a moderately well-off man, command more social prestige in Canada than any millionaire from Vancouver to Halifax. If demos be the spirit of the mob, then Canada has no faintest tinge of democracy in her; but inasmuch as the French colonists came in pursuit of a religious ideal and the English colonists of a political ideal, if democracy stand for freedom for the individual to pursue his own ideal—then Canada is supersaturated with that democracy. Freedom for the individual to pursue his own ideal was the very atmosphere in which Canada's national consciousness was born.
In the West a something more entered into the national spirit. French fur-traders, wood-runners, voyageurs had drifted North and West, men of infinite resources, as much at home with a frying-pan over a camp-fire as over a domestic hearth, who could wrest a living from life anywhere. English adventurers of similar caliber had drifted in from Hudson Bay. These little lords in a wilderness of savages had scattered west as far as the Rockies, south to California. They knew no law but the law of a strong right arm and kept peace among the Indians only by a dauntless courage and rough and ready justice. They could succeed only by a good trade in furs, and they could obtain a good trade in furs only by treating the Indians with equity. Every man who plunged into the fur wilderness took courage in one hand and his life in the other. If he lost his courage, he lost his life. Indian fray, turbulent rapids, winter cold took toll of the weak and the feckless. Nature accepts no excuses. The man who defaulted in manhood was wiped out—sucked down by the rapids, buried in winter storms, absorbed into the camps of Indian degenerates. The men who stayed upon their feet had the stamina of a manhood in them that could not be extinguished. It was a wilderness edition of that dauntlessness which brought the Loyalists to Ontario and the French devotees to Quebec. This, too, made for a dogged, strong, obstinate race. At the time of the fall of French power at Quebec in 1759 there were about two thousand of these wilderness hunters in the West. Fifty years later by way of Hudson Bay came Lord Selkirk's Settlers—Orkneymen and Highlanders, hardy, keen and dauntless as their native rock-bound isles.
These four classes were the primary first ingredients that went into the making of Canada's national consciousness and each of the four classes was the very personification of strength, purpose, courage, freedom.
III
But Destiny plays us strange tricks. When Quebec fell in 1759, New France passed under the rule of that English and Protestant race which she had been fighting for two centuries; and when the American colonies won their independence twenty years later and the ultra-English Loyalists trekked in thousands across the boundary to what are now Montreal and Toronto and Cobourg, there came under one government two races that had fought each other in raid and counter-raid for two centuries—alien and antagonistic in religion and speech. It is only in recent years under the guiding hand of Sir Wilfred Laurier that the ancient antagonism has been pushed off the boards.
The War of 1812 probably helped Canada's national spirit more than it hurt it. It tested the French Canadian and found him loyal to the core; loyal, to be sure, not because he loved England more but rather because he loved the Americans less. He felt surer of religious freedom under English rule, which guaranteed it to him, than under the rule of the new republic, which he had harried and which had harried him in border raid for two centuries. The War of 1812 left Canada crippled financially but stronger in national spirit because she had tested her strength and repelled invasion.
If mountain pines strike strong roots into the eternal rocks because they are tempest-tossed by the wildest winds of heaven, then the next twenty years were destined to test the very fiber of Canada's national spirit. All that was weak snapped and went down. The dry rot of political theory was flung to dust. Special interests, pampered privileges, the claims of the few to exploit the many, the claims of the many to rule wisely as the few—the shibboleth of theorists, the fine spun cobwebs of the doctrinaires, governmental ideals of brotherhood that were mostly sawdust and governmental practices that were mostly theft under privilege—all went down in the smash of the next twenty years' tempest. All that was left was what was real; what would hold water and work out in fact.
It is curious how completely all records slur over the significance of the Rebellion of 1837. Canada is sensitive over the facts of the case to this day. Only a few years ago a book dealing with the unvarnished facts of the period was suppressed by a suit in court. As a rebellion, 1837 was an insignificant fracas. The rebels both in Ontario and Quebec were hopelessly outnumbered and defeated. William Lyon MacKenzie, the leader in Ontario, and Louis Papineau, the leader in Quebec, both had to flee for their lives. It is a question if a hundred people all told were killed. Probably a score in all were executed; as many again were sent to penal servitude; and several hundreds escaped punishment by fleeing across the boundary and joining in the famous night raids of Hunters' Lodges. Within a few years both the leaders and exiles were permitted to return to Canada, where they lived honored lives. It was not as a rebellion that 1837 was epoch-making. It was in the clarifying of Canada's national consciousness as to how she was to be governed.
Having migrated from the revolting colonies of New England and the South, the ultra-patriotic United Empire Loyalists unconsciously felt themselves more British than the French of Quebec. Canada was governed direct from Downing Street. There were local councils in both Toronto and Quebec—or Upper and Lower Canada, as they were called—and there were local legislatures; but the governing cliques were appointed by the Royal Governor, which meant that whatever little clique gained the Governor's ear had its little compact or junta of friends and relatives in power indefinitely. There were elections, but the legislature had no control over the purse strings of the government. Such a close corporation of special interests did the governing clique become that the administration was known in both provinces as a "Family Compact." Administrative abuses flourished in a rank growth. Judges owing their appointment to the Crown exercised the most arbitrary tyranny against patriots raising their voices against government by special interests. Vast land grants were voted away to favorites of the Compact. Public moneys were misused and neither account given nor restitution demanded from the culprit. Ultra-loyalty became a fashionable pose. When strolling actors played American airs in a Toronto theater they were hissed; and when a Canadian stood up to those airs, he was hissed. Special interests became intrenched behind a triple rampart of fashion and administration and loyalty. Details of the revolt need not be given here. A great love is always the best cure for a puny affection—a Juliet for a Rosalind; and when a pure patriotism arose to oust this spurious lip-loyalty, there resulted the Rebellion of 1837.
The point is—when the rebellion had passed, Canada had overthrown a system of government by oligarchy. She had ousted special interests forever from her legislative halls. In a blood and sweat of agony, on the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile, her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all, special privileges to none. Her patriots had themselves learned on the scaffold that law must be as sacredly observed by the good as by the evil, by the great as by the small. From the death scaffolds of these patriots sprang that part of Canada's national consciousness that reveres law next to God. Canada passed through the throes of purging her national consciousness from 1815 to 1840, as the United States passed through the same throes in the sixties, but the process cost her half a century of delay in growth and development.
While the union of Upper and Lower Canada put an end to the evils of special privileges in government, events had been moving apace in the far West, where roving traders and settlers were a law unto themselves. Red River settlers of the region now known as Manitoba were clamoring for an end to the monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company over all that region inland from the Great Northern Sea. The discovery of gold had brought hordes of adventurers pouring into Cariboo, or what is now known as British Columbia. Both Red River and British Columbia demanded self-government. Partly because England had delayed granting Oregon self-government, the settlers of the Columbia had set up their own provisional government and turned that region over to the United States. We are surely far enough away from the episodes to state frankly the facts that similar underground intrigue was at work in both Red River and British Columbia, fostered, much of it, by Irish malcontents of the old Fenian raids. Once more Canada's national consciousness roused itself to a bigger problem and wider outlook. Either the far-flung Canadian provinces must be bound together in some sort of national unity or—the Canadian mind did not let itself contemplate that "or." The provinces must be confederated to be held. Hence confederation in 1867 under the British North American Act, which is to Canada what the Constitution is to the United States. It happened that Sir John Macdonald, the future premier of the Dominion, had been in Washington during one period of the Civil War. He noted what he thought was the great defect of the American system, and he attributed the Civil War to that defect—namely, that all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government were supposed to rest with the states. Therefore, when Canada formed her federation of isolated provinces, Sir John and the other famous Fathers of Confederation reversed the American system. All power not specifically delegated to the provinces was supposed to rest with the Dominion. Only strictly local affairs were left with the provinces. Trade, commerce, justice, lands, agriculture, labor, marriage laws, waterways, harbors, railways were specifically put under Dominion control.
IV
Now, stand back and contemplate the situation confronting the new federation:
Canada's population was less than half the present population of the state of New York; not four million. That population was scattered over an area the size of Europe.[1] To render the situation doubly dark and doubtful the United States had just entered on her career of high tariff. That high tariff barred Canadian produce out. There was only one intermittent and unsatisfactory steamer service across the Atlantic. There was none at all across the Pacific. British Columbians trusted to windjammers round the Horn. Of railroads binding East to West there was none. A canal system had been begun from the lakes and the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence, but this was a measure more of national defense than commerce. Crops were abundant, but where could they be sold? I have heard relatives tell how wheat in those days sold down to forty cents, and oats to twenty cents, and potatoes to fifteen cents, and fine cattle to forty dollars, and finest horses to fifty dollars and seventy-five dollars. Fathers of farmers who to-day clear their three thousand dollars and four thousand dollars a year could not clear one hundred dollars a year. Commerce was absolutely stagnant. Canada was a federation, but a federation of what? Poverty-stricken, isolated provinces. Not in bravado, not in flamboyant self-confidence, rebuffed of all chance to trade with the United States, the new Dominion humbly set herself to build the foundations of a nation. She did not know whether she could do what she had set herself to do; but she began with that same dogged idealism and faith in the future which had buoyed up her first settlers; and there were dark days during her long hard task, when the whiff of an adverse wind would have thrown her into national bankruptcy—that winter, for instance, when the Canadian Pacific had no money to go on building and the Canadian government refused to extend aid. Had the Kiel Rebellion of '85 not compelled the Dominion government to extend aid so that the line would be ready for the troops every bank in Canada would have collapsed, and national credit would have been impaired for fifty years.
Meanwhile, a country of less than four million people set itself to link British Columbia with Montreal, and Montreal with Halifax, and Ottawa with Detroit, and the Great Lakes with the sea. The story is too long to be related in detail, but on canals alone Canada has spent a hundred millions. Including stocks, bonds, funded debt and debenture stock, the Dominion railways have a capital of $1,369,992,574; and the country that had not a foot of railroads, when the patriots fought the Family Compact, to-day possesses twenty-nine thousand miles of trackage,[2] three transcontinental systems of railroads and threescore lines touching the boundary.[3] Five times more tonnage passes through the Canadian Soo Canal than is expected for Panama or has passed through Suez; but consider the burden of this development on a people whose farmers were scarcely clearing one hundred dollars a year. It is putting it mildly to say that during these dark days property depreciated two-thirds in value. Land companies that had loaned up to two-thirds the value of farm property found themselves saddled with farms which could not be sold for half they had advanced on the loan.
Three times within the memory of the living generation Canadian delegates sought trade concessions in Washington; and three times they came back rebuffed, with but a grimmer determination to work out Canada's own destiny. Is it any wonder, when the fourth time came and Canada was offered reciprocity that she voted it down?
During the twenty dark years Canada lost to the United States one-fourth her native population.[4] During the last ten years she has drawn back to her home acres not only many of her expatriated native born but almost two million Americans. In ten years her population has almost doubled. Uncle Sam has boasted his four billion yearly foreign trade from Atlantic ports. Canada with a population only one-twelfth Uncle Sam's to-day has a foreign trade of almost a billion.
V
Take another look at Canada's area! All of Germany and Austria spread over Eastern Canada would still leave an area uncovered in the East bigger than the German Empire. England spread out flat would just cover the maritime provinces. Quebec stands a third bigger than Germany, Ontario a third bigger than France; and you still have a western world as large again as the East. Spread the British Isles flat, they would barely cover Manitoba. France and Germany would not equal Saskatchewan and Alberta; and two Germanies would not cover British Columbia—leaving undefined Yukon and MacKenzie River and Peace River and the hinterland of Hudson Bay, an area equal to European Russia. If areas in Canada had the same population as areas in Europe, the Dominion would be supporting four hundred million people.
It would be assuming too much stoicism to say that Canadians are not conscious of a great destiny. For years they stuck so closely to their nation-building that they had no time to stand back and view the size of the edifice of their own structure, but all that is different to-day. When four hundred thousand people a year flock to the Dominion to cast in their lot with Canadians, there is testimony of worth. Canadians know their destiny is upon them, whatever it may be; and they are meeting the challenge half-way with faces to the front. In the words of Sir Wilfred Laurier, they know that "the Twentieth Century is Canada's." What will they do with it? What are their aims and desires as a people? Will the same ideals light the path to the fore as have illumined the long hard way in the past? Will Canada absorb into her national life the people who are coming to her, or will they absorb her?
[1] Canada's area is 3,750,000 square miles. The area of Europe is 3,797,410 square miles.
[2] Canada's railway mileage at the end of 1913 was 29,303.53. The land grants to Canadian railroads, Dominion and provincial, stand 55,256,429 acres. Cash subsidies to railroads in Canada up to June 30, 1913, stand thus: from the Dominion, $163,251,469.42; from the provinces, $36,500,015.16; from the municipalities, $18,078,673.60.
[3] The tonnage through both Canadian and U. S. canals at the "Soo" in 1913 was 72,472,676, of which 39,664,874 went through the Canadian canal.
[4] The U. S. Census reports place the number of Canadians in the United States at one and a quarter million; but this is obviously far below the mark. Canada's loss of people shows that. For instance, from 1898 to 1908, Canada was receiving immigrants at a rate exceeding 200,000 a year, yet the census for this decade showed a gain of only a million. It was not till 1914 her census showed a gain of two million for ten years. Her immigrants either went back or drifted over the line. Port figures show that few went back to Europe.
CHAPTER II
FOUNDATION FOR HOPE
I
Canada at the opening of the twentieth century has the same population as the United States at the opening of the nineteenth century.[1] Has the Dominion any material justification for her high hopes of a world destiny? Switzerland possesses national consciousness to an acute degree. Yet Switzerland remains a little people. What ground has Canada for measuring her strength with the nations of the world? Having remained almost stationary in her national progress from 1759 to 1859, what reason has she to anticipate a progress as swift and world-embracing as that which forced the United States to the very forefront of world powers? It takes something more than high hopes to build empire. Has Canada a foundation beneath her high hopes? No nation ever had a more passionate patriotism than Ireland. Yet Ireland has lost her population and retrogressed.[2] Why will the same fate not halt and impede Canada?
It may be acknowledged here that Canadians have no answers for such questions and short shift for the questioner. They are too busy making history to talk about it. It is only the woman insecure of her social position who prates about it. It is only the nation uncertain of herself that bolsters a fact with an argument. Canada is too busy with facts for any flamboyant arguments. It is an even wager that if you ask the average well-informed business man in Canada how many miles of railways the Dominion has, he will answer on the dot "almost thirty thousand." But if you ask if he knows that Germany, for instance, with nine times denser population has barely twice as much trackage—no, your Canadian business man doesn't know it. He is too busy building his own railroads to care much what other nations are doing with theirs. Likewise of the country's trade increasing faster almost than the Dominion can handle it. He knows that imports have increased one hundred and sixty-three per cent. in ten years, and that exports have increased almost fifty per cent.; but he doesn't realize in the least that the Dominion with seven million people has one-fourth as large a foreign trade as the United States with a hundred million people.[3] He knows that immigration has in ten years jumped from 49,000 a year to 402,000; but does he take in what it means that his country with only five million native born is being called on to absorb yearly a third as many immigrants as the United States with eighty million native born?[4] He has been so busy handling the rush of prosperity that has come in on him like a tidal wave that he has not had time to pause over the problems of this new destiny—the fact, for instance, that in two more decades the newcomers will outnumber the native born.
II
Unless the edifice be top heavy, beneath it all must be the rock bottom of fact. Beneath the tide is the pull of some eternal law. What facts is Canada building her future on? What pull is beneath the tide of four hundred thousand homeseekers a year? What has doubled population and almost doubled foreign trade?
It is almost a truism that the farther north the land, the greater the fertility, if there be any fertility at all. There is first the supply of unfailing moisture, with a yearly subsoiling of humus unknown to arid lands. Canada is super-sensitive about her winter climate—the depth and intensity of the frost, the length and rigor of her winters; but she need not be. It should be cause of gratitude. Frost penetrating the ground from five to twelve feet—as it does in the Northwest—guarantees a subterranean root irrigation that never fails. Heavy snow—let us acknowledge frankly snow sometimes banks western streets the height of a man—means a heavy supply of moisture both in thaw and rain. There is second the long sunlight. An earth tilted on its axis toward the sun six months of the year gives the North a sunlight that is longer the farther north you go. When the sun sets at seven to eight in New York, it sets at eight to nine in Winnipeg, and nine to ten in Athabasca, and only for a few hours at all still farther north. It is the long sunlight that gives the fruit of Niagara and Quebec and Annapolis its "fameuse" quality; just as it is the sunlight that gives western fruit its finest coloring, the higher up the plateau it is grown. It is the long sunlight that gives Number One Hard Wheat its white fine quality so indispensable to the millers. So of barley and vegetables and small fruits and all that can be grown in the short season of the North. What the season lacks in length it gains in intensity of sunlight. Four months of twenty-hour sunlight produce better growth in some products than eight months of shorter sunlight.
These two advantages of moisture and sunlight, Canada possesses.[5] What else has she? It doesn't mean much to say that Canada equals Europe in area and that you could spread Germany and France and Austria and Great Britain over the Dominion's map and still have an area uncovered equal to European Russia. Nor does it mean much more to say that in Canada you can find the climate of a Switzerland in the Canadian Rockies, of Italy in British Columbia, of England in the maritime provinces and of Russia in the Northwest. Areas are so great and diverse that you have to examine them in groups to realize what basis of fact Canada builds from.
Girt almost round by the sea are the maritime provinces—Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick—in area within sixty-seven square miles of the same size as England, and in climate not unlike the home land.[6] Your impression of their inhabitants is of a quiescent, romantic, pastoral and sea-faring people—sprung from the same stock as the liberty-seekers of New England, untouched by the mad unrest of modern days, conservative as bed-rock, but with an eye to the frugal main chance and a way of making good quietly. They do not talk about the simple life in the maritime provinces because they have always lived it, and the land is famed for its diet of codfish, and its men of brains. Frugal, simple, reposeful living—the kind of living that takes time to think—has sent out from the maritime provinces more leaders of thought than any other area of Canada. It is a land that leaves a dreamy memory with you of sunset lying gold on the Bras d' Or Lakes, of cattle belly-deep in pasture, of apple farms where fragrance of fruit and blossoms seem to scent the very atmosphere, of fishermen rocking in their smacks, of great ships plowing up and down to sea. You know there are great coal mines to the east and great timber limits to the north; you may even smell the imprisoned fragrance of the yellowing lumber being loaded for export, but it is as the land of winter ports and of seamen for the navy that you will remember the maritime provinces as factors in Canada's destiny.
When gold was discovered in the Yukon and a hundred million dollars in gold came out in ten years, the world went mad. Yet Canada yearly mines from the silver quarries of the sea a harvest of thirty-four million dollars, and of that amount, fifteen million dollars comes from the maritime provinces.[7] Conservationists have sung their song in vain if the world does not know that the fisheries of the United States have been ruthlessly depleted, but here is a land the area of England whose fisheries have increased in value one hundred per cent. in ten years. It is not, however, as the great resource of fisheries that the maritime provinces must play their part in Canada's destiny. It is as the nursery of seamen for a marine power. No southern nation, with the exception of Carthage, has ever dominated the sea; partly for the simple reason that the best fisheries are always located in temperate zones, where the glacial silt of the icebergs feeds the finny hordes with minute infusoria; and the fisherman's smack—the dory that rocks to the waves like a cockleshell, with meal of pork and beans cooking above a chip fire on stones in the bottom of the boat, and rough grimed fellows singing chanties to the rhythm of the sea—the fisherman's smack is the nursery of the world's proudest merchant marines and most powerful navies. Japan knows this, and encourages her fishermen by bounties and passage money to spread all over the world, and Japanese to-day operate practically all the fisheries of the Pacific. England knows this and in the North Sea and off Newfoundland protects her fishermen and draws from their ranks her seamen.
Japan dominates seventy-two per cent. of the commerce of the Pacific, not through chance, but through her merchant marine built up from rough grimed fellows who quarry the silver mines of the sea. England dominates the Seven Seas of the world, not through her superiority man to man against other races, but through her merchant marine, carrying the commerce of the world, built up from simple fisher folk hauling in the net or paying out the line through icy salty spray above tempestuous seas. No power yet dominates the seas of the New World. The foreign commerce of the New World up to the time of the great war was carried by British, German and Japanese ships. Canada has the steel, the coal, the timber, the nursery for seamen. Will she become a marine power in the New World? It is one of her dreams. It is also one of England's dreams. No country subsidizes her merchant liners more heavily than Canada[8]—in striking contrast with the parsimonious policy of the United States. It is Canada's policy of ship subsidies that has established regular merchant liners—all liable to service as Admiralty ships—to Australia, to China, to Japan and to every harbor on the Atlantic.
Whether heavy subsidies to large liners will effect as much for a merchant marine for Canada as numerous small subsidies to small lines remains to be seen. The development of seamen from her fisheries is one of the dreams she must work out in her destiny, and that leads one to the one great disadvantage under which Canada rests as a marine power. She lacks winter harbors on the Atlantic accessible to her great western domain, whence comes the bulk of her commerce for export. True, the maritime provinces afford those harbors—Saint John and Halifax. A dozen other points, if need were, could be utilized in the maritime provinces as winter harbors; but take a look at the map! The maritime provinces are the longest possible spiral distance from the rest of Canada. They necessitate a rail haul of from two to three thousand miles from the west. What gives Galveston, New Orleans, Baltimore, Buffalo preeminence as harbors? Their nearness to the centers of commerce—their position far inland of the continent, cutting rail haul by half and quarter from the plains. Montreal has this advantage of being far inland; but from November to May Montreal is closed; and Canadian commerce must come out by way of American lines, or pay the long haul down to the maritime provinces. There can be no doubt that this disadvantage is one of the factors forcing the West to find outlet by Hudson Bay—where harbors are also closed by the ice but are only four hundred miles from the wheat plains. There can also be no doubt that the opening of Panama will draw much western commerce to Europe by way of the Pacific.
III
When one comes to consider Quebec under its new boundaries, one is contemplating an empire three times larger than Germany, supporting a population not so large as Berlin.[9] It is the seat of the old French Empire, the land of the idealists who came to propagate the Faith and succeeded in exploring three-quarters of the continent, with canoes pointed ever up-stream in quest of beaver. All the characteristics of the Old Empire are in Quebec to-day. Quebec is French to the core, not in loyalty to republican France, but in loyalty to the religious ideals which the founders brought to the banks of the St. Lawrence three centuries ago. Church spire, convent walls, religious foundations occupy the most prominent site in every city and town and hamlet of Quebec. From Tadousac to Montreal, from Labrador to Maine or New Hampshire, you can follow the thread of every river in Quebec by the glitter of the church spires round which nestle the hamlets. No matter how poor the hamlet, no matter how remote the hills which slope wooded down to some blue lake, there stand the village church with its cross on the spire, the whitewashed house of the curé, the whitewashed square dormer-windowed school.
Outside Quebec City and Montreal, Quebec is the most reposeful region in all America. What matter wars and rumors of wars to these habitants living under guidance of the curé, as their ancestors lived two hundred years ago? They pay their tithes. They attend mass. At birth, marriage and death—the curé is their guide and friend. He teaches them in their schools. He advises them in their family affairs. He counsels them in their business. At times he even dictates their politics; but when you remember that French is the language spoken, that primary education is of the slimmest, though all doors are open for a promising pupil to advance, you wonder whether constant tutelage of a benevolent church may not be a good thing in a chaotic, confused and restless age. The habitant lives on his little long narrow strip of a farm running back from the river front. He fishes a little. He works on the river and in the lumber camps of the Back Country. He raises a little tobacco, hay, a pig, a cow, a little horse and a family of from ten to twenty. When the daughters marry—as they are encouraged to do at the earliest possible age—the farm is subdivided among the sons; and when it will subdivide no longer, there is a migration to the Back Country, or to a French settlement in the Northwest, where another curé will shepherd the flock; and the habitant, blessed at his birth and blessed at his marriage, is usually blessed at his death at the ripe age of ninety or a hundred. It is a simple and on the whole a very happy, if not progressive, life. Some years ago, when hard times prevailed in Canada and the manufacturing cities of New England offered what seemed big wages to habitants, who considered themselves rich on one hundred dollars a year—a great migration took place across the border; but it was not a happy move for these simple children of the soil. They missed the shepherding of their beloved curé, and the movement has almost stopped. Also you find Jean Ba'tiste in the redwoods of California as lumber-jack, or plying a canoe on MacKenzie River. The best fur-traders of the North to-day are half-breeds with a strain of French Canadian blood.
If you take a look at the map of Quebec under its new boundaries up into Labrador—it seems absurd to call a region three times the area of Germany "a province"—you will see that only the fringe of the river fronts has been peopled. This is owing to the old system of parceling out the land in mile strips back from the river—a system that antedated the railroads, when every man's train was a paddle and the waterfront. Beyond, back up from the rivers, lies literally a no-man's-land of furs plentiful as of old, of timber of which only the edge has been slashed, of water power unestimated and of mineral resources only guessed. It seems incredible at this late date that you can count on one hand the number of men who have ascended the rivers of Quebec and descended the rivers of Labrador to Hudson Bay. The forest area is estimated at one hundred and twenty million acres; but that is only a guess. The area of pulp wood is boundless.
Along the St. Lawrence, south of the St. Lawrence and around the great cities come touches of the modern—elaborate stock farms, great factories, magnificent orchards, huge sawmills. The progress of Montreal and the City of Quebec is so intimately involved with the navigation of the St. Lawrence route and the development of railroads that it must be dealt with separately; but it may be said here that nearly all the old seigneurial tenures—Crown grants of estates to the nobility of New France—have passed to alien hands. The system itself, the last relic of feudal tenure in Canada, was abolished by Canadian law. What, then, is the aim of Quebec as a factor in Canada's destiny? It may be said perfectly frankly that with the exception of such enlightened men as Laurier, Quebec does not concern herself with Canada's destiny. In a war with France, yes, she would give of her sons and her blood; in a war against France, not so sure. "Why are you loyal?" I asked a splendid scholarly churchman of the old régime—a man whose works have been quoted by Parkman. "Because," he answered slowly, "because—you—English—leave us—alone to work out our hopes." "What are those hopes?" I asked. He waved his hand toward the window—church spires and yet more spires far as we could see down the St. Lawrence—another New France conserving the religious ideals that had been crushed by the republicanism of the old land. Let it be stated without a shadow of doubt—Quebec never has had and never will have the faintest idea of secession. Her religious freedom is too well guaranteed under the present régime for her to risk change under an untried order of independence or annexation. The church wants Quebec exactly as she is—to work out her destiny of a new and regenerate France on the banks of the St. Lawrence.
A certain section of the French oppose Canada embroiling herself in European wars. They do this conscientiously and not as a political trick to attract the votes of the ultramontane French. One of the most brilliant supporters Sir Wilfred Laurier ever had flung his chances of a Cabinet place to the winds in opposing Canada's participation in the Boer War. He not only flung his chances to the winds, but he ruined himself financially and was read out of the party. The motive behind this opposition to Canada's participations in the Imperial wars is, perhaps, three-fold. French Canada has never forgotten that she was conquered. True, she is better off, enjoys greater religious liberty, greater material prosperity, greater political freedom than under the old régime; but she remembers that French prestige fell before English prestige on the Plains of Abraham. The second motive is an unconscious feeling of detachment from British Imperial affairs. Why should French Canada embroil herself and give of her blood and means for a race alien to herself in speech and religion? The Monroe Doctrine forever defends Canada from seizure by European power. Why not rest under that defense and build up a purely Canadian power? The third motive is almost subconscious. What if a European war should involve French-Catholic Canada on the side of Protestant England against French-Catholic France, or even Catholic Italy? Quebec feels herself a part of Canada but not of the British Empire; and it is a great question how much Laurier's support of the British in the Boer War had to do with that partial defection of Quebec which ultimately defeated him on Reciprocity; for if there is one thing the devout son of the church fears more than embroilment in European war, it is coming under the republicanizing influence of the United States. Under Canadian law the favored status of the church is guaranteed. Under American law the church would be on the same footing as all other denominations.
IV
When one comes to Ontario, one is dealing with the kitchen garden of the Dominion—in summer a land of placid sky-blue lakes, and amber-colored wooded rivers, and trim, almost garden-like farms, and heavily laden orchards, and thriving cities beginning to smoke under the pall of the increasing and almost universal factory. Under its old boundaries Ontario stood just eighteen thousand square miles larger than France. Under its new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay, Ontario measures almost twice the area of France. France supports a population of nearly forty millions; Ontario, of barely two and a half millions. Both Ontario and France are equally fertile and equally diversified in fertility. Along the lakes and clustered round Niagara is the great fruit region—vineyards and apple orchards that are gardens of perfection. North of the lakes is a mixed farm region. Parallel with the latitude skirting Georgian Bay begins the Great Clay belt, an area of heavily forested lands about seven hundred miles north to south and almost a thousand diagonally east to west. On its southern edge this hinterland, which forms the watershed between Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence, seems to be rock-bound and iron-capped. For years travelers across the continent must have looked through the car windows across this landscape of windfall and fire as a picture of desolation. Surely, "here was nothing," as some of the first explorers said when they viewed Canada from Labrador; but pause; not so fast! Here lay, if nothing else, an area of timber limits seven hundred by one thousand miles; and as the timber burned off curious mineral outcroppings were observed. When the railroad was graded through what is now known as Sudbury, there was a report of a great find of copper. Expert after expert examined it, and company after company forfeited options and refused to bond it. Finally a shipment was sent out to a smelter across the border. The so-called "copper" was pronounced "nickel"—the greatest deposit of the metal needed for armor plating known in the world. In fact, only one other mine could compete against the Sudbury nickel beds—the French mines of New Caledonia. Here was something, surely, in this rock-bound iron region of desolation, which passing travelers had pronounced worthless.
The discovery of silver at Cobalt came by an almost similar chance. Grading an extension of a North Ontario railroad projected purely for the sake of prospective settlers, workmen came on surface deposits of "rose" silver—almost pure metal, some of it; and there resulted such a mining boom and series of quick fortunes as had made Klondike famous. And Cobalt and Sudbury are at only the southern edge of the unexplored hinterland of Ontario. Old records of the French régime, daily journals of the Hudson's Bay Company fur-traders, repeatedly refer to well-known mines between Lake Superior and James Bay; but fur-traders discouraged mining; and this region is less known to-day than when coureur de bois and voyageur threaded river and lake and leafy wilderness. Ontario, like Quebec, is only on the outer edge of realizing her own wealth.
V
We sometimes speak as though Canada had had her boom and it was all over. She has had her boom, and the boom has exploded, and it is a good thing. When inflation collapses, a country gets down to reality; and the reality is that Canada has barely begun to develop the exhaustless mine of wealth which Heaven has given her. Ontario, complacent with a fringe of prosperity along lake front, is an instance; Quebec, with only a border on each bank of her great rivers peopled, is another instance; and the prairie provinces are still more striking illustrations of the sleeping potentialities of the Dominion. In our dark days we used to call those three prairie provinces between Lake Superior and the Rockies "the granary of the Empire." I am afraid it was more in bravado, hoping against hope, than in any other spirit; for we were raising little grain and exporting less and receiving prices that hardly paid for the labor. That was back in the early nineties. To-day, what? One single year's wheat crop from one only of those provinces equals more gold in value than ever came out of Klondike. If Britain were cut off from every other source of food supply, those three provinces could feed the British Isles with their surplus wheat. To be explicit, credit Great Britain with a population of forty-five millions. Apportion to each six bushels of wheat—the per capita requirement for food, according to scientists. Great Britain requires two hundred and eighty to three hundred million bushels of wheat for bread only—not to be manufactured into cereal products, which is another and enormous demand in itself. Of the wheat required for bread, Great Britain herself raises only fifty to sixty million bushels, leaving a deficit, which must come from outside sources, of two hundred million bushels.
In 1912 Canada raised one hundred and ninety-nine million bushels of wheat. In 1913, of grain products, Canada exported one hundred and ten million bushels; of flour products, almost twenty million dollars' worth. Under stress of need or high prices these totals could easily be trebled. The figures are, indeed, bewildering in their bigness. In the three prairie provinces there were under cultivation in 1912 for all crops only sixteen and one-half million acres.[10] At twenty bushels to the acre this area put under wheat would feed Great Britain. But note—only sixteen and one-half million acres were under cultivation. There have been surveyed as suitable for cultivation one hundred and fifty-eight million acres. The land area of the three prairie provinces is four hundred and sixty-six million acres. If only half the land surveyed as suitable for cultivation were put in wheat—namely seventy-nine million acres; and if it yielded only ten bushels to the acre (it usually yields nearer twenty than ten), the three prairie provinces of Canada would be producing crops equal to the entire spring wheat production of the United States. Grant, then, two bushels for reseeding, or one hundred and fifty-eight million bushels, and six bushels for food, or fifty million bushels, the three prairie provinces would still have for export more than five hundred million bushels. All this presupposes population. Granting each man one hundred and sixty acres, it presupposes 493,750 more farmers than are in the West; but coming to Canada yearly are four hundred thousand settlers; so that counting four out of every five settlers children, in half a decade at the least, Western Canada will have five hundred thousand more farmers—enough to feed Great Britain and still have a surplus of wheat for Europe.
In connection with wheat exports from the West one factor should never be ignored—the influence of the Great Lakes and the Soo Canal in reducing freight to the West. Great Lakes freight tolls are to-day the cheapest in the world, and their influence in minimizing the toll on the all-land haul must never be ignored. Freight can be carried on the Great Lakes one thousand miles for the same rate charged on rail rate for one hundred miles.[11]
And wheat is not the only product of the three prairie provinces. On the borderland between Manitoba and Saskatchewan are enormous deposits of coal which have not yet been explored. Canoeing once through Eastern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba, I saw a piece of almost pure copper brought down from the hinterland of Churchill River by an Indian, from an unknown mine, which no white man has yet found. On the borderland between Alberta and British Columbia is a ridge of coal deposits which such conservative experts as the late George Dawson estimated would mine four million tons a year for five thousand years. These coal deposits seem almost nature's special provision for the treeless plains.
It is well known that the decrease in white fish in the Great Lakes for the past ten years has been appalling. Northward of Churchill River is a region of chains of lakes—the Lesser Great Lakes, they have been called—and these are the only untouched inland fisheries in America. To the exporter they are ideal fishing ground. The climate is cool. The fish can be sent out frozen to American markets. Of Canada's thirty-four million dollars' worth of fish in 1912, one and one-half million dollars' worth came from the three prairie provinces.
Under the old boundaries, the three prairie provinces compared in area respectively Manitoba with Great Britain; Saskatchewan with France; Alberta, one and a half times larger than Germany. Under the new boundaries extending the province to Hudson Bay, Manitoba is fifty-two thousand square miles larger than Germany; Saskatchewan extended north is fifty thousand square miles larger than France; and Alberta extended north is fifty thousand square miles larger than Germany. And north of the three grain provinces is an area the size of European Russia.
We talk of Canada's boom as "done," but has it even begun? Strathcona used to say that the three prairie provinces would support a population of one hundred million. Was he right? On the basis of Europe's population the three provinces would sustain three times Germany's sixty-five millions.
VI
In British Columbia one reaches the province of the greatest natural wealth, the greatest diversity in climate and the most feverish activity in Canada. East of the mountains is a climate high, cold and bracing as Russia or Switzerland. Between the ranges of the mountains are valleys mild as France. On the coast toward the south is a climate like Italy; toward the north, like Scotland. Of Canada's entire timber area—twice as great as Europe's standing timber—three-quarters lie in British Columbia. Fruit equal to Niagara's, fisheries richer than the maritime provinces, mines yielding more than Klondike—exist in this most favored of provinces. While the area is a half larger than Germany, the population is smaller than that of a suburb of Berlin.[12] Of Canada's thirty-four million dollars' worth of fish, thirteen million dollars' worth come from British Columbia; and of her products of forty-six millions of precious and fifty-six millions of non-metallic minerals in 1911 easily half came from British Columbia.[13]
Instead of that repose which marks the maritime provinces, one finds an eager fronting to the future that is almost feverish. If Panama is turning the entire Pacific into a front door instead of a back door, then British Columbia knows the coign of vantage, which she holds as an outlet for half Canada's commerce by way of the Pacific. It is in British Columbia that East must meet West and work out destiny.
[1] In 1800, the United States population was 5,308,483; in 1901, the Canadian population was 5,371,315.
[2] Ireland lost one-half her population from 1840 to 1900, Her population dropped in round numbers from eight millions to four millions.
[3] Total foreign trade of Canada, 1912, $1,085,264,000; of United States, $4,538,702,000.
[4] This presupposes immigration to the United States at a million and a quarter, as before the war.
[5] Speaking generally, there are few sections of the Northwest where the average rainfall is scanty.
[6] The areas of all the Canadian provinces except the maritime ones have been extended in recent years—Quebec to include Labrador—except the East Shore, which is under Newfoundland; Ontario to James Bay; Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Hudson Bay; Alberta to MacKenzie River. Northern British Columbia is not yet surveyed, which explains why its northern area is largely a matter of guess—closest estimates placing the whole province including Yukon as twice Germany; without Yukon as about one and two-thirds the area of Germany; but this is rough guesswork.
[7] Canada's fisheries for 1912 yielded $34,667,872.
[8] Canada's subsidies to steamships vary from year to year, but I do not think any year has much exceeded two millions.
[9] This is including Labrador.
[10] Under crop in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta 16,478,000 acres. Area surveyed available for cultivation 158,516,427 acres; land area, 466,068,798 acres.
[11] The rate from the head of the Lakes to Montreal is usually four to five cents. It has been as low as one cent, when grain was carried almost for ballast.
[12] British Columbia's population in 1912 was 392,480.
[13] Canada, mineral production for 1911 stands thus: copper, $6,911,831: gold, $9,672,096; iron, $700,216; lead, $818,672; nickel, $10,229,623; silver, $17,452,128; other metal, $322,862; total, $46,197,428. Non-metallic production 1911: coal $26,378,477; cement, $7,571,299; clay, $8,317,709; stone, $3,680,361; in all, $56,094.258.
CHAPTER III
THE TIE THAT BINDS
I
It is easy to understand what binds the provinces into a confederation. They had to bind themselves into a unity with the British North America Act or see their national existence threatened by any band of settlers who might rush in and by a perfectly legitimate process of naturalization and voting set up self-government. At the time of confederation such eminent Imperial statesmen as Gladstone and Labouchère seriously considered whether it would not be better to cut Canada adrift, if she wanted to be cut adrift. The difference between the Canadian provinces and the isolated Latin republics of South America illustrates best what the bond of confederation did for the Dominion. The why and how of confederation is easy to understand, but what tie binds Canada to the Mother Country? That is a point almost impossible for an outsider to understand.
England contributes not a farthing to Canada. Canada contributes not a dime to England. Though a tariff against alien lands and trade concessions to her colonies would bring such prosperity to those colonies as Midas could not dream, England confers no trade favor to her colonial children. There have been times, indeed, when she discriminated against them by embargoes on cattle or boundary concessions to cement peace with foreign powers. Except for a slight trade concession of twenty to twenty-five per cent. on imports from England—which, of course, helps the Canadian buyer as much as it helps the British seller—Canada grants no favors to the Mother Country. In spite of those trade concessions to England, in 1913 for every dollar's worth Canada bought from England, she bought four dollars' worth from the United States.
Certainly, England sends Canada a Governor-General every four years; but the Cabinet of England never appoints a Governor-General to Canada till it has been unofficially ascertained from the Cabinet of the Dominion whether he will be persona grata. Canada gives the Governor-General fifty thousand dollars a year and some perquisites—an emolument that can barely sustain the style of living expected and exacted from the appointee, who must maintain a small viceregal court. The Governor-General has the right of veto on all bills passed by the Canadian government; and where an act might conflict with Imperial interests, he would doubtless exercise the right; but the veto power in the hands of the Imperial vicegerent is so rarely used as to be almost dead. Veto is avoided by the Governor-General working in close conference with the prevailing Cabinet, or party in power; and a party on the verge of enacting laws inimical to Imperial interests can be disciplined by dismissal from office, in which case the party must appeal to the country for re-election. That means time; and time allows passion to simmer down; and an entire electorate is not likely to perpetrate a policy inimical to Imperial interests. In practice, that represents the whole, sole and entire power of England's representative in Canada—a power less than the nod of a saloon keeper or ward boss in the civic politics of the United States. Officially, yes; the signature of the Governor-General is put to commissions and appointments of first rank in the army and the Cabinet and the courts. In reality, it is a question if any Governor in Canada since confederation has as much as suggested the name of an applicant for office.
On the other hand, Canada's dependence on England is even more tenuous. Does a question come up as to the "twilight zone" of provincial and federal rights, it is settled by an appeal to the Privy Council. Suits from lower courts reversed by the Supreme Court of Canada can be appealed to England for decision; and in religious disputes as to schools—as in the famous Manitoba School Case—this right of appeal to Imperial decision has really been the door out of dilemma for both parties in Canada. It is a shifting of the burden of a decision that must certainly alienate one section of votes—from the shoulders of the Canadian parties to an impartial Imperial tribunal.
If there be any other evidence of bonds in the tangible holding Canada to England and England to Canada—I do not know it.
II
What, then, is the tie that binds colony to Mother Country? Tangible—it is not; but real as life or death, who can doubt, when a self-governing colony voluntarily equips and despatches sixty thousand men—the choice sons of the land—to be pounded into pulp in an Imperial war? Who can doubt the tie is real, when bishops' sons, bankers', lawyers', doctors', farmers', carpenters', teachers' and preachers'—the young and picked heritors of the land—clamor a hundred thousand strong to enlist in defense of England and to face howitzer, lyddite and shell? Why not rest secure under the Monroe Doctrine that forever forefends European conquest? It is something the outsider can not understand. President Taft could not understand it when his reciprocity pact was defeated in Canada partly because of his own ill-advised words about Canada drifting from United States interests. Canada was not drifting from American interests. In trade and in transportation her interests are interlinking with the United States every day; but the point—which President Taft failed to understand—is: Canada is not drifting because she is sheet-anchored and gripped to the Mother Country. We may like it or dislike it. We may dispute and argue round about. The fact remains, without any screaming or flag waving, or postprandial loyalty expansions of rotund oratory and a rotunder waist line—Canada is sheet-anchored to England by an invisible, intangible, almost indescribable tie. That is one reason why she rejected reciprocity. That is why at a colossal cost in land and subsidies and loans and guarantees of almost two billions, she has built up a transportation system east and west, instead of north and south. That is why for a century she has hewn her way through mountains of difficulty to a destiny of her own, when it would have been easier and more profitable to have cast in her lot with the United States.
What is the tie that binds? Is it the hope of an Imperial Federation, which shall bind the whole British Empire into such a world federation as now holds the provinces of the Dominion? Twenty years ago, if you had asked that, the answer might have been "Yes." Canada was in the dark financially and did not see her way out. If only the Chamberlain scheme of a tariff against the world, free trade within the empire, could have evolved into practical politics, Canada for purely practical reasons would have welcomed Imperial Federation. It would have given her exports a wonderful outlet. But to-day Imperial Federation is a deader issue in Canada than reciprocity with the United States. No more books are written about it. No one speaks of it. No one wants it. No one has time for it. The changed attitude of mind is well illustrated by an incident on Parliament Hill, Ottawa, one day.
A Cabinet Minister was walking along the terrace above the river talking to a prominent public man of England.
"How about Imperial Federation?" asked the Englishman. "Do you want it?"
The Canadian statesman did not answer at once. He pointed across the Ottawa, where the blue shimmering Laurentians seem to recede and melt into a domain of infinitude. "Why should we want Imperial Federation?" he answered. "We have an empire the size of Europe, whose problems we must work out. Why should Canadians go to Westminster to legislate on a deceased wife's sister's bills and Welsh disestablishment and silly socialistic panaceas for the unfit to plunder the fit?"
It will be noticed that his answer had none of that flunkeyism to which Goldwin Smith used to ascribe much of Canadian pro-loyalty. Rather was there a grave recognition of the colossal burden of helping a nation the area of Europe to work out her destiny in wisdom and in integrity and in the certainty that is built up only from rock bottom basis of fact.
Has flunkeyism any part in the pro-loyalty of Canada? Goldwin Smith thought it had, and we all know Canadians whose swelling lip-loyalty is a sort of Gargantuan thunder. It may be observed, parenthetically, those Canadians are not the personages who receive recognition from England.
"Sorry, Your Royal Highness, sorry; but Canada is becoming horribly contaminated by Americanizing influences," apologized a pro-loyalist of the lip-flunkey variety to the Duke of Connaught shortly after that scion of royalty came to Canada as Governor.
The Duke of Connaught turned and looked the fussy lip-loyalist over.
"What's good enough for Americans is good enough for me," he said.
An instance of the absence of flunkeyism from the Dominion's loyalty to the Mother Country occurred during the visit of the present King as Prince of Wales to the Canadian Northwest a few years ago. The royal train had arrived at some little western place, where a contingent of the Mounted Police was to act as escort for the Prince's entourage. The train had barely pulled in when a fussy little long-coat-tailed secretary flew John-Gilpin fashion across the station platform to a khaki trooper of the Mounted Police.
"His Royal Highness has arrived! His Royal Highness has arrived," gasped the little secretary, almost apoplectic with self-importance. "Come and help to get the baggage off—"
"You go to ——," answered the khaki-uniformed trooper, aiming a tobacco wad that flew past the little secretary's ear. "Get the baggage off yourself! We're not here as porters. We're here to execute orders and we don't take 'em from little damphool fussies like you."
Yet that trooper was of the company that made the Strathcona Horse famous in South Africa—famous for such daring abandon in their charges that the men could hardly be held within bounds of official orders. He is of the very class of men who have forsaken gainful occupations in the West to clamor a hundred-thousand strong for the privilege of fighting to the last ditch for the empire under the rain of death from German fire.
"How can Canadians be loyal to a system of government that acknowledges some fat king sitting on a throne chair like a mummy as ruler?" demanded an American woman of a Canadian man.
"Well," answered the Canadian, "I don't know that any 'fat king' was ever quite so fat as a gentleman named Mammon who plays a pretty big part in the government of all republics." He drew a five-dollar bill from his pocket. "As a piece of paper that is utterly worthless," he explained. "It isn't even good wrapping paper. It's a promise to pay—to deliver the goods, that gives it value. It's what the system of government stands for, that rouses support—not this, that, or the other man—"
"But what does it stand for?" interrupted the American; and the Canadian couldn't answer. It roused and held his loyalty as if of family ties. Yet he could not define it.
He might have explained that Canada has had a system of justice since 1837 never truckled to nor trafficked in, but he knew in his heart that the loyalty was to a something deeper than that. He knew that many republics—Switzerland, for instance—have as impartial a system of justice. He might have descanted on the British North America Act being to Canada what the Constitution is to the United States, only more elastic, more susceptible to growth and changing conditions; but he knew that the Constitution was what it was owing to this other principle of which law and justice were but the visible formula. He might easily have dilated on excellent features of the Canadian parliamentary system different from the United States or Germany. For instance, no party can hold office one day after it lacks the support of a majority vote. It must resign reins to the other party, or go to the country for re-election. Or he might have pointed to the very excellent feature of Cabinet Ministers sitting in the House and being directly responsible to Commons and Senate for the management of their departments to the expenditure of a farthing. A Cabinet member who may be quizzed to-day, to-morrow, every day in the week except Sunday, on the management of affairs under him can never take refuge in ambiguous silence or behind the skirts of his chief, as secretaries delinquent have frequently taken refuge behind the spotless reputation of a too-confiding President. But the Canadian explained none of these things. He knew that these things were only the outward and visible formula of the principle to which he was loyal.
III
A few years ago the mistake would have been impossible; for there was, up to 1900, practically no movement of settlers from the British Isles to Canada; but to-day with an enormous in-rush of British colonists to the Dominion, a superficial observer might ascribe the loyalty to the ties of blood—to the fact that between 1900 and 1911, 685,067 British colonists flocked to Canada. Not counting colossal investments of British capital, there are to-day easily a million Britishers living on and drawing their sustenance from the soil of Canada. And yet, however unpalatable and ungracious the fact may be to Englishmen, the ties of blood have little to do with the bond that holds Canada to England. This statement will arouse protest from a certain section of Canadians; but those same Canadians know there are hundreds—yes, thousands—of mercantile houses in the Dominion where employers practically put up the sign—"No Englishman need apply."
"I've come to the point," said a wholesale hardware man of a Canadian city, "where I won't employ a man if he has a cockney accent. I've tried it hundreds of times, and it has always ended the same way. I have to break a cockney's neck before I can convince him that I know the way I want things done, and they have to be done that way. He is so sure I am 'ownley a demmed ke-lo-neal' that he is lecturing me on how I should do things before he is in my establishment ten minutes. I don't know what it is. It may be that coming suddenly to a land where all men are treated on an equality and not kicked and expected to doff caps in thanks for the insolence, they can't stand the free rein and not go locoed. All I know is—where I'll employ an Irishman, or a Scotchman, or a Yorkshireman, on the jump, I will not employ a cockney. I don't want to commit murder."
And that business man voiced the sentiment of multitudes from farm, factory and shop. I'll not forget, myself, the semi-comic episode of rescuing an English woman from destitution and having her correct my Canadian expressions five minutes after I had given her a roof. She had referred to her experience as "jolly rotten"; and I had remarked that strangers sometimes had hard luck because "we Canadians couldn't place them," when I was roundly called to order by a tongue that never in its life audibly articulated an "h."
IV
Before digging down to the subterranean springs of Canadian loyalty, we must take emphatic cognizance of several facts. Canada, while not a republic, is one of the most democratic nations in the world. Practically every man of political, financial or industrial prominence in Canada to-day came up by the shirt-sleeve route in one generation. If there is an exception to this statement—and I know every part of Canada almost as well as I know my own home—I do not know it. Sifton, Van Horne, MacKenzie, Mann, Laurier, Borden, Foster, the late Sir John Macdonald—all came up from penniless boyhood through their own efforts to what Canadians rate as success. I said "what Canadians rate as success." I did not say to affluence, for Canadians do not rate affluence by itself as success. Laurier, Foster, Sir John Macdonald—each began as a poor man. Sifton began life as a penniless lawyer. Van Horne got his foot on the first rung of the ladder hustling cars for troops in the Civil War. MacKenzie of Canada Northern fame began with a trowel; Dan Mann with an ax in the lumber woods at a period when wages were a dollar and twenty-five cents a day; Laurier with a lawyer's parchment and not a thing else in the world. Foster, the wizard of finance, taught his first finance in a schoolroom. And so one might go on down the list of Canada's great. Unless I am gravely mistaken the richest industrial leader of Ontario began life in a little bake shop, where his wife cooked and he sold the wares; and the richest man in the Canadian West began with a pick in a mine. I doubt if there is a single instance in Canada of a public man whose family's security from want traces back prior to 1867.
But the richest are not rated the most successful in Canada. There is an untold and untellable tragedy here. There is many a city in Canada which has a Mr. Rich-Man's-Folly in the shape of a palatial house or castellated residence which failed to force open the portals of respect and recognition for himself. Folly Castle has been occupied in an isolation that was almost quarantine. Why? Because its foundations were laid in some financial mud, which Canada never forgets and never forgives. Instances could be multiplied of brilliant politicians retired to private life, of moneyed men who spent fortunes to buy a knighthood, a baronetcy, an earldom—and died disappointed because in early life they had used fiduciary funds or trafficked in politics. It may impart a seeming snobbery to Canadian life, an almost crude insolence; but it keeps a title from becoming the insignia of an envied dollar bill. It keeps men from buying what their conduct failed to win. It does more than anything else to keep down that envy of true success which is the curse of many lands. Canadian papers rarely trouble to chronicle whether a rich man wears the hair shirt of a troubled conscience, or the paper vest of a tight purse. They are not interested in him simply because he is rich. If he loots a franchise and unloads rotten stocks on widows and orphans and teachers and preachers, they call him a thief and send him to jail a convict. Three decades ago the premier's own nephew misused public funds. It could have been hushed by the drop of a hat or the wave of a hand. The party in power was absolutely dominant. The culprit was arrested at nine in the morning and sentenced to seven years in the penitentiary by six that day; and he served the term, too, without any political wash to clear him. Instances are not lacking of titled adventurers ostracized in Winnipeg and Montreal going to Newport and capturing the richest heiresses of the land. These instances are not mentioned in invidious self-righteousness. They are mentioned purely to illustrate the underlying, unspoken difference in essential values.
V
Set down, then, two or three premises! Canada is under a monarchy, but in practice is a democratic country. Canada is absolutely impartial in her justice to rich and poor. Have we dug down to the fountain spring of Canadian loyalty? Not at all. These are not springs. They are national states of mind. These characteristics are psychology. What is the rock bottom spring? One sometimes finds the presence of a hidden spring by signs—green grass among parched; the twist of a peach or hazel twig in answer to the presence of water; the direction of the brook below. What are the signs of Canada's springs? Signs, remember; not proofs. Of proofs, there is no need.
Perfectly impartially, whether we like it or dislike it, without any argument for or against, let us set down Canadian likes and dislikes as to government. These are not my likes and dislikes. They are not your likes and dislikes. They are facts as to the Canadian people.
Canadians have no faith in a system of government, whether under a Turkish Khan or a Lloyd George Chancellor, which delegates the rule of a nation to butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers and "the dear people" fakers. They do not believe that a man who can not rule his own affairs well can rule the nation well. They regard government as a grave and sacred function, not as a grab bag for spoils. If a party makes good in power, they have no fear of leaving that party in power for term after term. The longer their premier is in office the more efficient they think he will become. They have no fear of the premier becoming a "fat" tyrannical king. Long as the party makes good, they consider it has a right to power; and that experience adds to competency. Instantly the party fails to make good, they throw it out independent of the length of its tenure of office.
Canadians do not believe that "I-am-as-good-as-you-are-and-a-little-better." They will accept the fact that "I-am-as-good-as-you-are" only when I prove it in brain, in brawn, in courtesy, in mental agility, in business acumen, in service—in a word, in fact. They are comparatively untouched by the theoretical radicalism of the French Revolution, by the socialism of a Lloyd George, by the war of labor and capital. They are untouched by theory because they are so intent on fact. The "liberty, equality and fraternity" cry of the French Revolution—they regard as so much hot air. Canadians since 1837 have had "liberty, equality, fraternity." Why rant about it? And when they didn't have it, they fought for it and went to the scaffold for it, and got it. The day's work—that's all. Why posturize and theorize about platitudes? Canadians are not interested in the Lloyd George theory of the poor plundering the prosperous, because every man or woman who tries in Canada can succeed. He may hoe some long hard rows. Let him hoe! It will harden flabby muscle and give backbone in place of jawbone! Help the innocent children—yes! There is a child saving organization in every province. But if the adult will not try, let him die! If he will not struggle to survive, let him die! The sooner the better! No theoretical parasites for Canada, nor parlor socialism! "Take off your coat! Roll up your shirt-sleeves! Stop blathering! Go to work!" says Canada.
"But I think—" protests the theorist.
"Thinks don't pass currency as coin. Go to work, and pass up facts," says Canada.
VI
It may be objected that all this means the survival of the fit, the rule of the many by the few. That is exactly what it means. That is the fountain spring of Canada's national idea, whether we like it or hate it. That is the belief that binds Canada's loyalty to the monarchical idea—though Canada would as soon call it the presidential idea as the monarchical idea. She does not care what name you tag it by so long as she delegates to the selected and elected few the power to rule. She believes the selected few are better than the unwinnowed many as rulers. She would sooner have a mathematical school-teacher as finance minister than a saloon keeper or ward heeler. She believes that the rule of the select few is better than the rule of the thoughtless many. She delegates the right and power to rule to those few, lets them make the laws and bows to the laws as to the laws of God, as the best possible for the nation because they have been enacted by the best of her nation. If that best be bad, it is at least not so bad as the worst. She never says—"Pah! What is law! I made the law! If it doesn't suit me, I'll break it. I am the law."
Canadians acknowledge they have delegated power to make law to men whom they believe superior to the general run. Therefore, they obey that law as above change by the individual. In other words, Canadians believe in the rule of the many delegated to the superior few. Those few do what they deem wise; not what the electorate tell them. They exceed instructions. They lead. They do not obey. But if they fail, they are thrown to the dogs without mercy, whether the tenure of office be complete or incomplete. It is the old Saxon idea of the Witenagemot—the council of a few wise men ruling the clan.
There is the fountain spring of Canadian loyalty to the monarchical idea. It is not the fat king. It is not any king. It is what the insignificant personality called "king" stands for, like the five-dollar bill worthless as wrapping paper but of value as a promise to deliver the goods.
CHAPTER IV
AMERICANIZATION
I
"The Americanizing of Canada" is a phrase which has been much in vogue with a section of the British press ever since the attempt to establish reciprocity between the United States and the Dominion. It is a question if the glib users of the phrase have the faintest idea what they mean by it. It is a catchword. It sounds ominously deep as the owl's wise but meaningless "too-whoo." English publicists who have never been nearer Canada than a Dominion postage stamp wisely warn Canada against the siren seductions of Columbia's republicanism.
If the phrase means that reciprocity might lead to annexation, Canada's repudiation of reciprocity is sufficient disproof of the imputation. If it means increased and increasing trade weaving a warp and woof of international commerce—then—yes—there is an "Americanizing of Canada" as there is a Canadianizing of the United States through international traffic; but the users of the phrase should remember that the country doing the largest trade of all countries with the United States is Great Britain; and does one speak of the "Americanizing" of Great Britain? If it means that in ten years two-fifths as many Americans have settled in Western Canada as there are native-born Canadians in the West—then—yes—Canada pleads guilty. She has spent money like water and is spending it yet to attract these American settlers; and they, on their part, have brought with them an average of fifteen hundred dollars a settler, not counting money invested by capitalists. If in the era between 1900 and 1911, 650,719 American settlers came to Western Canada, and from 1911 to 1914, six hundred thousand more—or say, with natural increase, a million and a quarter in fifteen years; to counterpoise that consideration remember that in the era from 1885 to 1895 one-fifth of Canada's native population moved to the United States.
There is not the slightest doubt that within ten years the balance of political power in Canada has shifted from the solidarity of French Quebec to the progressive West; but that can hardly be considered as of political import when two out of four western provinces rejected reciprocity.
What, then, is meant by the phrase "Americanizing of Canada"?
Consider for a moment what is happening!
Twenty years ago the number of American and Canadian railroads meeting at the boundary and crossing the boundary numbered some six. Ten years ago in the West alone there were sixteen branch lines feeding traffic into one another's territory across the border. To-day, if you count all the American railroads reaching up from trunk lines north to Canada, and all the Canadian spurs reaching south from trunk lines into the United States, and all the great trunk lines having subsidiaries like the South Shore and "Soo" crossing the border, and all the lines having international running rights over one another's roadbed, there are more than sixty railroads feeding Canadian traffic into the United States and American traffic into Canada. This explains why of all the export grain traffic from the Northwest forty-four per cent. only goes from Canada by all-Canadian routing, while fifty-six per cent. comes to seaboard over American lines; and all this is independent of the enormous American traffic through the Canadian "Soo" by the Great Lakes, in some years, reaching a total five times as large as the traffic expected through Panama. One can not contemplate this constant interchange of traffic without recalling the metaphor of the warp and the woof, of the shuttle weaving a fabric of international commerce that ignores dead reciprocity pacts and an invisible boundary. Yet England does three-fourths of the carrying trade for the United States across the Atlantic. Spite of high tariff on one side of the ocean and no tariff on the other side, spite of eagle and lion rampant, British ships weave like busy shuttles across the silver lanes of the sea an invisible warp and woof that are stronger than cables of steel, or political treaty.
So much for lines of traffic between Canada and the United States!
What of the traffic carried?
American imports to Canada have doubled in three years; or increased from two hundred sixteen million dollars' worth in 1910 to four hundred fifteen million dollars' worth in 1913; and instead of the war causing a falling off, it is likely to cause an increase; for Canada's purchases from Europe have been cut off and must be supplied by the United States. Of the imports to Canada, two-thirds are manufactured articles—motors, locomotives, cars, coffee, cotton, iron, steel, implements, coal. At time of writing exports from the United States now rank the United Kingdom first, Canada second, Germany third. When you consider that Canada's purchasing power is that of seven million people, where the United Kingdom's is forty-five and Germany's sixty-five million, the significance of these comparative ranks is apparent.
From Canada to the United States, exports increased from $95,000,000 in 1910 to $120,000,000 in 1913, not because Canada's producing power is so much smaller than her buying power, but because she is growing so fast that she consumes much of what she produces. To put it another way, of all Canada exports, the United States takes four-fifths of the coal, nine-tenths of the copper, four-fifths of the nickel, ten-elevenths of the gold, two-fifths of the silver, four-fifths of other minerals, one-third of the fish, one-third of the lumber, one-fourth of the animals and meat, one-tenth of the grain. It need not be told here that the other portions of Canada's farm, mine and lumber exports go almost entirely to Great Britain.
II
It has been estimated that half a billion of American capital is invested in Canada. A moment's thought reveals how ridiculously below the mark are these figures. Between 1900 and 1911 by actual count there entered Canada 650,719 American settlers. Averaging up one year with another by actual estimate of settlers' possessions at point of entry, these settlers were possessed of fifteen hundred dollars each in cash. This represents almost a billion, and almost as many more American settlers have entered Canada since 1911. This represents not the investments of the capital class but of small savings. It takes no account of the nickel mines, the copper mines, the smelters, the silver mines, the coal lands, the timber limits, the fisheries, the vast holdings of agricultural lands in the West held for speculative purposes—for all of which spot cash was paid down in large proportion.
The largest steel plant in the East, the largest coal areas in the West, the only nickel mines in America, three-quarters of all the copper and gold reduction works of the West are financed by American capital. To be more explicit, when the MacKenzie-Mann interests bought one large coal area in British Columbia, the Hill interests of St. Paul bought the other large coal area. This does not mean there are not large coal areas owned by Canadian capital. There are—colossal areas; but for every big area being worked by Canadian capital there are two such being worked by American.
Before a single Canadian railroad had wakened up to the fact there were any mines in East and West Kootenay and the Slocan, American lines had pushed up little narrow-gauge lines to feed the copper and gold ores into Butte and Helena smelters. By the time Canadian and British capital came on the scene in Kootenay the cream had been skimmed from the profits, and the mines had reached the wildcat stage of beautifully gilded and engraved stock certificates taking the place of real profits—of almost worth-nothing shares in worthless holes in the ground selling on a face value of a next-door profit-yielding neighbor. The American is without a peer as pioneer on land, in mine, in forest; but the boomster, who invariably follows on the heels of that pioneer, is also the most expert "houn' dawg" to rouse the wildcatter. Canadians have too often wakened up only at the wildcat stage, and British capital has come in to reorganize inflated and collapsed properties on a purely investment basis. The American pioneer does nothing on an investment basis. He goes in on a wild and rampant dare-devil gamble. If he loses—as lose he often does—he takes his medicine and never whines. If he wins, the welkin rings.
What happened in Kootenay was largely repeated ten years later in Klondike and ten years yet later in Cobalt, and it must not be forgotten that when Canadian capital refused to bond the nickel mines of Sudbury, it was American capital that dared the risk.
What happened in the mining booms was only a faint foreshadowing of the furore that broke to a madness in real estate when American settlers began crossing the boundary in tens and hundreds of thousands a year. Canadians knew they had wonderfully fertile farming land. Hadn't they been telling themselves so since confederation, when they pledged the credit of Canada to build a transcontinental? They knew they had the most fertile wheat lands on earth, but what was the use of knowing that when you could not sell those lands for fifty cents an acre? What was the use of raising forty bushels of wheat to the acre, when you burned it in the stack or fed it to cattle worth only ten dollars a head, because you could get neither wheat nor cattle to market? You really believed you had the best land on earth, but what good did the belief do you? Sons and daughters forsook the Canadian farmstead for the United States. Between the early eighties and the early nineties, of Canada's population of five millions, over a million—some estimates place it at a million and a half—Canadians left the Dominion for the United States. You find the place names of Ontario all through Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota and the two Dakotas; and you find Jean Ba'tiste drifting from the lumber woods of Quebec to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and to the redwoods of California and to the yellow pine uplands of the Southwestern Desert. I have met men who worked for my brothers in the lumber woods of Wisconsin down among the yellow pines of the Arizona Desert. All that was back in the decrepit and languid and hopesick nineties. It was then you could see the skies of Southern Manitoba luridly aflame at night with wheat stacks it didn't pay to thresh.
Came a turn of the wheel! Was it Destiny or Providence? We talk mistily of Cause and Effect, but who drops the Cause that turns the Wheel? Who of us that witnessed the crazy gold stampede to Kootenay and the crazier stampede to Klondike could guess that the backwash of those foolish tidal waves of gold-mad humanity would people the Northwest? Why, we were mad with alarm over the gold stampede! Men pitched their homesteads to the winds and trekked penniless for the mines. Women bought mining shares for a dollar that were not worth ten cents. Clerks, railroad hands, seamstresses, waitresses—all were infected by the mania. In vain the wheat provinces pointed out that one single year's wheat crop would exceed in value all the gold mined in the North in fifty years. Nothing could stem the madness. You could pave Kootenay with the fortunes lost there or go to Klondike by the bones of the dead bleaching the trail.
But behold the unexpected Effect! Adventurers from all the earth rushing to the gold mines passed over unpeopled plains of seeming boundlessness. Land in the western states was selling at this time at from seventeen dollars in the remote sections to seventy-five dollars an acre near markets. Here was land in these Canadian plains to be had for nothing but the preemption fee of ten dollars and three years' residence.
"I didn't take up a homestead meaning to farm it," said a disappointed fortune seeker to me on the banks of the Saskatchewan. "I did it because I was dead broke, and it seemed to me the easiest way to make three thousand dollars. I could earn three dollars a day well-driving, and then at the end of my homestead term sell this one hundred and sixty acres for three thousand dollars."
Do you appreciate the amazing optimistic confidence of this bankrupt argonaut? We could not sell that land for fifty cents an acre. To use the words of a former Minister of the Interior, "We could not bring settlers in by the scruff of the neck and dump them on the land." (There had been fewer than two thousand immigrants the year that minister made that apology for hard times to an audience in Winnipeg.) But this penniless settler had seen it happen in his own home state of Iowa. He had seen land increase in value from nothing an acre to ten dollars and twenty dollars and seventy-five dollars and one hundred dollars, and he sat him down on the bare prairie in a tar-papered shanty to help the same process along in Canada. He never had the faintest shadow of a doubt of his hopes materializing. He had gambled on the gold and he had lost; and behold him casting another throw of the dice in the face of Fate, and gambling on the land; and please note—he won out. He was one of the multitude who won out of the land what they had lost on gold—who plowed out of the prairie what they had sunk in a hole in the ground in a mine!
Another twist of the capricious Wheel of Fate! We didn't send Clifford Sifton down from the West to boom Canada. We didn't know a boom was coming. Nobody saw it. Clifford Sifton was one of the youngest Cabinet Ministers ever appointed in Canada. There was a fight on between the Province of Manitoba and the Dominion government as to the right of the province to abolish separate schools. Had the province exceeded its rights? The dispute was non-religious at first, but finally developed into a bitter Catholic versus Protestant controversy. Not all Protestants wanted non-religious schools; but when Catholic Quebec said that Protestant Manitoba should not have non-religious schools, a furious little tempest waxed in a furious little teapot. The entrenched government of Sir John Macdonald, who had died some few years previously, went down in defeat before Laurier, the Liberal, the champion of Quebec and at the same time the defender of Manitoba rights. Cardinal Merry del Val came from Rome, and the dispute was literally squelched. It was never settled and comes up again to this day; but the point was the champion of Manitoba, Clifford Sifton, entered the Dominion Cabinet just as the Klondike boom broke.
He saw the backwash of disappointed gold seekers. He realized the enormous possibilities of free advertising for Canada, and he launched such a campaign of colonization for Canada as the most daring optimist hardly dreamed. Agents were appointed in every hamlet and city and town in the western states—especially those states like Iowa and Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, where land was becoming high priced. The personal testimony of successful farmers was bill-posted from station platform to remotest barb-wire fence. The country was literally combed by Sifton agents. Big land companies which had already exploited colonization schemes in the western states pricked up their ears and sent agents to spy out the land. Those agents may have deluded themselves that they went to Canada secretly; it is a safe wager that Sifton's agents prodded them to activity at one end and Sifton's agents caught and piloted and plied them with facts at the other end. I know of land that English colonization companies had failed to sell at fifty cents an acre that was sold at this time to these American companies at five dollars and resold by them at fourteen dollars to thirty dollars.
Such profits are the best advertisement for a propaganda. There followed a land boom compared to which the gold boom had been mild. American settlers came in special cars, in special trains, in relays of special trains. Before Canada had wakened up to it fifty thousand American settlers had trekked across the border. You met them in Peace River. You met them at Athabasca. You met them on far reaches of the Saskatchewan. And land jumped in value from five dollars to fifteen dollars, from fifteen dollars to thirty dollars an acre. When Canada's yearly immigration reached the proportions of four hundred thousand—half Americans—it is not exaggerating to say the prairie took fire. Villages grew into cities overnight. Edmonton and Calgary and Moose Jaw and Regina—formerly jumping-off places into a no-man's-land—became metropolitan cities of twenty-five to fifty thousand people. If every American settler averaged fifteen hundred dollars on his person at this period—as customs entries prove—it may be confidently set down that his value as a producer and worker was another fifteen hundred dollars. Wheat exports jumped to over one hundred million dollars a year. Flour mills and elevators financed by western American capital strung across the prairie like beads on a string.
If this was an "Americanizing of Canada," it was not a bad thing. Every part of Canada felt the quickened pulse. Two more transcontinental railroads had to be built. All-red routes of round-the-globe steam ships were established; all-red round-the-world cables were laid. The quickened pulse was Canada's passing from hobble-de-hoy adolescence with a chip on the shoulder and a tremor in the throat to big strong, silent, self-confident manhood.
John Bull is a curious and dour foster father in some of his moods. He never really wakened up to Canada as a desirable place for his numerous family to settle till he saw Jonathan's coat tails going over the fence of the border—till somebody began to howl about "the Americanizing of Canada." Then, in the words of the illustrious Governor-General, "what was good enough for Americans was good enough" for him. Clifford Sifton's agents had been combing the United Kingdom as they had combed the western states. British immigration jumped from almost nothing to a total of 687,067 in ten years—with accelerating totals every year since.
If this was "the Americanizing of Canada," it was a good thing for the
Dominion.
III
There was another feature to the tidal wave of four hundred thousand immigrants a year. The American is a born pioneer, a born gambler, a born adventurer. The Englishman is a steady-going, dogged-as-does-it plodder. The American will risk two dollars on the chance of making ten dollars; he often loses the two dollars, and he often makes the ten dollars; from his general prosperity, I should say the latter results oftener than the former; but the American never in the least minds blazing the trail and stumping his toe and coming a hard fall. John Bull does. He takes himself horribly seriously. He will never risk two dollars to gain ten dollars. He will not, in fact, spend the two dollars till he is sure of four per cent. on it. Four per cent. on two dollars and ten dollars on two dollars do not belong to the same category of investment. Jonathan makes the ideal pioneer; John Bull, the ideal permanent settler who comes in and buys from the pioneer.
If this, too, be "the Americanizing of Canada," it has been a good thing for the country.
To be sure, there have been hideous horrible abuses. The real estate boom reached the proportions of a fevered madness before it collapsed. Americans bought r_an_ches for five dollars an acre and resold them as r_awn_ches for fifty dollars to young Englishmen who will never make a cent on their investment; chiefly because fruit trees take from five to ten years to come to maturity, and because fruit must be near a market, and because only an expert can succeed at fruit.
If ever wildcat flourished in a gold camp or gambling joint, and that wildcat did not hie to Canada when the real estate boom broke loose, the wildcat species not in evidence was too rare to be classified. Property in small cities sold at New York and Chicago values. Suburban lots were staked out round small towns in areas for a London or a Paris, and the lots were sold on instalment plan to small investors, many of whom bought in hope of resale before payments could accrue. City taxes for these suburban improvements increased to a great burden. Fortunes were made and lost overnight. Railroad bonds were guaranteed plentifully enough to pave the prairie. All this applies chiefly to city real estate. Inflation beyond investment basis never touched farm lands; but as a prominent editor remarked, "No fool thing that ever failed was half as improbable as the fool things that have succeeded. Men have literally been kicked into fortunes; and the carefulest man has often been the biggest fool by not biting till the last."
The boom, of course, burst of its own inflation; but it is worthy of note that the year the boom collapsed immigration reached its highest figure—four hundred thousand. Whether the boom was good or bad for Canada is hard to determine. It left a great many fortunes in its wake and a great many wrecks; but naturally it did for the country what years of hope, years of dogged silent work, years of self-confidence could not do—it jolted Canada and the world into a consciousness of the Dominion's possibilities. It is like the true story of the finding of coal on Vancouver Island—a miner stubbed his toe and lo, a clod of earth split into a seam of shining worth!
Practically the very same story of the advent of American energy and daring and optimism into the lumber industry of Canada could be told; but it is the same story as of the mines and the land, except that the Canadians on the ground first reaped larger profits. A few years ago scarcely an acre in British Columbia was owned by interests outside the province. To-day as far north as Prince Rupert the great lumbermen of the United States own the timber limits. Canadians bought these lands round four dollars and five dollars an acre. They sold at from one hundred dollars to one thousand dollars. One understands why American lumbermen to-day demand low tariff on Canadian lumber. East of the Rockies from Edmonton to Port Arthur the fringe of timber along the great rivers and lakes is owned by operators of Wisconsin and Louisiana. In Quebec the most valuable pulp wood limits—the last of the great pulp wood limits on the continent—are owned by New York interests. Undoubtedly all this means "the Americanizing of Canada" industrially. Will it result in the entrance of Big Business into politics? That is hard to answer. The door is not wide open to Big Business in politics for reasons that will appear in an account of how Canada is governed. If Americans have entered so powerfully into Canadian industrial life, why was reciprocity rejected? That, too, is an interesting story by itself.
There is one subject on which Canada's inconsistency regarding "Americanizing influences" is almost laughable. It is the subject of the influence of periodical literature. Canadians are great lip-loyalists, but in all the history of Canada they have never accorded support to a national magazine that enabled that magazine to become worthy of the name. Facts are very damning testimony here. Very well—then—let us have the facts! There is one American weekly which has a larger circulation in every city in Canada than any daily in any city in Canada. Of the American monthlies of first rank, there is hardly one that has not a larger circulation in Canada than any Canadian magazine has ever enjoyed. Even Canadian newspapers are served by American syndicates and press associations. The influence of this flood of American thought in the currents of Canadian thought can not be exaggerated. It is subtle. It is intangible. It is irresistible. What Americans are thinking about, Canadians unconsciously are thinking, too. The influence makes for a community of sentiment that political differences can never disrupt, and it is a good thing for the race that this is so. It helps to explain why there is no fort between the two nations for three thousand miles.
It may also be added that no Canadian writer can get access to the public in book form except through an American publisher. Unless the author assumes the cost or risk of publication, the Canadian publisher will rarely issue a book on his own responsibility. He sends the book to New York or to London, and from New York or London buys plates or sheets. This compels the Canadian book to have an Imperial or an American appeal. In literature, the modus operandi works; for the appeal is universal; but one might conceive of conditions demanding a purely national Canadian treatment, which New York or London publishers would not issue, when Canada would literally be damming the springs of her national literature. Canada considers her population too small to support a purely national literature. Not so reasons Belgium of smaller population; nor Ireland; nor Scotland. The fault here is primarily in the copyright law. A book published first in the United States gains international copyright. A book published first in Canada may be pirated in the United States or England; and on such printed editions no payment can be collected by the author. The profits in England and the United States were lost to authors on two of the most popular books ever published by Canadians. [1]
[1] Charles Gordon's Black Rock, pirated from his own publisher, sale half a million; Kirby's Chien d'Or, sale one million.
CHAPTER V
WHY RECIPROCITY WAS REJECTED
I
If American capital and American enterprise dominate Canadian mines, Canadian timber interests, Canadian fisheries; if American elevators are strung across the grain provinces and American flour mills have branches established from Winnipeg to Calgary; if American implement companies and packing interests now universally control subsidiaries in Canada—why was reciprocity rejected? If it is good for Canada that American capital establish big paper mills in Quebec, why is it not good for Canada to have free ingress for her paper-mill products to American markets? The same of the British Columbia shingle industry, of copper ores, of wheat and flour products? If it is good for the Canadian producer to buy in the cheapest market and to sell in the highest, why was reciprocity rejected? Implements for the farm south of the border are twenty-five per cent. cheaper than in the Canadian Northwest. Canadian wheat milled in Minneapolis enjoys a lower freight rate and consequently a higher market than Canadian wheat milled in Europe, as sixteen and twenty-two are to forty and fifty cents—the former being the freight cost to a Minneapolis mill; the latter, the freight cost to a European mill. Why, then, was reciprocity rejected?
From 1867, Canada had been intermittently seeking reciprocity with the United States. Now, at last, the offer of it came to her unsolicited. Why did she reject it by a vote that would have been unanimous but for the prairie provinces? Though the desire for reciprocity with the United States was exploited politically more by the Liberals—or low-tariff party—than by the Conservatives—the high-tariff party—both had repeatedly sent official and unofficial emissaries to Washington seeking tariff concessions. Tariff concessions were a plank in the Liberal platform from the days of Alexander MacKenzie. They were not a plank in the platform of the Conservative party for the sole reason that the high tariff on the American side forced a high tariff in self-defense on the Canadian side. Close readers of Sir John Macdonald's life must have been amazed to learn that one of his very first visits to Washington—contemporaneous with the Civil War period, when the United States were just launching out on a high-tariff policy—was for the purpose of seeking tariff favors for Canada. Failing to obtain even a favorable hearing, he observed the high-tariff trend at Washington, took a leaf out of his rival's book and returned to Canada to launch the high-tariff policy that dominated the Dominion for thirty years. Alexander MacKenzie, Blake, Mowat, George Brown, Laurier, Cartwright, Fielding—all the dyed-in-the-wool ultra Whigs of the Liberal party—practically held their party together for the thirty lean years out-of-office by promises and repeated promises of reciprocity with the United States the instant they came into office. They never seemed to doubt that the instant they did come into office and proffered reciprocity to the United States the offer would be accepted and reciprocated. It may be explained that all these old-line Liberals from MacKenzie to Laurier were free-traders of the Cobden-Bright school. They believed in free trade not only as an economic policy but as a religion to prevent the plundering of the poor by the rich, of the many by the few. One has only to turn to the back files of the Montreal Witness and Toronto Globe from 1871 to 1895—the two Liberal organs that voiced the extreme free-trade propaganda—to find this political note emphasized almost as a fanatical religion. The high-tariff party were not only morally wrong; they were predestinedly damned. I remember that in my own home both organs were revered next to the Bible, and this free-trade doctrine was accepted as unquestionably as the Shorter Catechism.
II
Well—Laurier came to power; and he gathered into his Cabinet all the grand old guard free-traders still alive. As soon as the Manitoba School Question was settled Laurier put his Manchester school of politics into active practice by granting tariff concessions on British imports. The act was hailed by free-trade England as a tribute of statesmanship. Laurier and Fielding were recognized as men of the hour. The next step was to carry out the promises of reciprocity with the United States. One can imagine Sir John Macdonald, the old chieftain of the high-tariff Conservatives, turning over in his grave with a sardonic grin—"Not so fast, my Little Sirs!" When twitted on the floor of the House over a high tariff oppressing farmers and favoring factories, Sir John had always disclaimed being a high-tariff man. He would have a low tariff for the United States, if the United States would grant Canada a low tariff—he had answered; but the United States would not grant Canada any tariff concessions. And the grand old guard of Whigs had jeered back that he was "a compromiser" and "a trimmer," who tacked to every breeze and never met an issue squarely in his life.
If the Liberals had not been absolutely sincere men, they would not have ridden to such a hard and unexpected fall. They would, like Sir John, have trimmed to the wind; but they believed in free trade as they believed in righteousness; and they furthermore believed all they had to do was to ask for it to get it. Blake had retired from Canadian politics. George Brown of the Globe was dead; Alexander MacKenzie had long since passed away; but the old guard rallied to the reciprocity cry. International negotiations opened at Quebec. They were not a failure. They were worse than a failure. They were a joke. High tariff was at its zenith in the United States. Every one of the American commissioners was a dyed-in-the-wool high-tariff man. It would be an even wager that not one man among them had ever heard of the Cobden-Bright Manchester School of Free Trade, by which the Laurier government swore as by an unerring Gospel. They had heard of McKinley and of Mark Hanna, but who and what were Cobden and Bright? What relation were Cobden and Bright to the G. O. P.? The negotiations were a joke to the United States and a humiliation to Canada. They were adjourned from Quebec to Washington; and from Washington, Fielding and Cartwright returned puzzled and sick at heart. They could obtain not one single solitary tariff concession. They found it was not a case of theoretical politics. It was a case of quid pro quo for a trade. What had Canada to offer from 1893 to 1900 that the United States had not within her own borders? Canada wanted to buy cheaper boots and cheaper implements and cheaper factory products generally. She wanted a higher market for her wheat and her meat and her fish and her crude metals and her lumber. She would knock off her tariff on American factory products, if the United States would knock off her tariff against Canadian farm products. One can scarcely imagine Republican politicians going to American farmers for votes on that platform. What had Canada to offer? She had meat and wheat and fish and timber and crude metals. Yes; but from 1893 to 1900 Uncle Sam had more meat and wheat and fish and timber and crude metals than he could digest industrially himself. Look at the exact figures of the case! You could buy pulp timber lands in the Adirondacks at from fifty cents to four dollars an acre. You could buy timber limits that were almost limitless in the northwestern states for a homesteader's relinquishment fee. Kansas farmers fed their wheat to hogs because it did not pay to ship it. Texas steers sold low as five dollars on the hoof. Crude metals were such a drug on the market that the coinage of free silver was suggested as a panacea. Canada hadn't anything that the United States wanted badly enough for any quid pro quo in tariff concessions.
This was the time that Uncle Sam rejected reciprocity.
Fielding, Laurier and Cartwright came home profoundly disappointed men; and—as stated before—old Sir John may have turned over in his grave with a sardonic grin.
When Sir John had launched the Canadian Pacific Railroad to link Nova Scotia with British Columbia, when his government to huge land grants had added cash loans, when he had offered bonuses for factories and subsidies for steamships—no one had sent home such bitter shafts of criticism as these old-guard Liberals hungry for office. Why give away public lands? Why push railroads in advance of settlement? Why build railroads when there were no terminals, and terminals when there were no steamships? Why subsidize steamships, when there were no markets? Was it not more natural to trade with neighbors a handshake across the way than with strange nations across the ocean? I have heard these barbed interrogations launched by Liberals at Conservatives with such bitterness that the wives of Conservative members would not bow to the wives of Liberal members met in the corridors of Parliament.
Now mark what happened when the free-trade Liberals found they could obtain no tariff concessions from the United States! They had gibed Sir John for committing the country to one transcontinental railroad. They now launched two more transcontinental railroads—east and west, not north and south. Subsidies were poured into the lap of steamship companies to attract them to Canadian ports; and thirty-eight millions in all were spent improving navigation in the St. Lawrence. Wherever Clifford Sifton sent agents to drum up settlers trade agents were sent to drum up markets. Then—as Sir Richard Cartwright acknowledged—the Liberals were traveling in the most tremendous luck. An era of almost opulent prosperity seemed to come over the whole world. Gold was discovered in Klondike. Germany opened unexpected markets for copper ores. Number One Hard Wheat became famous in Europe. Canadian apples, Canadian butter, Canadian meats began to gather a fame of their own. Canada was no longer dependent on American markets. There was more demand for Canadian products in European markets than could be filled. Then came the tidal wave of colonists. This created an exhaustless market for farm produce within Canada's borders, and within three years—in spite of the tariff—imports of manufacturers from the United States doubled. American factories and flour mills and lumber mills sprang up on the Canadian side by magic. In this era Canada was actually importing ten million dollars' worth of food a year for one western province, and the cost of living in ten years increased fifty-one per cent.
III
Came a turn in the wheel! The wheel has a tricky way of turning up the unexpected between nations. A new era had come to the United States. Kansas was no longer feeding wheat to hogs. In fact, the decrease in wheat exports had become so alarming that men like Hill of Great Northern fame and James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, actually predicted that there would come a day of bread famine in the United States. The population of the United States had grown faster than the country's production of food. There was an appalling decrease of meat animals. American packers were establishing branch houses all through Canada. As for metals, with the superabundance of gold from Yukon and Nevada, there did not seem any limit to the world's power to absorb what was produced. The almost limitless timber lands of the northwestern states passed into the hands of the great trusts. Buyers of print paper in the United States became alarmed at the impending shortage of wood pulp.
It was not unnatural that the same thought came to many minds in the United States at once. "If we had free trade, we could bring Canada's raw products in and build up our factories here instead of in Canada," was the gist of the manufacturer's argument. "If we had free trade, it would reduce the cost of living," was the gist of the city consumer's argument. Canadian lumber, Canadian meat, Canadian wheat could be brought across and manufactured on the American side. For the first time the American manufacturer became a free trader. Practically there was only one section in the United States opposed to reciprocity with Canada; that was the American farmer, and his opposition was more negative than positive.
It is hard to say who voiced the desire for reciprocity first. Possibly the buyers of print paper. At all events, there was at Ottawa a Governor-General of the Manchester School of Free Trade. There was editing the Toronto Globe—the main Liberal organ—a worthy successor of George Brown as an exponent of the Manchester School of Free Trade. Shortly after this editor—a man of brilliant forceful character—had met President Taft and Joe Cannon in Washington, the Governor-General of Canada was the guest of Governor Hughes at Albany and there met President Taft. Of the old guard of free traders, there were still a few in Laurier's Cabinet, and Laurier himself was as profoundly and sincerely a free trader in power as he had been out of office. Enemies aver that the Laurier government now launched reciprocity to divert public attention from criticism of the railroad policy, in which there had undoubtedly been great incompetency and gross extravagance—an extravagance more of a recklessly prosperous era than of dishonesty—but this motive can hardly be accepted. If Laurier had launched reciprocity as a political dodge, he would have sounded public opinion and learned that it was no longer with him on tariff concessions; but because he was absolutely sincere in his belief in the Cobden-Bright Gospel of Free Trade, he rode for a second time to a humiliating fall. A trimmer would have sounded public opinion and pretended to lead it while really following. Laurier believed he was right and launched out on that belief.
IV
There was probably never at any time a more conspicuous example of politicians mistaking a rear lantern for a headlight. I had come East from a six months' tour of the northwestern states and Northwestern Canada. I chanced to meet a magazine editor who for twenty years had been the closest exponent of Republican politics in New York. The Canadian elections were to be held that very day. In Canada a party does not launch a new policy like reciprocity without going to the country for the electorate's approval or condemnation. The editor asked me if I would mind reading over a ten-page advance editorial congratulating both countries on the endorsation of reciprocity. I was paralyzed. I was a free trader and had been trained to love and revere Laurier from childhood; but I knew from cursory observation in the West that there was not a chance, nor the shadow of a chance, for reciprocity to be endorsed by the Canadian people. The editor would not believe me. He was in close touch with Taft. He sat up overnight to get returns from Canada, and the next night I left for Ottawa to get the views of Robert Borden, Canada's new Conservative Premier, as to why it had happened.
It had happened because it could not have happened otherwise, though neither President Taft nor Premier Laurier, neither the editor of the Globe nor the free-trade Governor-General seemed to have the faintest idea what was happening. Canada rejected reciprocity now for precisely the same reason that Uncle Sam had rejected reciprocity ten years before—because Uncle Sam had no quid pro quo, no equivalent in values to offer, which Canada wanted badly enough to make trade concessions. Said Canada: you have exhausted your own lumber; you want our lumber; pay for it. You want it so badly that you will ultimately put lumber on the free list without any concession from us. Meanwhile, for us to remove the tariff would simply lead to our lumber going across the line to be manufactured. It would build up your mills instead of ours. The higher you keep the tariff against our lumber the better pleased we'll be; for you will have to build more and more mills on our side of the line. We are even prepared to put an export duty on logs to compel you to keep on building mills on our side of the line. This was the argument that swayed and won the vote in British Columbia and Quebec. A similar argument as to wheat and meat swayed the prairie provinces and Ontario.
From Montreal to Vancouver there is hardly a hamlet that has not some American industry, packing house, lumber mill, flour mill, elevator, machine shop, motor factory, which operates on the Canadian side of the border because the tariff wall compels it to do so. These industries have doubled and trebled the populations of cities like Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary, Moose Jaw. Would removal of the tariff bring more industries to these cities or move them south of the border? The cities voted almost to a man against reciprocity.
Allied with the cities were the great transportation systems running east and west. Reciprocity to divert traffic north and south seemed a menace to their receipts. To a man these systems were against reciprocity.
You have forced us to work out our own Destiny, said Canada. Very well—now that we are at the winning post, don't divert us from the goal! We love you as neighbors; we welcome you as settlers; we embrace you as investors; but when we came to you, you rejected us. Now you must come to us!
Deep beneath all the jingoism these were the economic factors that rejected reciprocity. It is all a curious illustration of the difference between practical and theoretical politics. Theoretically both parties have been free traders in Canada. Practically free trade had thrown them both down. Theoretically Canada rejects reciprocity. Practically trade across the boundary has increased one hundred per cent. since she rejected reciprocity. Theoretically Canada was protecting her three transcontinental systems when she rejected reciprocity. Practically the growth of lines with running rights across the boundary has increased from sixteen to sixty-four in ten years.
When American industries have become rooted in Canadian soil beyond possibility of transplanting, no doubt the fear will be removed; and at the present rate of the increase of trade between the two countries the tariff wall must become an anachronism, if it be not worn down by sheer force of trade attrition.
Comical incidents are related of the Canadian fear in individual cases. There was a Scotch school trustee in Calgary. He had voted Whig-Liberal-dyed-in-the-wool free trade for forty years—from the traditions of reciprocity under Alexander Mackenzie. A Canadian flag was flying above the fine new Calgary school. The Scotchman was going to the polls by street-car. An excursion of American home seekers had just come in, and one of the variety to essay placing an American flag on the pyramids had taken a glass too much. He began haranguing the street-car. "So that's the old Can-a-dáy flag," said he. "You jus' wait till to-morrow and, boys, you'll see another flag above that thar school 'ouse!"
Now a Scotchman is vera' serious. The Scotch trustee gave one glowering look at that drunken prophet; and he rang the street-car bell; and he went at the patter of a dead run to the polling place; and for the first time in his life he voted, not Whig, not free trade, not reciprocity and Laurier, but Tory and high tariff. [1]
It should be added here that the tariff reductions on food under
President Wilson have justified Canada's rejection of reciprocity.
Canadian farm products have gained freer access to the American market
without a quid pro quo.
[1] Opponents of reciprocity in the United States made skilful use of Canadian touchiness on such matters, and not all such expressions as that quoted above were spontaneous.—THE EDITOR.
CHAPTER VI
THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH
For a hundred years England's colonies have been distinctively dependencies—self-governing dependencies, if you will, in the case of Canada and Australia—but distinctively dependent on the Mother Country for protection from attack by land and sea. Has the day come when these colonies, are to be, not lesser, but greater nations—offshoots of the parent stock but transcending in power and wealth the parent stock—a United Kingdom of the Outer Meres, becoming to America and Australasia what Great Britain has been to Europe?
Ten years ago this question would have been considered the bumptious presumption of flamboyant fancy. It isn't so considered to-day. Rather than a flight of fancy, the question is forced on thinking minds by the hard facts of the multiplication table. Between 1897 and 1911 there came to Canada 723,424 British colonists; and since 1911 there have come half a million more. At the outbreak of the war settlers of purely British birth were pouring into Canada at the rate of two hundred thousand a year. A continuation of this immigration means that in half a century, not counting natural increase, there will be as many colonists of purely British birth in Canada as there are Americans west of the Mississippi, or as there were Englishmen in England in the days of Queen Elizabeth. It means more—one-fourth of the United Kingdom will have been transplanted overseas. If there be any doubt as to whether the transplanting be permanent, it should be settled by homestead entries. In one era of something less than three years out of 351,530 men, women and children who came, sixty thousand entered for homesteads. In other words, if each householder were married and had a family of four, almost the entire immigration of 351,530 was absorbed in permanent tenure by the land. The drifters, the floaters, the disinherited of their share of earth became landowners, proprietors of Canada to the extent of one hundred and sixty acres. From 1897 to 1911 the Canadian government spent $2,419,957 advertising Canada in England and paying a bonus of one pound per capita to steamship agents for each immigrant; so that each colonist cost the Dominion something over three dollars. I have heard immigration officials figure how each colonist was worth to the country as a producer fifteen hundred dollars a year. This is an excessive estimate, but the bargain was a good one for Canada. In 1901, when Canada's population was five millions, there were seven hundred thousand people of British birth in the Dominion; so that of Canada's present population of 7,800,000, there are in the Dominion a million and a half people of British birth.[1] Averaging winter with summer for ten years, colonists of British birth have been landing on Canada's shores at the rate of three hundred a day. Canada's natural increase is under one hundred thousand a year. British colonists are to-day yearly outnumbering Canada's natural increase.
Only two other such migrations of Saxon blood have taken place in history: when the Angles and Jutes and Saxons came in plunder raids to English shores at the dawn of the Christian Era; when in the seventeenth century Englishmen came to America; and both these tides of migration were as a drop in an ocean wave compared to the numbers of English born now flooding to the shores of Canada.
Knowing the Viking spirit that rode out to conquer the very elements in the teeth of death, it is easy to look back and realize that these Angles and Jutes and Saxons were bound to found a great sea empire. So, too, of the New England Puritans! Men who sacrificed their all for a political and religious belief were bound to build of such belief foundation for a sturdy nation of the future. It is easy to look back and realize. It is hard to look forward with eyes that see; but one must be a very opaque thinker, indeed, not to wonder what this latest vast migration of Saxon blood portends for future empire. The Jutes and Angles and Saxons poured into ancient Albion for just one reason—to acquire each for his own freehold of land. Look at the ancient words! Freehold of land! For what else have a million and a half British born come to the free homesteads of Canada? For freehold of land—land unoppressed by taxes for war lords; land unoppressed by tithes for landlord; land absolutely free to the worker. That such a migration should break in waves over Canadian life and leave it untouched, uninfluenced, unswerved, is as inconceivable as that the Jutes and Angles and Saxons could have settled in ancient Albion and not made it their own.
II
For years Canada was regarded chiefly in England as a dumping ground for slums. "You have broken your mother's heart," thundered an English magistrate to a young culprit. "You have sent your father in sorrow to the grave. Why—I ask you—do you not go to Canada?" That such material did not offer the best fiber for the making of a nation in Canada did not dawn on this insular magisterial dignitary; and the sentiments uttered were reflected in the activities of countless philanthropies that seemed to think the porcine could be transmogrified into the human by a simple transfer from the pig-sty of their own vices and failure to the free untrammeled life of a colony. Fortunately Canada has a climate that kills men who won't work. Men must stand on their own feet in Canada, and keep those feet hustling in winter—or die. It is not a land for people who think; the world owes them a living. They have to earn the living and earn it hard, and if they don't earn it, there are neither free soup kitchens nor maudlin charities to fill idle stomachs with some other man's earnings.
"Why do you think so many young Englishmen fail to make good in Canada?" I asked a young Yorkshire mill hand who had come to Canada with his five brothers and homesteaded nearly a thousand acres on the north bank of the Saskatchewan. The house was built of logs and clay. There was not a piece of store furniture in it except the stove. The beds were berths extemporized ship-fashion, with cowhides and bear-skins for covering. The seats were benches. The table was a rough-hewn plank. These young factory hands had things reduced to the simplicity of a Robinson Crusoe. They had come out each with less than one hundred dollars, but they had their nine hundred and sixty acres proved up and wintered some ten horses and thirty head of cattle in a sod and log stable. They had acquired what small ready cash they could by selling oats and hay to newcomers. The hay they sold at four dollars a ton, the oats at thirty cents a bushel. The boy I questioned had all the characteristics of the overworked factory hand—abnormally large forehead, cramped chest, half-developed limbs. Yet the health of outdoor life glowed from his face, and he looked as if his muscles had become knotted whipcords.
"Why do I think so many young Englishmen fail to make good settlers?" he repeated, changing my question a little. "Because, up to a few years ago, the wrong kind of people came. The only young Englishmen who came up to a few years ago were no-goods, who had failed at home. They were the kind of city scrubs who give up a job when it is hard and then run for free meals at the soup kitchen. There aren't any soup kitchens out here, and when they found they had to work before they could eat, they cleared out and gave the country the blame. Men who are out of work half the time at home get into the habit of depending on charity keeping them. When you are a hundred miles from a railroad town, there isn't any charity to keep you out here; you have to hustle for yourself. But there is a different class of Englishmen coming now. The men coming now have worked and want to work."
And yet—at another point a hundred miles from settlement I came on a woman who belonged to that very type that ought never to emigrate. She was a woman picked out of the slums by a charity organization. She had presumably been scrubbed and curried and taught household duties before being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the slum marks—bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she had lived in her shanty three years and it was still bare of comfort as a biscuit box, to explain why the Dominion regards this type as unsuitable for pioneering. The American or Canadian wife of a frontiersman would have had skin robes for rugs, biscuit boxes painted for bureaus, and chairs hand-hewn out of rough timber upholstered in cheap prints. But the really amazing thing was the condition of her children. They were fat, rosy, exuberant in health and energy. They were Canadians. In a decade they would begin to fill their place as nation makers. Back in England they would have gone to the human scrap heap in hunger and rags. Ten years of slums would have made them into what their mother was—an unfit; but ten years of Canada was making them into robust humans capable of battling with life and mastering it.
The line is a fine one and needs to be drawn with distinction. Canada does not begrudge the down-and-outs, the failures, the disinherited, the dispossessed, a chance to begin over again. She realizes that she has room, boundless room, for such as they are to succeed—and many more; but what she can not and will not do is assume the burden of these people when they come to Canada and will not try and fail. What she can not and will not do is permit Europe to clean her pig-sties of vice and send the human offal to Canadian shores. Children, strays, waifs, reforms—who have been taken and tested and tried and taught to support themselves—she welcomes by the thousands. In fact, she has welcomed 12,260 of them in ten years, and the cases of lapses back to failure have been so small a proportion as to be inconsiderable.
In the early days, "the remittance man"—or young Englishman living round saloons in idleness on a small monthly allowance from home—fell into bad repute in Canada; and it didn't help his repute in the least to have a title appended to his remittance. Unless he were efficient, the title stood in his way when he applied for a job, whether as horse jockey or bank clerk. Canadians do not ask—"Who are you?" or "What have you?" but "What can you do?" "What can you do to add to the nation's yearly output of things done—of a solid plus on the right side of the yearly balance?" It is a brutal way of putting things. It does not make for poetry and art. It may be sordid. I believe as a people we Canadians, perhaps, do err on the sordid side of the practical, but it also makes for solidity and national strength.
Ten years have witnessed a complete change in the class of Englishmen coming to Canada. The drifter, the floater, the make-shift, rarely comes. The men now coming are the land-seekers—of the blood and type that settled England and New England and Virginia—of the blood and type, in a word, that make nations. Hard on the heels of the land-seekers have come yet another type—the type that binds country to country in bonds tighter than any international treaty—the investors of surplus capital.
III
It is possible to keep a record of American investments in Canada; because possessions are registered more or less approximately at ports of entry and in bills of incorporation; but the English investor has acted through agents, through trust and loan companies, through banks. He is the buyer of Canada's railway stocks, of her municipal, street railway, irrigation and public works bonds. Of Canadian railroad bonds and stocks, there are $395,000,000 definitely known to be held in England. Municipal and civic bonds must represent many times that total, and the private investments in land have been simply incalculable. The Lloyd George system of taxation was at once followed by enormous investments by the English aristocracy in Canada. These investments included large holdings of city property in Montreal and Winnipeg and Vancouver, of ranch lands in Alberta, town sites along the new railroads, timber limits in British Columbia and copper and coal mines in both Alberta and British Columbia. The Portland, Essex, Sutherland and Beresford families have been among the investors. It does not precisely mean the coming of an English aristocracy to Canada, but it does mean the implanting of an enormous total of the British aristocracy's capital in Canada for long-time investment.
It would be untrue to say that these investments have all been wisely made. One wonders, indeed, at what the purchasing agents were aiming in some cases. I know of small blocks in insignificant railroad towns bought for sixty thousand dollars, for no other reason, apparently, than that they cost ten thousand dollars and had been sold for twenty thousand dollars. The block, which would yield twenty per cent. on ten thousand dollars, yields only three per cent. on sixty thousand dollars. Held long enough, doubtless, it will repay the investor; or if the investor is satisfied with three per cent., where Canadians earn twenty per cent.—it may be all right; but Canadians expect their investments to repay capital cost in ten years, and they do not buy for profits to posterity but for profits in a lifetime.
Similarly of many of the r_an_ches bought at five dollars an acre by Americans and resold as r_awn_ches at twenty-five dollars to forty dollars to Englishmen. If the Englishmen will be satisfied with two and three per cent., where the American demands and makes twelve to twenty per cent.—the investment may make satisfactory returns; but it is hard to conceive of enormous tracts two and three hundred miles from a railroad bought for fruit lands at twenty-five dollars an acre. Fruit without a market is worse than waste. It is loss. When questioned, these English investors explain how raw fruit lands that sold at twenty-five dollars an acre a few years ago in the United States to-day sell for five hundred dollars and one thousand dollars an acre. The point they miss is—that these top values are the result of exceptional conditions; of millionaires turning a region into a playground as in the walnut and citrus groves of California; or of nearness to market and water transportation; or of peculiarly finely organized marketing unions. If the rich estates of England like to take these risks, it is their affair; but they must not blame Canada if their investment does not give them the same returns as more careful buying gives the Canadian and American.
Not all investments are of this extravagant character. Hundreds of thousands of acres and city properties untold have been bought by English investors who will multiply their capital a hundredfold in ten years. I know properties bought along the lines of the new railroads for a few hundred dollars that have resold at twenty thousand and thirty thousand and fifty thousand. It is such profits as these that lure to wrong investment.
Horse and cattle ranching has appealed to the Englishman from the first, and as great fortunes have been realized from it in Canada as in Argentina. However, the day of unfenced pasture ground is past; and in reselling ranches for farms, many English investors have multiplied their fortunes. In the outdoor life and freedom from conventional cares—there has been a peculiar charm in ranch life. In no life are the grit and efficiency of the well-bred in such marked contrast with the puling whine and shiftlessness of the settler from the cesspool of the city slums. I have gone into a prairie shanty where an Englishwoman sat in filth and rags and idleness, cursing the country to which she had come and bewailing in cockney English that she had come to this; and I have gone on to an English ranch where there presided some young Englishman's sister, who had literally never done a stroke in her life till she came to Canada, when in emergency of prairie fire, or blizzard, or absent ranch hands, she has saddled her horse and rounded to shelter herds of cattle and droves of ponies. She didn't boast about it. She probably didn't mention it, and when winter came, she would go off for her holiday to England or California. Having come of blood that had proved itself fit in England, she proved the same strain of blood in Canada; and to this class of English Canada gives more than a welcome. She confers charter rights.
Lack of domestic help will long be the great drawback for English people on the prairie. You may bring your help with you if you like. If they are single, they will marry. If they are married, they will take up land of their own and begin farming for themselves. It is this which forces efficiency or exterminates—on the prairie. Let no woman come to the prairie with dolce far niente dreams of opalescent peaks, of fenceless fields and rides to a horizon that forever recedes, with a wind that sings a jubilate of freedom. All these she will have; but they are not ends in themselves; they are incidental. Days there will be when the fat squaw who is doing the washing will put all the laundry in soap suds, then roll down her sleeves and demand double pay before she goes on. Prairie fires will come when men are absent, and women must know how to set a back fire; and whether the ranch hands are near or far, stock must never be allowed to drive before a blizzard. The woman with iron in her blood will meet all fate's challenges halfway and master every emergency. The kind that has a rabbit heart and sits down to weep and wail should not essay adventures in the Canadian West.
IV
I said that England's colonies depended on the Mother Country for protection from attack by land and sea. Of the vessels calling at Canadian ports, three-fifths are British, one-fifth foreign, and one-fifth Canadian. Whore England is the great sea carrier for Europe, Canada has not wakened up to establish enough sea carriers for her own needs.
Canada's exports to the whole British Empire are almost two hundred millions a year.[2] Her aggregate trade with the British Empire has increased three hundred per cent. since confederation, or from one hundred and seven to three hundred and sixteen millions. With the United States, her aggregate trade has increased from eighty-nine to six hundred and eight millions. For one dollar's worth she buys in England, she buys four dollars' worth in the United States. Here trade is not following the flag, and the flag is not following trade. Trade is following its own channels independent of the flag.
V
What is the future portent of the great migration of Englishmen of the best blood and traditions to Canada? There can be only one portent—a Greater Britain Overseas, and Canada herself has not in the slightest degree wakened to what this implies. She knows that her railroads are a safe and shorter path to the Orient than by Suez; and in a cursory way she may also know that the nations of the world are maneuvering for place and power on the Pacific; but that she may be drawn into the contest and have to fight for her life in it—she hardly grasps. If you told Canada that within the life of men and women now living her Pacific Coast may bristle with as many forts and ports as the North Sea—you would be greeted with an amused smile. Yet all this may be part of the destiny of a Greater Britain Overseas.
With men such as Sir John Macdonald and Laurier and Borden on the roster roll of Canada's great, one dislikes to charge that Canadian statesmen have not grown big enough for their job. The Aztec Indians used to cement their tribal houses with human blood. Canada's part in the Great War may be the blood-sign above the lintel of her new nationality.
[1] I have variously referred to Canada's population as five million, seven million, and over seven million. Five million was Canada's population before the great influx of colonists began. The census figures of 1911 give Canada's population as 7,204,838. Add to this the immigration for 1912, and you get the Department of Labor figures—7,758,000. If you add the immigration for 1913 the total must be close on 8,000,000.
[2] The figures are from the official Trade and Commerce Report, Part I, 1914: They tabulate the trade of 1913 thus: Imports from United Kingdom, $138,741,736; imports from United States, $435,770,081. Average duty imports United Kingdom, 25.1. Average duty imports United States, 24.1. Per cent. of goods from U. K., 20.1; per cent. of goods from U. S., 65.1.
Exports to United Kingdom, $177,982,002; exports to United States, $150,961,675. Percentage goods exported U. K., 47.1; percentage goods exported U. S., 40.1.
CHAPTER VII
THE COMING OF THE FOREIGNER
So far scarcely a cloud appears on the horizon of Canada's national destiny. Like a ship launched roughly from her stays to tempests in shallow water, she seems to have left tempests and shallow water behind and to have sailed proudly out to the great deeps. In '37 she settled whether she would be ruled by special interests, by a plutocracy, by an oligarchy. In '67 she settled forever what in the United States would be called "states' rights." That is—she gathered the scattered members of her fold into one confederation and bound them together not only with the constitution of the British North America Act, but with bands of iron and steel in railways that linked Nova Scotia with British Columbia. By '77 she had met the menace of the American high tariff, which barred her from markets, and entered on a fiscal system of her own. By '87 her system of transportation east and west was in working order and she had begun the subsidizing of steamships and the search for world markets which have since resulted in a total foreign trade equal to one-fourth that of the United States. By '97 she was almost ready for the preferential tariff reduction of from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent. on British goods which the Laurier government later introduced, and she had established her right to negotiate commercial treaties with foreign powers independent of the Mother Country. By 1907 she was in the very maelstrom of the maddest real estate boom and immigration flood tide that a sane country could weather.
In a word, Canada's greatest dangers and difficulties seem to have been passed. The sea seems calm and the sky fair. In reality, she is close to the greatest dangers that can threaten a nation—dangers within, not without; dangers, not physical, but psychological, which are harder to overcome; dangers of dilution and contamination of national blood, national grit, national government, national ideals.
These are strong statements! Let us see if facts substantiate them!
Canada's natural increase of population is only one-fourth her incoming tide of colonists. In a word, put her natural increase at eighty to one hundred thousand a year, and it is nearer eighty than one hundred thousand. Her immigration exceeds four hundred thousand. If that immigration were all British and all American there would be no problem; for though there are differences in government, both people have the same national ideal—utter freedom of opportunity for each man to work out the best in him. It is an even wager that the average Canadian coming to the United States is unaware of any difference in his freedom, and the average American coming to Canada is unaware of any difference in his freedom. Both people have fought and bled for freedom and treasure it as the most sacred thing in life.
But this is not so of thirty-three per cent. of Canada's immigrants who do not speak English, much less understand the institutions of freedom to which they have come. If they had been worthy of freedom, or capable of making right use of it, they would have fought for it in the land from which they came, or died fighting for it—as Scotchmen and Irishmen and Englishmen and Americans have fought and bled for freedom wherever they have lived. A people unused to freedom suddenly plunged in freedom need not surprise us if they run amuck.
II
"This is mos' won'erful country," writes Tony to his brother in Italy.
"They let us vote and they pay us two dollars to do it."
"Yah, yah," answered a foreign mother in North Winnipeg to a school-teacher, trying to recall why her young hopeful had played truant. "Dat vas eelection—my boy, he not go—because Jacob—my man—he vote seven time and make seven dollar." (The whole family had been on a glorious seven-dollar drunk.)
"Does this man understand for what he is voting?" demanded the election clerk of a Galician interpreter who had brought in a naturalized foreigner to vote.
"Oh, yaas; I eexplain heem."
"Can he write?"
An indeterminate nod of the head; so the voter marks his ballot, and his vote counts for as much as that of the premier or president of a railroad.
For years Canadians have pointed the finger of scorn at the notorious misgovernment of American cities, at the manner in which foreigners were herded to the polls by party bosses to vote as they were paid. The cases of a Louisiana judge impeached for issuing bogus certificates of citizenship to four hundred aliens and of New York courts that have naturalized ignorant foreigners in batches of twenty-five thousand in a few months have all pointed a moral or adorned a tale in Canada.
Yet what is happening in Canada since the coming of hordes of ignorant immigrants? I quote what I have stated elsewhere, an episode typical of similar episodes, wherever the foreign vote herds in colonies. An election was coming on in one of the western provinces, where reside twenty thousand foreigners almost en bloc. The contest was going to be very close. Offices were opened in a certain block. Legally it requires three years to transform a foreigner into a voting Canadian subject. He must have resided in Canada three years before he can take out his papers. The process is simple to a fault. The newcomer goes before a county judge with proof of residence and two Canadian witnesses. He must not be a criminal, and he must be of age. That is all that is required to change a Pole or a Sicilian or a Slav into a free and independent Canadian fully competent to apprehend that voting implies duties and fitness as well as rights. The contest was going to be very close. A few of the party leaders could not bear to have those newcomers wait a long three years for naturalization. They got together and they forged in the same hand, the same manipulation, the signatures of three hundred foreigners, who did not know in the least what they were doing, to applications for naturalization papers—foreigners who had not been three months in Canada. If forgery did not matter, why should perjury? The perpetrators of this fraud happened to be provincial and of a stripe different politically from the federal government then in power at Ottawa. The other party had not been asleep while this little game was going on. The party heeler neither slumbers nor sleeps. The papers with those three hundred forged signatures—names in the writing of foreigners, who could neither read, write, nor speak a word of English—were sent down to the Department of Justice in Ottawa; and everybody waited for the explosion. The explosion did not come. Those perjuries and forgeries slumber yet, secure in the Department of Justice. For when the provincial politicians heard what had been done to trap them, they sent down a little message to the heelers of the party in power: If you go after us for this, we'll go after you for that; and perhaps the pot had better not call the kettle black. The chiefs of each party were powerless to act because the heelers of both parties had been alike guilty.
It may be said that the fault here was not in the poor ignorant foreigner but in the corrupt Canadian politicians. That is true of Canada, as it is of similar practices in the United States; but the presence of the ignorant, irresponsible foreigner in hordes made the corruption possible, where it is neither possible nor safe with men of Saxon blood, with German, Scandinavian or Danish immigrants, for instance.
III
It is futile to talk of the poor and ignorant foreigner as a Goth or a Vandal—to talk of excluding the ignorant and the lowly. The floating "he-camps"—as these floating immigrants are called in labor circles—are to-day doing much of the manual work of the world. Canadian railways could not be built without them. Canadian industrial and farm life could not go on without them. They are needed from Halifax to Vancouver, and their labor is one of the wealth producers for the nation.
And do not think for a moment that the wealth they produce is for capital—for the lords of finance and not for themselves. When Montenegrins, who earn thirty cents a day in their own land, earn eleven dollars a day on dynamite work constructing Canadian railroads, it is not surprising that they retire rich, and that the railroad for which they worked would have gone bankrupt if the Dominion had not come to its aid with a loan of millions. Likewise of Poles and Galicians in the coal mines. When Charles Gordon—Ralph Connor—was sent to investigate the strike in these mines he found foreigners earning seventeen dollars a day on piecework who had never earned fifty cents a day in their own land. I have in mind one Galician settler who has accumulated a fortune of $150,000 in perfectly legitimate ways in ten years. Even the Doukhobors—the eccentric Russian religious sect—hooted for their oddities of manner and frenzies of religion—are accumulating wealth in the Elbow of the Saskatchewan, where they are settled.
From the national point of view Canada needs these foreign settlers. She needs their labor. Every man to her is worth fifteen hundred dollars in productive work. The higher wages he earns on piecework the more Canada is pleased; for the more work he has done. But at the present rate of peopling Canada these foreign born will in twenty years outnumber the native born. What will become of Canada's national ideals then? In one foreign section of the Northwest I once traveled a hundred miles through new settlements without hearing one word of English spoken; and these Doukhobors and Galicians and Roumanians and Slavs were making good. They were prospering exceedingly. Men who had come with less than one hundred dollars each and lived for the first years in crowded tenements of Winnipeg or under thatch-roof huts on the prairie now had good frame houses, stables, stock, modern implements. The story is told of one poor Russian who, when informed of the fact that the land would be his very own, fell to the earth and kissed the soil and wept. Such settlers make good on soil, whatever ill they work in a polling booth. Except for his religious vagaries, the Doukhobor Russian is law abiding. The same can not be said of the other Slav immigrants. Crime in the Northwest, according to the report of the Mounted Police, has increased appallingly. The crimes are against life rather than against property—the crimes of a people formerly kept in order by the constant presence of a soldier's bayonet run amuck in Canada with too much freedom. And the votes of these people will in twenty years out-vote the Canadian. These poverty-stricken Jews and Polacks and Galicians will be the wealth and power of Canada to-morrow. If you doubt what will happen, stroll down Fifth Avenue, New York, and note the nationality of the names. A Chicago professor carefully noted the nationality of all the names submitted in Chicago's elections for a term of years. Three-quarters of the names were of nationalities only one generation away from the Ghetto.
Man to man on the prairie farm, in the lumber woods, your Canadian can out-do the Russian or Galician or Hebrew. The Canadian uses more brains and his aggregate returns are bigger; but boned down to a basis of who can save the most and become rich fastest, your foreigner has the native-born Canadian beaten at the start. Where the Canadian earns ten dollars and spends eighty per cent. of it, your foreigner earns five dollars, and saves almost all of it. How does he do this? He spends next to nothing. Let me be perfectly specific on how he does it: I have known Russian, Hebrew, Italian families in the Northwest who sewed their children into their clothes for the winter and never permitted a change till spring. Your Canadian would buy half a dozen suits for his children in the interval. Your foreigner buys of furniture and furnishings and comforts practically nothing for the first few years. He sleeps on the floor, with straw for a bed, and he occupies houses twenty-four to a room—which is the actual report in foreign quarters in the north end of Winnipeg. Your Canadian requires a house of six rooms for a family of six. When your foreigner has accumulated a little capital he buys land or a city tenement. Your Canadian educates his children, clothes them a little better, moves into a better house. When the foreigner buys a block, he moves his whole family into one room in the basement and does the janitor and scrubbing and heating work himself or forces his women to do it for him. When the Canadian buys a block, he hires a janitor, an engineer, a scrub woman, and if he moves into the block, he takes one of the best apartments. It does not take any guessing to know which of these two will buy a second block first—especially if the foreigner lives on peanuts and beer, and the Canadian on beefsteak and fresh fruit. Nor does it take any guessing to know which type stands for the higher citizenship—which will make toward the better nation.
IV
The question is—will Canada remain Canada when these new races come up to power? And Canada need not hoot that question; or gather her skirts self-righteously and exclusively about her and pass by on the other side. The United States did that, and to-day certain sections of the foreign vote are powerful enough to dictate to the President.
Take a little closer look at facts!
Foreigners have never been rushed into Canada as cheap labor to displace the native born, so they have not, as in great American industrial centers, lowered the standard of living for Canadians. They have come attracted by two magnets that give them great power: (1) wages so high they can save; (2) land absolutely free but for the ten-dollar preemption fee.
In 1881 there were six hundred and sixty-seven Jews in Canada.
In 1901 there were sixteen thousand. To-day it is estimated there are twenty thousand each in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg. These Jews have not gone out to the land. They have crowded into the industrial centers reproducing the housing evils from which they fled the European Ghetto. There are sections of Winnipeg and Montreal and Toronto where the very streets reek of Bowery smells. When they go to the woods or the land, these people have not the stamina to stand up to hard work. Yet in the cities, by hook or crook, by push-cart and trade, they acquire wealth. On the charity organization of the cities they impose terrible burdens during Canada's long cold winter.
In one section of the western prairie are 150,000 Galicians. Of Austrians and Germans—the Germans chiefly from Austria and Russia—there are 800,000 in Canada, or a population equal to the city of Montreal. Of Italians at last report there were fully 60,000 in Canada. In one era of seven years there took up permanent abode in Canada 121,000 Austrians, 50,000 Jews, 60,000 Italians, 60,000 Poles and Russians, 40,000 Scandinavians. When you consider that by actual count in the United States in 1900, 1,000 foreign-born immigrants had 612 children, compared to 1,000 Americans having 296 children, it is simply inconceivable but that this vast influx of alien life should not work tremendous and portentous changes in Canada's life, as a similar influx has completely changed the face of some American institutions in twenty years. Immigration to Canada has jumped from 54,000 in 1851-1861 to 142,000 in 1881-1891, and to 2,000,000 in 1901-1911. It has not come in feeble rivulets that lost their identity in the main current—as in the United States up to 1840. It has come to Canada in inundating floods.
Chief mention has been made of the races from the south of Europe because the races from the north of Europe assimilate so quickly that their identity is lost. Of Scandinavians there are in Canada some fifty thousand; of Icelanders, easily twenty thousand; and so quickly do they merge with Canadian life that you forget they are foreigners. I was a child in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and their rise has been a national epic. I do not believe the first few hundreds had fifty dollars among them. They slept under high board sidewalks for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties on vacant lots the next day. In these they housed the first winter. Though we Winnipeggers did not realize it, it must have been a dreadful winter to them. Their clothing was of the scantest. Many were without underwear. They lived ten and twenty to a house. The men sawed wood at a dollar and a half a day. The women worked out at one dollar a day. In a few weeks each family had bought a cow and rudiments of winter clothes. By spring they had money to go out on their homesteads. During winter some of the grown men attended school to learn English. Teachers declared they never witnessed such swift mastery of learning. To-day the Icelanders are the most prosperous settlers in Manitoba. The same story could be told of German Mennonites driven from Russia by religious persecution and of Scandinavians driven abroad by poverty. Of course, the weak went to the wall and died, and didn't whine about the dying, though some mother's heart must have broken in silence. I recall one splendid young fellow who walked through every grade the public schools afforded, and then through the high school, and was on the point of graduating in medicine when he died from sheer mental and physical exhaustion. This type of settler will build up Canada's national ideals. It is the other type that gives one pause.
V
Well—what is Canada going to do about it? Bar them out! Never! She needs these raw brawny Vandals and Goths of alien lands as much as they need Canada. She needs their hardy virility. They are the crude material of which she must manufacture a manhood that is not sissified, and one must never forget that some of the most honored names in the United States are from these very races. One of the greatest mathematicians in the United States, the greatest copper miners, the richest store keepers, one of the most powerful manufacturers—these sprang from the very races that give Canada pause to-day.
It is on the school rather than on the church that Canada must depend for the nationalizing of these alien races. Nearly all the colonists from the south of Europe have brought their church with them. In one foreign church of North Winnipeg is a congregation of four thousand, and certainly, in the case of the Doukhobors, the influence of the foreign priest has not been for the good of Canada. But none of these races has brought with them a school system, and that throws on the public school system of Canada the burden of preserving national ideals for the future. Will the schools prove equal to it? I wish I could answer unequivocally "yes"; for I recall some beautiful episodes of boys and girls—too immature to realize the importance of their work—"baching" it in prairie shanties, teaching at forty dollars a month; amid the isolation of Doukhobor and Galician and Ruthenian settlement preserving Canada's national ideals for the future; little classes of foreigners in the schools of North Winnipeg reading lessons in perfect English with flower gardens below the window kept by themselves—the little girls learning sewing and housekeeping in upper rooms, the boys learning technical trades in the basement. All this is good and well; but how about the recognition Canada gives these teachers who manufacture men and women out of mud, who do more in a day for the ideals of the nation than all the eloquence that has been spouted in Houses of Parliament? In Germany, they say—once an army man always an army man; for though the pay is ridiculously small, social prestige and recognition are so great that the army is the most desirable vocation. Canada's teachers in the schools among foreigners are doing for the Dominion what the German army has aimed to do for the empire. Do the Canadian teachers receive the same recognition? The question needs no answer. They receive so little recognition that the majority throw aside the work at their twenty-first year and crowd into other over-crowded professions. Meanwhile time moves on, and in twenty years the foreign vote will outnumber that of the native born.
CHAPTER VIII
THE COMING OF THE ORIENTAL
I
If the coming of the foreigner has been Canada's greatest danger from within, the coming of the Oriental has been one of her most perplexing problems from without. It is not only a perplexity to herself. It is a perplexity in which Canada involves the empire.
Take the three great Oriental peoples! With China, Great Britain is in friendly agreement. With Japan, Great Britain is in closest international pact. To India, Great Britain is a Mother. Yet Canada refuses free admission to peoples from all three countries. Why? For the same reason as do South Africa and Australia. It is only secondarily a question of labor. The thing goes deeper than that.
Consider Japan first: Panama is turning every port facing west into a front door instead of a back door. Within twenty years, the combined populations of American ports on the Pacific have jumped from a few hundreds of thousands at San Francisco and nothing elsewhere to almost two million, with growth continuing at an accelerated rate promising within another quarter of a century as many great harbors of almost as great population on the Pacific as on the Atlantic. The Orient has suddenly awakened. It is importing something besides missionaries. It is buying American and Canadian steel, American and Canadian wool, American and Canadian wheat, American and Canadian machinery, American and Canadian dressed lumber. Ship owners on the Pacific report that the docks of through traffic are literally jammed with goods outward bound—"more goods than we have ships," as the president of one line testified.
When the reason for building Panama has been shorn of highfalutin metaphors, it concentrates down to the simple bald fact that the United States possessions on the Pacific had grown too valuable to be guarded by a navy ten thousand miles away around the Horn. True, Roosevelt sent the fleet around the world to show what it could do, and the country howled its jubilation over the fact. But the Little Brown Brother only smiled; for the fleet hadn't coal to steam five hundred miles without hiring foreign colliers to follow around with supply of fuel. "Fine fleet! To be sure we have the ships," exploded a rear admiral in San Diego Bay a few years ago; "but look here!" He pointed through the port at an insignificant coaling dock such as third-rate barges use. "See any coal?" he asked. "If trouble should come"—it was just after the flight of Diaz—"we haven't coal enough to go half-way up or down the coast."
II
Sometimes we can guess the game from the moves of the chess players.
With facts for chessmen, what are the moves?
It was up in Atlin, British Columbia, a few years after the Klondike rush. Five hundred Japs had come tumbling into the mining camp, seemingly from nowhere, in reality from Japanese colonies in Hawaii. The white miners warned the Japs that "it wouldn't be a healthy camp," but mine owners were desperate for workers. Wages ran at from five to ten dollars a day. The Japs were located in a camp by themselves and put to work. On dynamite work, for which the white man was paid five to ten dollars, the Jap was paid three and five dollars. Still he held on with his teeth, "dogged as does it," as he always does. Suddenly the provincial board of health was notified. There was a lot of sickness in the Jap camp—"filthy conditions," the mine owners reported. The board of health found traces of arsenical poisoning in all the Jap maladies. The Japs decamped as if by magic.
Simultaneously there broke out from Alaska to Monterey the anti-Jap, anti-Chinese, anti-Hindu agitation. California's exclusion and land laws became party planks. British Columbia got round it by a subterfuge. She had the Ottawa government rush through an order-in-council known as "the direct passage" law. All Orientals at that time were coming in by way of Hawaii. Ships direct from India were not sailing. They stopped at Hong Kong and Hawaii. The order-in-council was to forbid the entrance of Brown Brothers unless in direct passage from their own land. That effectually barred the Hindu out, till recently when a Japanese line, to test the Direct Passage Act, brought a shipload of Hindus direct from India to Vancouver. Vancouverites patrolled docks and would not let them land. A head tax of five hundred dollars was leveled at John Chinaman. That didn't keep John Chinaman out. It simply raised his wages; for the Chinese boss added to the new hand's wages what was needed to pay the money loaned for entrance fee. A special arrangement was made with the Mikado's government to limit Japanese emigration to a few hundreds given passports, but California went the whole length of demanding the total exclusion of Brown Brothers.
Why? What was the Pacific Coast afraid of? When the State Departments of the United States and Canada met the State Department of the Mikado, practically what was said was this. Only in very diplomatic language:
Whiteman: "We don't object to your students and merchants and travelers, but what we do object to is the coolies. We are a population of a few hundred thousands in British Columbia, of less than three million in the states of the Pacific. What with Chink and Jap and Hindu, you are hundreds of millions of people. If we admit your coolies at the present rate (eleven thousand had tumbled into one city in a few months), we shall presently have a coolie population of millions. We don't like your coolies any better than you do yourself! Keep them at home!"
This conversation is paraphrased, but it is practically the substance of what the representative of the Ottawa government said to a representative of the Mikado.
Brown Brother: "We don't care any more for our coolies than you do. We don't in fact, care a hoot what becomes of the spawn and dregs of no-goods in our population. We are not individualists, as you white men are! We don't aim to keep the unfit cumbering the earth! We don't care a hoot for these coolies; but what we do care for is this—we Orientals refuse to be branded any longer as an inferior race. We'll restrain the emigration of these coolies by a passport system; but don't you forget it, just as soon as we are strong enough, in the friendliest, kindest, suavest, politest, most diplomatic way in the world, we intend not to be branded any longer as an inferior race. We intend to stand shoulder to shoulder with you in the management of the world's affairs. If we don't stand up to the job, throw us down! If we stand up to the job—and we stood up moderately in China and Russia and Belgium—we don't intend to ask you for the sop of that Christian brotherhood preached by white men. We intend to force recognition of what we are by what we do. We ask no favors, but we now serve you notice we are in to play the game."
Neither is this conversation a free translation. Shorn of diplomatic kotowing and compliments and circumlocutions, it is exactly what the Mikado's representative served to the representatives of three great governments—Uncle Sam's, John Bull's, Miss Canada's. If you ask how I know, I answer—direct from one of the three men sent to Japan.
Can you see the white men's eyes pop out of their heads with astonishment? They thought they were up against a case of labor union jealousy, and they found themselves involved in a complex race problem, dealing with three aggressive applicants for places at the councils of rulers governing the world. California was ordered to turn on the soft pedal and do it quick, and officially, at least, she did for a time. Canada was ordered to lay both hands across her mouth and never to speak above a whisper of the whole Brown Brother problem; and England—well—England openly took the Jappy-Chappy at his word—recognized him as a world brother and entered into the famous alliance. And the coming of coolies suddenly stopped to the United States and Canada. It didn't stop to South America and Mexico, but that is another play of the game with facts for chessmen.
Chinese exclusion, Japanese exclusion, Hindu exclusion suddenly became party shibboleths—always for the party out of power, never for the party in power. The party in power kept a special Maxim silencer on the subject of Oriental immigration. The politician in office kept one finger on his lip and wore rubber-soled shoes whenever an almond-eyed was mentioned. With that beautiful consistency which only a politician has, a good British Columbia member, who rode Oriental exclusion as his special hobbyhorse, employed a Jap cook. In the midst of his stump campaign against Orientals he found in the room of his cook original drawings of Fort Esquimalt, of Vancouver Harbor and of Victoria back country. I was in British Columbia at the time. The funny thing to me was—all British Columbia was so deadly in earnest it didn't see the funny side of the inconsistency.
III
I was up and down the Pacific the year the Mikado died, and chanced to be in San Diego the month that a Japanese warship put into port because its commander had suicided of grief over the Emperor's death. The ship had to lie in port till a new commander came out from Japan. Japanese coolies were no longer coming; but the Japanese middies had the run and freedom of the harbor; and they sketched all the whereabouts of Point Loma—purely out of interest for Mrs. Tingley's Theosophy, of course.
Diaz's ministry had been very hard pressed financially before being ousted by Madero. Some Boston and Pacific Coast men had secured an option from the Diaz faction of the sandy reaches known as Magdalena Bay in Lower California. The Pacific Coast is a land of few good natural harbors; especially harbors for a naval station and target practice. Suddenly an unseen hand blocked negotiations. Within a year Japan had almost leased Magdalena Bay, when Uncle Sam wakened up and ordered "hands off."
Nicaragua has never been famous as a great fishing country. Yet Japanese fishermen tried to lease fishing rights there and may have, for all the world knows. In spite of exclusion acts, they already dominate the salmon fishing of the Pacific.
Coaling facilities will be provided for the merchantmen of the world at both ends of Panama. Yet when England and France began furbishing up colonial stations in the Caribbean, Japan forthwith made offers for a site for a coaling station in the Gulf of Mexico.
But it was in South America and Mexico that the most active colonization proceeded. There is not an American diplomat in South America who does not know this and who has not reported it—reported it with one finger on both lips and then has seen his report discreetly smothered in departmental pigeon-holes. Up to a few years ago Mexico and South America were enjoying marvelous prosperity. Coffee had not collapsed in Brazil. Banks had not blown up from self-inflation in Argentina. Revolution at home and war abroad had not closed mines in Mexico. All hands were stretched out for colonists. Japan launched vast trans-Pacific colonization schemes. Ships were sent scouting commercial possibilities in South America. To colonists in Chile and Peru, fare was in many cases prepaid. Money was loaned to help the colonists establish themselves, and an American representative to one of these countries told me that free passage was given colonists on furlough home if they would go back to the colony. There is no known record outside Japan of the numbers of these colonists. And Japan asks—why not? Does not England colonize; does not Germany colonize; does not France colonize? We are taking our place at the world board of trade. If we fail to make good, throw us out. If we make good, we do not ask "by your leave."
IV
When a shipping investigation was on in Washington a year ago, many members of the committee were amazed to learn that Japan already controls seventy-two per cent. of the shipping on the Pacific. Ask a Chilean or Peruvian whether he prefers to travel on an American or a Japanese ship. He laughs and answers that American ships to the western coast of South America would be as tubs are to titanics—only until the new registry bill passed there were hardly any ships under the United States flag on the Southern Pacific. Each of these Japanese ships is so heavily subsidized it could run without a passenger or a cargo; high as one hundred thousand dollars a voyage for many ships. Its crews are paid eight to ten dollars a month, where American and Canadian crews demand and get forty to fifty dollars. In cheapness of labor, in efficiency of service, in government aid and style of building no American nor Canadian ships can stand up against them. And again Japan asks—why not? Atlantic commerce is a prize worth four billions a year. When the Orient fully awakens, will Pacific commerce total four billions a year? Who rules the sea rules the world. Japan's ships dominate seventy-two per cent. of the Pacific's commerce now.
So when the war broke out, Japan shouldered not the white man's burden but the Brown Brother's and plunged in to police Asia. Again—why not? As Uncle Sam polices the two Americas, and John Bull the seas of the world, so the Mikado undertakes to police the sea lanes of the Orient. The Jappy said when he met the diplomats on the subject of coolie immigration that he would prove himself the partner of the white man at the world's council boards—or step back.
Is it a menace or a portent? Certainly not a menace, when accepted as a matter of fact. Only the fact must be faced and realized, and the new chessman's moves recognized. Uncle Sam has the police job of one world, South America; Great Britain of another—Europe. Will the little Jappy-Chappy take the job for that other world, where the Star of the Orient seems to be swinging into new orbits? The Jappy-Chappy isn't saying much; but he is essentially on the job for all he is worth; and Canada hasn't wakened up to what that may mean to her Pacific Coast.
CHAPTER IX
THE HINDU
I
Is it, then, that Canada fears the growth of Japan as a great world power? No, the thing is deeper than that. We have come to the place where we must go deeper than surface signs and use neither rose water nor kid gloves. The question of the Chinese and the Japanese is entirely distinct from the Hindu.
If you think that shutting your eyes to what you don't want to know and stopping your nostrils to the stench and gathering your garments up and passing by on the other side ever settled a difficult question, then the Pacific Coast wishes you joy to your system of moral sanitation; but don't offer the people of the Pacific Coast any platitudinous advice about admitting Asiatics. They know what they are doing. You don't! Theoretically the Asiatic should have the same liberty to come and go with Canada as Canadians have to come and go with the Orient. Theoretically, also, the colored man should be as clean and upright and free-and-equal and dependable as the white man; but practically—in an anguish that has cost the South blood and tears—practically he isn't. The theory does not work out. Neither does it with the Asiatic. That is, it does not work out at close range on the spot, instead of the width of half a continent away.
Canada is being asked to decide and legislate on one of the most vital race problems that ever confronted a nation. She is also being asked to be very lily-handed and ladylike and dainty about it all. You must not explore facts that are not—"nice." You must not ask what the Westerner means when he says that "the Asiatic will not affiliate with our civilization." Is it more than white teeth and pigments of the skin? Is it more than skin deep? Had the Old Book some deep economic reason when it warned the children of Israel against mixing their blood with aliens? Has it all anything to do with the centuries' cesspools of unbridled vice? Is that the reason that women's clubs—knowing less of such things—rather than men's clubs—are begged to pass fool resolutions about admitting races of whose living practices they know absolutely nothing?
If it isn't the labor unions and it isn't the fear of new national power that prejudice against the Oriental—what is it? Why has almost every woman's club on the Pacific passed resolutions against the admission of the Oriental, and almost every woman's club in the East passed resolutions for the admission? Why did the former Minister of Labor in Canada say that "a minimum of publicity is desired upon this subject"? What did he mean when he declared "that the native of India is not a person suited to this country"? If the native Hindu is "not a person suited to Canada"—climate, soil, moisture, what not?—why isn't that fact sufficient to exclude the Oriental without any legislation? Italians never go to live at the North Pole. Nor do Eskimos come to live in the tropics.
You may ask questions about Hindu immigration till you are black in the face. Unless you go out on the spot to the Pacific Coast, the most you will get for an answer is a "hush." And it would not be such an impossible situation if the other side were also going around with a finger to the lip and a "hush"; but the Oriental isn't. The Hindu and his advocates go from one end of Canada to the other clamoring at the tops of their voices, not for the privilege, but for the right, of admission to Canada, the right to vote, the right to colonize. At the time the first five or six thousand were dumped on the Pacific Coast, twenty thousand more were waiting to take passage; and one hundred thousand more were waiting to take passage after them, clamoring for the right of admission, the right to vote, the right to colonize. Canada welcomes all other colonists. Why not these? The minute you ask, you are told to "hush."
South Africa and Australia "hushed" so very hard and were so very careful that after a very extensive experience—150,000 Hindus settled in one colony—both colonies legislated to shut them out altogether. At least South Africa's educational test amounted to that, and South Africa and Australia are quite as imperial as Canada. Why did they do it? The labor unions were no more behind the exclusion in those countries than in British Columbia. The labor unions chuckled with glee over the embarrassment of the whole question.