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Title: The Canadian Commonwealth
Author: Agnes C. Laut
Release Date: March 21, 2006 [eBook #18032]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CANADIAN COMMONWEALTH***
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.
II
Each side of the question must be stated plainly, not as my personal
opinions or the opinions of any one, but as the arguments of those
advocating the free admission of the Hindu, and of those furiously
opposing the free admission.
A few years ago British Columbia was at her wit's ends for laborers--men
for the mills, the mines, the railroads. India was at her wit's ends
because of surplus of labor--labor for which her people were glad to
receive three, ten, twenty cents a day. Her people were literally
starving for the right to live. It does not matter much who acted as the
connecting link,--the sawmill owners, the canneries, the railroads, or
the steamships. The steamship lines and the sawmill men seem to have
been the combined sinners. The mills wanted labor. The steamship lines
saw a chance to transport laborers at the rate of twenty thousand a year
to and from India. The Hindus came tumbling in at the rate of six
thousand in a single year, when, suddenly, British Columbia, inert at
first, awakened and threatened to secede or throw the newcomers into the
sea. By intervention of the Imperial government and the authorities of
India a sort of subterfuge was rigged up in the immigration laws. The
Hindus had been booked to British Columbia via Hong Kong and Hawaii. The
most of the Japs had come by way of Hawaii. To kill two birds with one
stone, by order-in-council in Ottawa, the regulation was enacted
forbidding the admission of immigrants except on continuous passage from
the land of birth. Canada's immigration law also permits great latitude
in interpretation as to the amount of money that must be possessed by the
incoming settlers. Ordinarily it is fifty dollars for winter,
twenty-five dollars for summer, with a five hundred dollar poll tax
against the Chinaman. The Hindus were required to have two hundred and
fifty dollars on their person.
One wonders at the simplicity of a nation that hopes to fence itself in
safety behind laws that are pure subterfuge. The subterfuge has but
added irritation to friction. What was to hinder a direct line of
steamships going into operation any day? As a matter of fact, to force
the issue, to force the Dominion to declare the status of the Oriental, a
Japanese ship early in 1914 did come direct from India with a cargo of
angry armed Hindus demanding entrance. Canada refused to relent. The
ship lay in harbor for months unable to land its colonists, and a
Dominion cruiser patrolled Vancouver water to prevent actual armed
conflict. When the final decision ordered the colonists on board
deported, knives and rifles were brandished; and Hopkinson, the secret
service man employed by British authorities, was openly shot to death a
few weeks later in a Vancouver court room by a band of Hindu assassins.
"We are glad we did it," declared the murderers when arrested. Hopkinson
himself had come from India and was hated and feared owing to his secret
knowledge of revolutionary propaganda among the Vancouver Hindus, who
were posing as patriots and British subjects. The fact that many
thousands of Sikhs and Hindus had just been hurried across Canada in
trains with blinds down to fight for the empire in Europe added tragic
complexity to an already impossible situation.
The leaders of the Hindu party in Canada had already realized that more
immigration was not advisable till they had stronger backing of public
opinion in Canada, and a campaign of publicity was begun from Nova Scotia
to the Pacific Coast. Churches, women's missionary societies, women's
clubs, men's clubs were addressed by Hindu leaders from one end of Canada
to the other. It did not improve the temper of some of these leaders
posing in flowing garments of white as mystic saints before audiences of
women to know that Hopkinson, the secret agent, was on their trail in the
shadow with proofs of criminal records on the part of these same leaders.
These criminal records Hopkinson would willingly have exposed had the
Imperial government not held his hand. When I was in Vancouver he called
to see me and promised me a full exposure of the facts, but before
speaking cabled for permission to speak. Permission was flatly refused,
and I was told that I was investigating things altogether too deeply. I
can see the secret agent's face yet--as he sat bursting with facts
repressed by Imperial order--a solemn, strong, relentless man, sad and
savage with the knowledge he could not use. Without Hopkinson's aid, it
was not difficult to get the facts. Canada is a country of party
government. One party had just been ousted from power, and another party
had just come in. While I was waiting for permission from Ottawa to
obtain facts in the open, information came to me voluntarily with proofs
through the wife of a former secret agent.
It did not make things easier for Hopkinson that the whole dispute as to
Hindu immigration was relegated into that doubtful resort of all
ambiguous politics--"the twilight zone"--or the doubtful borderland where
provincial powers end and federal powers begin and Imperial powers
intervene. England was shoving the burden of decision on the Dominion,
and the Dominion was shoving the burden on the Province of British
Columbia, and to evade responsibility each government was shuttling the
thing back and forward, weaving a tangle of hate and misunderstanding
which culminated in Hopkinson's assassination in 1914.
As "the twilight zone" between provincial and federal rights comes up
here, it should be considered and emphasized; for it is the one great
weakness of every federation. _Who_ is to do _what_--when neither
government wants to assume responsibility? Who is to enforce laws, when
neither government wants to father them? It was this gave such passion
to Vancouver's resentment in Hindu immigration. Indeed this very
question of "a twilight zone" gives pause to many an Imperial
Federationist. In a dispute of this sort, involving the parts of the
empire, could England give force to an exclusion act without losing the
allegiance to her British Empire?
Every conceivable argument has been used in this Hindu dispute. I want
to emphasize--they are _arguments_, used for argument's sake--not
reasons. The plain brutal bald reasons on each side of the dispute are
British Columbia does _not_ want the Hindus. The Hindus want British
Columbia. Simultaneously with the campaign for publicity action was
taken: (1) to force the resident Hindu on the voters' list; (2) to break
down the immigration laws by demanding the entrance of wives and
families; (3) to force recognition of the status of the Oriental by
bringing them in the ships of Japan--England's ally.
If the resident Hindu had a vote--and as a British subject, why not?--and
if he could break down the immigration exclusion act, he could out-vote
the native-born Canadian in ten years. In Canada are five and one-half
million native born, two million aliens. In India are hundreds of
millions breaking the dykes of their own national barriers and ready to
flood any open land. Take down the barriers on the Pacific Coast, and
there would be ten million Hindus in Canada in ten years. The drawing of
Japan into the quarrel by chartering a Japanese ship was a crafty move.
Japan is the empire's ally. Offense to Japan means war.
III
The arguments from both sides I set down in utter disinterest personally.
Here they are:
We need room for colonization--says the Hindu. Let England lose India,
and she loses five-sixths of the British Empire. By refusing admission
to the Hindu, Canada is endangering British dominion in India. Moral
conditions there are appalling, of course; but say the missionaries--give
these people a chance, and they will become as good as any of us. Are we
not sprung from the same Aryan stock?
British Columbia has immense tracts of arable land. Why not give India's
millions a chance on it as colonizers?
There is not so much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as
among Canadian-born Socialists, who rant of the flag as "the bloody rag."
The vices of the Hindu are no worse than the vices of the low whites.
They are British subjects and have a right to admission. Admission is
not a privilege but a right.
How can we expect good morals among three to five thousand men who are
forcibly separated from wives and children? Admit their wives to prevent
deterioration. This argument was used by a Hindu addressing audiences in
Toronto.
What right have Canadians to point the finger of scorn at the reproach of
the child wife when the age of marriage in one province is twelve years?
In the days of the mutiny the Sikh proved his loyalty. To-day the Indian
troops are proving their loyalty by fighting for the empire in Europe.
Many of the Canadians now denouncing the Hindu made money selling them
real estate in Vancouver, and expropriation is behind the idea of
exclusion.
The admission of the Hindu would relieve British Columbia's great need
for manual laborers.
Canadian missionaries to India are received as friends. Why are the
Hindus not received as friends in Canada?
Why should a Sikh not marry a white woman as one did in Vancouver? This
question was asked by the official publication of the Sikhs in Vancouver.
If Canada shuts her doors to the Hindus, let the Hindus shut doors to
Canadians.
These are not my arguments. They are the arguments of the people
advocating the free admission of people from India to Canada.
To these arguments the Pacific Coast makes answer. Likewise, the answer
is not mine:
We know that you as a people need room for colonization; but if we admit
you as colonists, will your presence drive out other colonists, as it has
done in Australia and South Africa; as the presence of colored people
prevents the coming of other colonists to the southern states? If we
have to decide between having you and excluding Canadians, or excluding
you and having Canadians, we can not afford to hesitate in our decision.
We must keep our own land for our own people.
Australia and South Africa have excluded the Hindu--South Africa's
educational test amounts to that--and that has not imperiled British
dominion in India. Why should it in Canada? The very fact there are
millions ready to come is what alarms us. Morals are low--you
acknowledge--and your people would be better if they had a chance; but
would the chance not cost us too dearly, as the improvement of the blacks
has cost the South in crime and contaminated blood? We are sorry for
you, just as we are sorry for any plague-stricken region; but we do not
welcome you among us because of that pity.
There may not be so much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as
among Canadian-born Socialists, who rant of the flag as "a bloody rag";
but our Socialistic seditionists have never yet been accused of
collecting two million dollars to send home to India to buy rifles for
the revolution. Canadian Socialists have never yet collected one dime to
buy rifles. These are not my accusations. They are accusations that
have been in the very air of Vancouver and San Francisco. If they are
true, they ought to be proved true. If they are untrue, they ought to be
proved untrue; but in view of the shoutings over patriotism and of
Hopkinson's assassination, they come with a rude jar to claims grounded
on loyalty. Could Hindus who landed in British Columbia destitute a few
years ago possibly have that amount of money among them? At last census
they had property in Vancouver alone to the amount of six million
dollars, held collectively for the whole community.
Their vices may be no worse than the vices of the low whites, but if
immigration officials find that whites low or high have vices, those
whites are excluded, be they English, Irish, Scotch, or Greek.
The Hindus are British subjects, but Canada does not admit British
subjects unless she wants them--unless they can give a clean bill of
health and morals.
Canada does not regard admission as a right to any race, European, Asian,
African. She considers her citizenship a privilege and reserves to
herself the right to extend or not to extend that privilege to whom she
will.
That separation from families will excuse base and lewd morals is a view
that Canada will never admit. Her sons go forth unaccompanied by wives
or sisters to lumber camps and mines and pioneer shacks, and in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred come back clean as they went forth,
and manlier. That women should be victims on an altar of lust is an
argument that may appeal to the Asiatic--the sentiment all draped in
wisteria and lilies, of course; but it isn't an argument that will prove
anything in Canada but the advocate's unfitness for citizenship.
What reason have Canadians to point the finger of reproach at the
institution of the child wife, when the age of marriage in one province
is low as twelve? And that brings up the whole question of the child
wife. Because one province has the marriage age criminally low does not
prove that that province approves of marriages at twelve. In the whole
history of that province marriages at that age have been as rare as the
pastime of skinning a man alive, and that province has no specific law
against skinning a man alive. It has no such law because that type of
crime is unknown. But can it be said that the institution of child
marriage is an unknown or even a rare crime in India? The Hindu wives
for whom loud outcry is being made are little girls barely eight years of
age, whom before marriage the husbands have never seen, men of
thirty-five and forty and forty-eight. Does Canada desire the system of
the child wife embodied in her national life? Suppose one hundred
thousand Hindu colonists came to the vacant arable lands of British
Columbia. As the inalienable right of a British subject, the colonist
must be allowed to bring in his wife. What if she is a child to whom he
was married in her infancy? The colonist being a British subject is to
be given a vote. How would Canada abolish the child wife system if Hindu
votes outnumbered Canadian votes? Forget all about the rifle fund--the
discovery of which was paid for in Hopkinson's life! Forget all about
labor and mill owner and color of pigments! You know now why the
Oriental question is more than skin-deep. Go a little deeper in this
child-wife thing! Don't balk at the horror of it! The Pacific Coast
wants you to know a few medical facts. Hundreds of thousands of children
in India, age from nine to twelve, are wives actually living with
husbands; and the husbands are in many cases from thirty to eighty years
of age. Anglo-Saxons regard these unions as criminal. One-third of all
children born of mothers under sixteen years of age die in infancy
because of the tortures to the mother's body, compared to which the
tortures of the Inquisition were merciful. Does Canada want that system
embodied in her national life? Under Canadian law such crimes are
treated to thirty-nine lashes: under American law to Judge Lynch.
Twenty-five per cent. of the women of India die prematurely because of
the crimes perpetrated through child marriage. Twenty-five per cent.
become invalids from the same cause. Nine million girl wives in India
are under fifteen years of age; two million are under eleven.
I asked a British Columbia sawmill owner why the Hindu could not speed up
with a Pole or Swede.
"No stamina," he answered. "Too many generations of vice! Too many
generations of birth from immature mothers; no dower of strength from
birth."
The advocates of Hindu colonization in Canada glibly advise "prohibiting
child wives." To bar out child wives sounds easy. How are you to know
they are child wives and not daughters? If one thing more than another
has been established in Vancouver about Hindus, not excepting the
leaders, it is that you can not believe a Hindu under oath. Also British
law does not allow you to bar out a subject's wife unless she be diseased
or vicious. If you let down the bar to any section of the Hindu, teeming
millions will come--with a demand to vote.
That Canada's continuous passage law is immoral and intolerable no one
denies. It is a subterfuge and a joke. The day the Japanese steamship
tested the law by bringing passengers direct from land of birth the law
fell down and Canada had to face squarely the question of exclusion. As
the world knows, the shipload of human cargo after lying for months in
Vancouver Harbor was sent back, and Hindu leaders proved their claims of
a right to citizenship by assassinating Hopkinson.
To the claim that the Sikhs are loyal, Canada answers--"for their own
sake." If British protection were withdrawn from India to-morrow, a
thousand petty chiefs would fly at one another's throats. The idea that
expropriation is behind exclusion could be entertained only by an
Oriental mind. Expropriation is possible under Canadian law only for
treason. Imperial unity is no more threatened in Canada by exclusion
than it was threatened in South Africa and Australia. The Hindus are
adapted to the cultivation of the soil, but if they come in millions,
will any white race sit down beside them? Why does immigration
persistently refuse to go to the southern states? Because of a black
shadow over the land. Does Canada want such a shadow?
The missionary argument can hardly be taken seriously. Missionaries do
not go to India to colonize. They do not introduce white vices. They go
at Canada's expense to give free medical and social service to India.
"Why should a Sikh not marry a white woman?" There, again, you are up
against a side of the subject that is neither violet water nor pink tea;
but--it is a vital side of the subject. For the same reason that the
South objects to and passes laws against mixed unions of the races.
These laws are not the registration of prejudice. They are the
registration of terrible lessons in experience. It is not a matter of
opinion. It is a matter of fact. What is feared is not the marriage of
a Sikh who is refined to a white woman who knows what she is doing. What
is feared is the effect of that union on the lewd Hindu; the effect on
the safety of the uncultured white woman and white girl. Any one on the
Coast who has lived next to Asiatics, any one in India or the Philippines
knows what this means in terms of hideous terrible fact that can not be
set down here. Vancouver knows. "I'll see," said an officer in the
Philippines of his native valet, "that the--dog turns up missing;" and
every man present knew why; and when the officer set out on an unnamed
expedition with his valet, the valet did "turn up missing." There are
vices for which a white man kills. "Have not the English carried vices
to India?" a Hindu protagonist asked me. Yes, answered British Columbia,
but we do not purpose poisoning the new young life of Canada to
compensate the vices of English soldiers who have gone to pieces morally
in India.
As to shutting Canadians out of India, Canada would accept that challenge
gladly. When Canadians carry vices to India--says Canada--shut them out.
These are the reasons given for the Pacific Coast's aversion to the
Hindu, and even with the arguments stated explicitly, there is a great
deal untold and untellable.
For instance, some of the leaders talking loudest in Eastern Canada in
the name of the Sikh are not Sikhs at all, and one at least has a
criminal record in San Francisco.
For instance again, when the coronation festivities were on in England,
there was a very peculiar guard kept round the Hindu quarters. It would
be well for some of the eastern women's clubs to inquire why that was;
also why the fact was hushed up that two white women of bad character
were carried out of that compound dead.
Said a mill owner, one who employs many Hindus, "If the East could
understand how some of these penniless leaders grow rich, they would
realize that the Hindu has our employment sharks beaten to a frazzle. I
take in a new man from one of these leaders. The leader gets two dollars
or five dollars for finding this fellow a job. I have barely got the man
broken in when the leader yanks him off to another job and sends me a new
man, getting, of course, the employment agent fee for both changes."
"But why not let them come out here and work and go back?" asks the East.
Because that is just what the Hindu will not do. When he comes, he
fights for the franchise to stay. That is the real meaning behind the
fight over cases now in the courts.
"They are curious fellows, poor beggars," said a police court official to
me. "They have no more conception of what truth means than a dog
stealing a bone. We had a Hindu come in here as complainant against
another man, with his back hacked to beef steak. We had very nearly sent
the defendant up for a long term in the 'pen,' when we got wind that
these two fellows had been bitter enemies--old spites--and that there was
something queer about the complainant's shanty. We sent out to examine.
The fellow had stuck bits of glass all over the inside of his shack walls
and then cut his own back to pay an old grudge against the other man.
Another fellow rushed in here gesticulating complaint, who was literally
soaked in blood. We had had our experience and so sending for an
interpreter, we soused this fellow into a bathtub. Every dab came off
and there was not a scratch under."
"You say the Hindu is the negro problem multiplied by ten, plus craft,"
said a life-long resident of India to me. "That is hardly correct. The
Hindu is different from the negro. He is intellectual and spiritual as
well as crafty and sensuous. You will never have trouble with the Hindu,
if you keep him in his place--"
"But do you think a democratic country can what you call 'keep a race in
its place'? The very genius of our democracy is that we want each
individual to come up out of his place to a higher place."
"Then you will learn a hard lesson here in Canada."
What kind of a lesson? Again, let us take facts, not opinions!
A clergyman's wife in Vancouver, full of missionary zeal for India,
thought it her duty to accord the Hindu exactly the same treatment as to
an American or English immigrant. She took a man as general house
servant and treated him with the same genial courtesy she had treated all
other help in her home. You know what is coming--don't you? The man
mistook it for evil or else failed to subdue the crimes of the centuries
in his own blood. Had he not come from a land where a woman more or less
did not matter, and hundreds of thousands of little girls are yearly
sacrificed on the altars of Moloch? I need not give details. As a
matter of fact, there are none. Asiatic ideas about women collided
violently with facts which any Canadian takes for granted and does not
talk about! No Anglo-Saxon (thank God) is too ladylike not to have a bit
of the warrior woman left in her blood. The Hindu was thrown out of that
house. Then the woman reasoned with the blind persistence peculiar to
any conscientious good woman, who always puts theory in place of fact!
There are blackguards in every race. There are scoundrels among
Englishmen in India. Why should she allow one criminal among the Hindus
to prejudice her against this whole people? And she at once took another
Hindu man servant in the house. This time she kept him in the kitchen
and garden. Within a month the same thing happened with a little
daughter. This Hindu also went out on his head. No more were employed
in that house. That woman's husband was one of the Pacific Coast
clergymen who passed the resolution, "that the Hindus would not affiliate
with our Canadian civilization."
Personally I think that resolution would have been a great deal more
enlightening to the average Easterner if the ministerial association had
plainly called a spade a spade.
IV
With the Chinaman conditions are different. In the first place, since
China obtained freedom from the old cast-iron dynasty, Chinamen have not
wanted to colonize in Canada. The leaders of the young China party laid
their plots and published their liberty journals from presses in the
basement of Vancouver and Victoria shops, but having gained their
liberty, they went back to China. The Chinaman does not want to
colonize. He does not want a vote. He wants only to earn his money on
the Pacific Coast and hoard it and go home to China with it. The fact
that he does not want to remain in the country but comes only to work and
go back has always been used as an argument against him. Neither does he
consider himself your equal. Nor does he want to marry your daughter,
nor have you consider him a prince of the royal blood in disguise--a pose
in which the little Jap is as great an adept as the English cockney who
drops enough "h's" to build a monument, all the while he is telling you
of his royal blue blood. If you mistake the Chinaman for a prince in
disguise, the results will be just what they were with a poor girl In New
York four or five years ago. The results will be just what they always
are when you mistake a mongrel for a thoroughbred.
All the same, dismiss the idea from your mind that labor is behind the
opposition to Chinese immigration! A few years ago, when Oriental labor
came tumbling into British Columbia at the rate of twelve thousand in a
single year--when the Chinese alone had come to number fifteen or sixteen
thousand--labor was alarmed; but a twofold change has taken place since
that time. First, labor has found that it can better control the
Chinaman by letting him enter Canada, than by keeping him in China and
letting the product of cheap labor come in. Second, the Chinaman has
demonstrated his solidarity as a unit in the labor war. If he comes, he
will not foregather with capital. That is certain! He will affiliate
with the unions for higher wages.
"If the Chinaman comes in here lowering the price of goods and the price
of labor," said the agitator a few years ago, "we'll put a poll tax of
five hundred dollars on and make him pay for his profit." The poll tax
was put on every Chinaman coming into Canada, but do you think John
Chinaman pays it? It is a way that unjust laws have of coming back in a
boomerang. The Chinaman doesn't pay it! Mr. Canadian Householder paid
it; for no sooner was the poll tax imposed than up went wages for
household servant and laundryman and gardener, from ten to fifteen
dollars a month to forty and forty-five and fifty dollars a month. The
Italian boss system came in vogue, when the rich Chinaman who paid the
entrance tax for his "slaves" farmed out the labor at a profit to
himself. The system was really one of indentured slavery till the
immigration authorities went after it. Then Chinese benevolent
associations were formed. Up went wages automatically. The cook would
no longer do the work of the gardener. When the boy you hired at
twenty-five dollars had learned his job, he suddenly disappeared one
morning. His substitute explains he has had to go away; "he is sick;"
any excuse; with delightful lapses of English when you ask questions.
You find out that your John has taken a job at forty dollars a month, and
you are breaking in a new green hand for the Chinese benevolent
association to send up to a higher job. If you kick against the trick,
you may kick! There are more jobs than men. That's the way you pay the
five hundred dollars poll tax; comical, isn't it; or it would be comical
if the average white householder did not find it five hundred dollars
more than the average income can spare? So the labor leaders chuckle at
this subterfuge, as they chuckle at the "continuous" passage law.
For a time the indentured slavery system worked almost criminally; for if
the newcomer, ignorant of the law and the language, got wise to the fact
that his boss was doing what was illegal under Canadian law, and
attempted to jump his serfdom, he was liable--as one of them expressed
it--"to be found missing." It would be reported that he had suicided.
Among people who did not speak English, naturally, no details would be
given. It seems almost unbelievable that in a country wrestling with the
whole Asiatic problem the fact has to be set down that the government has
no interpreter among the Chinese who is not a Chinaman, no interpreter
among the Japanese who is not a Jap. As it chances, the government
happens to have two reliable foreigners as interpreters; but they are
foreigners.
Said Doctor Munro, one of the medical staff of the Immigration
Department: "Even in complicated international negotiations, where each
country is jockeying to protect its rights, Canada has to depend on
representatives of China or Japan to translate state documents and
transmit state messages. Here we are on the verge of great commercial
intercourse with two of the richest countries in Asia, countries that are
just awakening from the century's sleep, countries that will need our
flour and our wheat and our lumber and our machinery; and we literally
have not a diplomatic body in Canada to speak either Chinese or Japanese.
I'll tell you what a lot of us would like to see done--what the southern
states are doing with the Latin-Spanish of South America--have a staff of
translators for our chambers of commerce and boards of trade, or price
files and lists of markets, etc. How could this be brought about? Let
Japan and China send yearly, say twenty students to study international
law and English with us. Let us send to China and Japan yearly twenty of
our postgraduate students to be trained up into a diplomatic body for our
various boards of trade, to forward international trade and help the two
countries to understand each other.
"When trouble arose over Oriental immigration a few years ago," continued
Doctor Munro, "I can tell you that it was a serious matter that we had to
have the translating of our state documents done at that time by
representatives of the very nations we were contesting."
Unless I am misinformed, one of the men who did the translating at that
time is one of the Orientals who has since "suicided," and the reason for
that suicide you might as well try to fathom as to follow the windings of
a ferret in the dark. Certain royal clans of Japan will suicide on order
from their government for the good of their country.
"The trouble with these foolish raids on Chinatown for gambling," said an
educated Chinaman in Vancouver to me, "is that the city police have no
secret service among the Chinese, and they never raid the resorts that
need most to be cleaned out. They raid some little joint where the
Chinese boys are playing fan-tan for ten cents, when they do not raid
up-town gambling hells where white men play for hundreds of dollars. If
the police employed Chinese secret service, they could clean out every
vice resort in a week. Except in the segregated district, which is
white, there would not be any vice. They need Chinese police or men who
speak Chinese, and there would be no Chinese vice left in this town."
To go back to the matter of the poll tax and the system of indentured
slavery, the bosses mapped out every part of the city and province in
wage areas. Here, no wages under twenty-five dollars, to which green
hands were sent; here, a better quarter, no wages under forty dollars;
and so on up as high as sixty dollars for mill work and camp cooking.
About this time riots turned the searchlight on all matters Oriental; and
the boss system merged in straight industrial unionism. You still go to
a boss to get your gangs of workmen; but the boss is secretary of a
benevolent association; and if he takes any higher toll than an
employment agent's commission, the immigration department has never been
able to detect it. "I have no hesitation in saying," declared an
immigration official, "that for four years there has not been a case of
boss slavery that could be proved in the courts. There has not been a
case that could be proved in the courts of women and children being
brought in for evil purposes. Only merchants' wives, students, and that
class can come in. The other day an old fellow tried to bring a young
woman in. We suspected he had left an old wife in China; but we could
not prove it; so we charged him five hundred dollars for the entrance of
this one and had them married on the spot. Whenever there is the
slightest doubt about their being married, we take no chances, charge
them five hundred dollars and have the knot tied right here and now.
Then the man has to treat the woman as a wife and support her; or she can
sue him; and we can punish and deport him. There is no more of little
girls being brought in to be sold for slavery and worse."
All the same, some evils of the boss system still exist. The boss system
taught the Chinaman organization, and to-day, even with higher wages,
your forty-five dollars a month cook will do no gardening. You ask him
why. "They will cut my throat," he tells you; and if he goes out to mow
the lawn, he is soon surrounded by fellow countrymen who hoot and jeer
him.
"Would they cut his throat?" I asked a Chinaman.
"No; but maybe, the benevolent association or his tong fine him."
So you see why labor no longer fears the Chinaman and welcomes him to
industrial unionism, a revolution in the attitude of labor which has
taken place in the last year. Make a note of these facts:
The poll tax has trebled expenses for the householder.
The poll tax has created industrial unionism among the Chinese.
The poll tax has not kept the Chinaman out.
How about the Chinese vices? Are they a stench to Heaven as the Hindu's?
I can testify that they certainly are not open, and they certainly are
not aggressive, and they certainly do not claim vice as a right; for I
went through Vancouver's Chinatown with only a Chinaman as an escort (not
through "underground dens," as one paper reported it) after ten at night;
and the vices that I saw were innocent, mild, pallid, compared to the
white-man vices of Little Italy, New York, or Upper Broadway. We must
have visited in all a dozen gambling joints, two or three midnight
restaurants, half a dozen opium places and two theaters; and the only
thing that could be remotely constructed into disrespect was the
amazement on one drunken white face on the street that a white woman
could be going through Chinatown with a Chinaman. Instead of playing for
ten and one hundred dollars, as white men and women gamble up-town, the
Chinese boys were huddling intently over dice boxes, or playing fan-tan
with fevered zeal for ten cents. Instead of drinking absinthe, one or
two sat smoking heavily, with the abstracted stare of the opium victim.
In the midnight restaurants some drunken sailors sat tipsily, eating chop
suey. Goldsmiths were plying their fine craftsmanship. Presses were
turning out dailies with the news of the Chinese revolution. Grocery
stores, theaters, markets, all were open; for Chinatown never sleeps.
CHAPTER X
WHAT PANAMA MEANS
I
It now becomes apparent why British Columbia was described as the
province where East meets West and works out Destiny.
On the other side of the Pacific lies Japan come to the manhood of
nationality, demanding recognition as the equal of the white race and
room to expand. Behind Japan lies China, an awakened giant, potent for
good or ill, of half a billion people, whose commerce under a few years
of modern science and mechanics is bound to equal the commerce of half
Europe. It may in a decade bring to the ports that have hitherto been
the back doors of America an aggregate yearly traffic exceeding the
four billion dollars' worth that yearly leave Atlantic ports for
Europe. Canada is now the shortest route to "Cathay"; the railroads
across Canada offer shorter route from China to Europe than Suez or
Horn, by from two to ten thousand miles. Then there is India, another
awakened giant, potent for good or ill, of three hundred million
people--two hundred to the square mile--clamoring for recognition as
British subjects, clamoring for room to expand.
The question is sometimes asked by Americans: Why does Canada concern
herself about foreign problems and dangers? Why does she not rest
secure under the aegis of the Monroe Doctrine, which forever forfends
foreign conquest of America by an alien power? And Canada
answers--because the Monroe Doctrine is not worth the ink in which it
was penned without the bayonet to enforce the pen. Belgium's
neutrality did not protect her. The peace that is not a victory is
only an armed truce--a let-live by some other nation's permission.
Without power to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, that doctrine is to
Canada but a tissue-paper rampart.
To add to the complication involving British Columbia comes the opening
of Panama, turning the Pacific Ocean into a parade ground for the
world's fleets both merchantmen and war. Commercially Panama simply
turns British Columbia into a front door, instead of a back door. What
does this mean?
The Atlantic has hitherto been the Dominion's front door, and the
Canadian section of the Atlantic has four harbors of first rank with an
aggregate population of nearly a million. Canada has, besides, three
lake harbors subsidiary to ocean traffic with an aggregate population
of half a million. One may infer when the Pacific becomes a front
door, that Vancouver and Victoria and Port Mann and Westminster and
Prince Rupert will soon have an aggregate population of a million.
Behind the Atlantic ports, supplied by them with traffic, supplying
them with traffic, is a provincial population of five millions. Behind
the Pacific ports in British Columbia and Alberta, one would be
justified in expecting to find--Strathcona said a hundred million
people, but for this generation put it at twelve million.
Through the Atlantic ports annually come two hundred and fifty thousand
or more immigrants, not counting the one hundred and fifty thousand
from the United States. What if something happened to bring as many to
the Pacific, as well as those now coming to the Atlantic?
Then a century of peace has a sleeping-powder effect on a nation. We
forget that the guns of four nations once boomed and roared round old
Quebec and down Bay of Fundy way. If the Pacific becomes a front door,
the guns of the great nations may yet boom there. In fact, if Canada
had not been a part of Greater Britain four or five years ago when the
trouble arose over Japanese immigration, guns might easily have boomed
round Vancouver long before the Pacific Coast had become a front door.
Front door status entails bolt and strong bar. Front door means navy.
Navy means shipbuilding plants, and the shipyards of the United States
on the Atlantic support fifty thousand skilled artisans, or what would
make a city of two hundred and fifty thousand people. The shipyards of
England support a population equal to Boston. In the United States
those shipyards exist almost wholly by virtue of government contracts
to build war vessels, and in Great Britain largely by virtue of
admiralty subsidies. Though they also do an enormous amount of work on
river and coastal steamers, the manager of the largest and oldest plant
in the United States told me personally that with the high price of
labor and material in America, his shipyard could not last a day
without government contracts for war vessels, torpedoes, dredges, etc.
Front door on the Pacific means that to Canada, and it means more; for
Canada belongs to an empire that has vaster dominions to defend in Asia
than in Europe.
But isn't all this stretching one's fancy a bit too far in the future?
How far is _too_ far? The Panama Canal is open for traffic, and there
is not a harbor of first rank in the United States, Atlantic, Pacific,
or Gulf of Mexico, that does not bank on, that is not spending millions
on, the expectation of Panama changing the Pacific from a back into a
front door. Either these harbors are all wrong or Canada is sound
asleep as a tombstone to the progress round her. Boston has spent nine
million dollars acquiring terminals and water-front, and is now
guaranteeing the bonds of steamships to the extent of twenty-five
million dollars. New York has built five new piers to take care of the
commerce coming--and the Federal government has spent fifty million
dollars improving the approaches to her harbor. Baltimore is so sure
that Panama is going to revive shore-front interests that she has
reclaimed almost two hundred acres of swamp land for manufacturing
sites, which she is leasing out at merely nominal figures to bring the
manufacturers from inland down to the sea. In both Baltimore and
Philadelphia, railroads are spending millions increasing their trackage
for the traffic they expect to feed down to the coast cities for Panama
steamers.
Among the Gulf ports, New Orleans has spent fifteen million dollars
putting in a belt line system of railroads and docks with steel and
cement sheds, purely to keep her harbor front free of corporate
control. This is not out of enmity to corporations, but because the
prosperity of a harbor depends on all steamers and all railroads
receiving the same treatment. This is not possible under private and
rival control. Yet more, New Orleans is putting on a line of her own
civic steamships to South America. Up at St. Louis and Kansas City,
they are putting on civic barge lines down the rivers to ocean front.
At Los Angeles twenty million dollars have been spent in making a
harbor out of a duck pond. San Francisco and Oakland have improved
docks to the extent of twenty-four million dollars. Seattle attests
her expectation of what Panama is going to do on the Pacific by
securing the expenditure of fifteen million dollars on her harbor for
her own traffic and all the traffic she can capture from Canada; and it
may be said here that the Grand Trunk Pacific of Canada--a national
road on which the Dominion is spending hundreds of millions--has the
finest docks in Seattle. Portland has gone farther than any of the
Pacific ports. Portland is Scotch--full of descendants of the old
Scotch folk who used to serve in the Hudson's Bay Company. If there is
a chance to capture world traffic, Portland is out with both hands and
both feet after that flying opportunity. Portland has not only
improved the entrance to the Columbia to the extent of fifteen million
dollars--this was done by the Federal government--but she has had a
canal cut past bad water in the Columbia, costing nearly seven
millions, and has put on the big river a system of civic boats to bring
the wheat down from an inland empire. There is no aim to make this
river line a dividend payer. The sole object is to bring the Pacific
grain trade to Portland. Portland is already a great wheat port. Will
she get a share of Canada's traffic in bond to Liverpool? Candidly,
she hopes to. How? By having Canadian barges bring Alberta wheat down
the Columbia.
II
And now, what is Canada doing? Canada is doing absolutely nothing.
Canada is saying, with a little note of belligerency in her
voice--What's Panama to us? Either every harbor in the United States
is Panama fool-mad; either every harbor in the United States is
spending money like water on fool-schemes; or Canada needs a wakening
blast of dynamite 'neath her dreams. If Panama brings the traffic
which every harbor in the United States expects, then Canada's share of
that traffic will go through Seattle and Portland. Either Canada must
wake up or miss the chance that is coming.
Two American transcontinentals have not come wooing traffic in
Vancouver for nothing. The Canadian Pacific is not double tracking its
roadbed to the Coast for nothing. The Grand Trunk has not bought
terminals in Seattle for nothing. Yet, having jockeyed for traffic in
Vancouver, the two American roads have recently evinced a cooling.
They are playing up interests In Seattle and marking time in Vancouver.
Grand Trunk terminals in Seattle don't help Vancouver; but if Canada
doesn't want the traffic from the world commerce of the seas, then
Portland and Seattle do.
One recalls how a person feels who is wakened a bit sooner than suits
his slumbers. He passes some crusty comments and asks some criss-cross
questions. The same with Canada regarding Panama. What's Panama to
us? How in the world can a cut through a neck of swamp and hills three
thousand miles from the back of beyond, have the slightest effect on
commerce in Canada? And if it has, won't it be to hurt our railroads?
And if Panama does divert traffic from land to water, won't that divert
a share of shipping away from Montreal and St. John and Halifax?
There is no use ever arguing with a cross questioner. Mr. Hill once
said there was no use ever going into frenzies about the rights of the
public. The public would just get exactly what was coming to it. If
it worked for prosperity, it would get it. If it were not sufficiently
alert to see opportunity, it certainly would not be sufficiently alert
to grasp opportunity after you had pointed it out. Your opinion or
mine does not count with the churlish questioner. You have to hurl
facts back so hard they waken your questioner up. Here are the facts.
How can Panama turn the Pacific Coast into a front door instead of a
back door?
Almost every big steamship line of England and Germany, also a great
many of the small lines from Norway and Belgium and Holland and Spain
and Italy, have announced their intention of putting on ships to go by
way of Panama to the Orient and to Pacific Coast ports. Three of those
lines have explicitly said that they would call at Pacific ports in
Canada if there were traffic and terminals for them.
The steamers coming from the Mediterranean have announced their
intention of charging for steerage only five to ten dollars more to the
Pacific Coast ports than to the Atlantic ports. It costs the immigrant
from sixteen to twenty-five dollars to go west from Atlantic ports. It
can hardly be doubted that a great many immigrants will save fare by
booking directly to Pacific ports. Of South-of-Europe immigrants,
almost seven hundred thousand a year come to United States Atlantic
ports, of whom two-thirds remain, one-third, owing to the rigor of
winter, going back. Of those who will come to Pacific ports, they will
not be driven back by the rigor of winter. They will find a region
almost similar in climate to their own land and very similar in
agriculture. Hitherto Canada has not made a bid for South-of-Europe
immigrants, but, with Panama open, they will come whether Canada bids
for them or not. They are the quickest, cheapest and most competent
fruit farmers in the world. They are also the most turbulent of all
European immigrants. We may like or dislike them. They are coming to
Canada's shores when the war is over, coming in leaderless hordes.
The East has awakened and is moving west. The West has always been
awake and is moving east. The East is sending her teas and her silks
to the West, and the West is sending her wheat and her lumber to the
East. When these two currents meet, what? If two currents meet and do
not blend, what? Exactly what has happened before in the world,
impact, collision, struggle; and the fittest survives. This was the
real reason for the building of the Panama Canal--to give the American
navy command of her own shores on the Pacific. Now that Panama is
built it means the war fleets of the whole world on the Pacific.
Canada can no more grow into a strong nation and keep out of the world
conclave assembling on the Pacific than a boy can grow into strong
manhood and keep out of the rough and tumble of life, or a girl grow to
efficient womanhood and play the hothouse parasite all her life.
Fleets, naval stations, coaling stations, dry docks, whole cities
supported by shipyards are bound to grow on the Pacific just as surely
as the years come and go. The growth has begun already. Nothing worth
having can be left undefended and be kept. Poor old China tried that.
So did Korea. We may talk ourselves black in the face over peace and
pass up enough platitudes to pave the way to a universal brotherhood of
heaven on earth, but in the past good intentions and platitudes have
paved the way to an altogether different sort of place. In the whole
world history of the past (however much we might wish this earth a
different place) the nation most secure against war has been the nation
most prepared against war. Canada can't dodge that fact. With Panama
open come the armaments of the world to the Pacific!
How about a merchant marine for Canada? This question was important to
the maritime provinces, but the maritime provinces are well served by
British liners. On the Pacific seventy-two per cent. of the carrying
trade is already controlled by Japan. Now Canada can buy her ships in
the cheapest market, Norway or England.
She can herself build ships as cheaply as any country in the world.
She can operate her ships as cheaply as any country in the world.
She has no restrictions as to the manning of her crews and, as far as I
know, has never had a case of abuse arising from this freedom which her
laws permit.
Except for the St. Lawrence after October, there is no foreign
discrimination in the insurance of her ships.
Canada can go into the race for world-carrying trade unhampered.
She has yet another advantage. With only two or three exceptions--a
fishing bounty, one or two mail contracts--the United States has not
given and may never give government aid to ships. The Canadian
government does and does wisely! Ocean traffic may be as requisite to
prosperity as rail traffic, and you can't give land subsidies to the
sea.
III
It is when one comes to consider Panama's influence on rail traffic
that it becomes apparent the Canal may divert half the Dominion's
traffic to seaboard by Pacific routes. Why do you suppose that the big
grain companies of the Northwest want to reverse their former policy?
Formerly the biggest elevators were built east, the medium-sized at the
big gathering centers, the smaller scattered out along the line
anywhere convenient to the grower. To-day, as far as Alberta is
concerned, the biggest elevators are going up farthest west. Why? Why
do you suppose that the big traction companies of Birmingham, Alabama,
the big wire companies of Cleveland and Pittsburgh are looking over the
Canadian West for sites? One Birmingham firm has just bought the site
for a big plant in Calgary. Why do you suppose that the Canadian
Pacific Railway is building big repair shops at Coquitlam, and the
Canada Northern at Port Mann? Why are both these roads also stationing
big repair plants at inland points, one at Calgary, the other supposed
to be for Kamloops? It is not to help along the townsite lot booms in
these places. No one deprecates these town lots running out the area
of Chicago more than the railroads do. "Wild oats" hurt trade more
than they advertise the legitimate opportunities of a new country.
Take a look at them!
From Fort William to Alberta is one thousand two hundred miles, to
Calgary one thousand two hundred eighty, to Edmonton one thousand four
hundred fifty-one miles. From Alberta to Vancouver is slightly over
six hundred miles. Port William navigation is open only half the year.
The Pacific harbors are open all the year. Manitoba and Saskatchewan
wheat may be rushed forward in time for shipment before the close of
navigation. Because Alberta is farther west and must wait longest for
cars, very little of her wheat can be rushed forward in time; so
Alberta wheat must go on down to St. John, another one thousand two
hundred miles. Look at the figures--six hundred and fifty miles from
Alberta to the seaboard at Vancouver, two thousand four hundred miles
from Alberta to sea-board at St. John! In other words, while a car is
making one trip to St. John and back with wheat, it could make four
trips to Vancouver.
One year the crop so far exceeded the rolling stock of all the
railroads in America that millions of dollars were lost in depreciation
and waste waiting for shipment. This state of affairs does not apply
to wheat alone nor to Canada alone. It was the condition with every
crop in every section of America. I saw twenty-nine miles of cotton
standing along the tracks of a southern port exposed to wet weather
because the southern railroads had neither steamers nor cars to rush
shipments forward for Liverpool. In New York State and the belt of
middle west states thousands of barrels of fruit lay and rotted on the
ground because the railroads could not handle it. In an orchard near
my own I saw two thousand barrels lie and go to waste because there
were no shipping facilities cheap enough to make it worth while to send
the apples to market. Hill has said that if all the fruit orchards set
out in western states come to maturity, it will require twenty times
the rolling stock that exists today to ship the fruit out in time to
reach the market in a salable condition. The same of wheat, especially
in the West, where wheat is raised in quantities too great for any
individual granary. A few years ago, when the northwestern states had
their banner crop, piles of wheat the size of a miniature town lay
exposed to weather for weeks on Washington and Idaho and Montana
railroads because the railroads had not sufficient cars to haul it away.
The same thing almost happened in Canada one fall, though conditions
were aggravated by the coal strike.
Now, then, where does Panama come into this story? What if the
railroads did not carry the crop two thousand four hundred miles to
seaboard in order to ship forward to Liverpool? What if they carried
some of the big crops only six hundred miles west to sea-board on the
Pacific? They would have four times as many cars available to handle
the crop, or they could make just four times as many trips to Vancouver
with the same cars as to the Atlantic seaboard after the close of
navigation in the East. It is apparent now why the Pacific ports have
gone mad over the possibilities from Panama and are preparing for
enormous traffic. Of course there are features of this diversion of
traffic to new channels which the lay mind will miss and only the
traffic specialist appreciate. For instance, there is the question of
grade over the mountains. The Canadian Pacific Railroad meets this
difficulty with its long tunnel through Mount Stephen. The Grand Trunk
declares that it has the lowest mountain grade of all the
transcontinentals. The Great Northern uses electric power for its
tunnels, and Los Angeles will tell you how its new diagonal San Pedro
road up through Nevada puts it in touch with the inland empire of the
mountain states by running up parallel with the mountains and not
crossing a divide at all.
IV
Take a look at the subject from another angle! At the present rate of
homesteading in the West, within twenty years the three prairie
provinces will be producing seven to nine hundred million bushels of
wheat a year. Possibly they will not do so well as that, but suppose
they do; the three grain provinces of Canada will be producing as much
as the wheat produced in all the United States. Now, the United States
to take care of its crop has practically seven transcontinentals and a
host of allied trunk lines like the Illinois Central, the New York
Central and the Pennsylvania; but when a big crop comes, the United
States roads are paralyzed from a shortage of cars. Canada has only
three big transcontinentals and no big trunk lines to take care of a
crop that may be as large as the whole United States crop. Panama
promises, not a menace, but the one possible avenue of relief to the
railroads.
Of course eastern cities may fight a diversion of traffic to the
seaboard of the West, but they can not stop it. Portland is already
one of the big grain shippers and will bid for a share of Canada's
west-bound grain, if Vancouver and Prince Rupert do not prepare for the
new conditions.
Not only terminals but elevators must be prepared on the Pacific.
Terminals mean more than railroad company tracks. They mean city-owned
trackage, so that the tramp steamer seeking cargo at cheap rates shall
have every inducement and facility for getting cargo. They mean free
sites for manufacturers, not sky-rocket boom prices that keep new
industries out of a city. Elevators and terminals have been announced
time and again for Vancouver, but up to the present the announcements
have not materialized. Regular grain steamers must be put on, steamers
good for cargo of three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand
bushels, as on the lakes, and with devices for such swift handling as
have made Montreal one of the best grain ports in the world, in spite
of high insurance rates and half-season. As long as there are no
elevators at Vancouver, grain must be sacked. Sacking costs from five
to six cents extra a bushel, and more extra in handling. The remedy
for this is for the Pacific ports to build elevators; and even when
they haven't elevators, the saving in rates over and above the extra
sacking has already been from eight to fourteen cents a bushel on grain
billed for Liverpool via the one hundred ninety miles of rail over
Tehuantepec, or via the Panama railroad, where bulk need not be broken
twice.
An objection is that in the humid Pacific Coast winter climate there is
danger of grain heating. This has been overcome at Portland, and
against this must be set the incalculable advantage that Pacific Coast
ports are open all the year round. One year, of 65,000,000 bushels of
grain from the prairie provinces that passed over the Great Lakes
forty-three per cent. went out by way of Buffalo to American ports.
Why? Because the glut was so great, the facilities so inadequate for
the enormous crop, the insurance so high, that the grain could not be
rushed seaward fast enough before close of navigation. Through
Vancouver during this very period there passed only 750,000 bushels of
wheat. Why not more? No facilities.
"We could have shipped millions of bushels of wheat to Liverpool by way
of Vancouver," said the head of one of the largest grain companies in
Calgary, "but there were simply no facilities to take care of it. On
16,000 bushels, which we shipped by way of Vancouver and Tehuantepec,
we saved eight cents a bushel, as against Atlantic rates. You know how
much handling the Tehuantepec route requires. Well, you can figure
what we should save the farmer when Panama opens and the cargo never
breaks bulk to Liverpool from our shore."
Rates, not heating nor sacking, are the real cloud in the Canadian mind
regarding Panama; and if Canada continues to stand twiddling her hands
over rates when she should be hustling preparations, the inevitable
will happen--Portland, which sends millions of bushels of her own wheat
to Liverpool, is ready to take care of Canada's traffic; so is Seattle.
There is nothing these cities hope more than that Canada will continue
to shun the question of rates.
V
Let us look at this question of rates!
Ordinarily the rate on wheat from Chicago to New York is about ten to
twelve cents a bushel; from New York to Liverpool about three to seven
cents. That is, for one thousand miles (roughly) the rate by rail is
ten cents. For three thousand miles the rate by water is three cents.
That is, one cent buys the shipper one hundred miles by rail. One cent
buys him one thousand miles by water. Get out a chart and figure out
for yourself what the saving means on wheat via Panama to Liverpool on
a crop--we'll say--of one hundred million bushels, Alberta's future
share alone, leaving Saskatchewan and Manitoba crops to continue going
to Liverpool by Fort William and Montreal. You can figure the distance
to Liverpool via Panama twice or even three times as far as via
Atlantic ports, long as water rates are to rail, as one to ten, the
saving on a one-hundred-million-bushel crop for a single year is enough
to buy terminals, build elevators and run civic ships as Boston and New
Orleans and St. Louis and Kansas City and Portland are doing. Via
Tehuantepec the saving was eight cents a bushel. At that rate your
saving in a year would be eight million dollars for Alberta wheat
alone, not counting dairy products, which are bound to become larger
each year, and coal, which will yet bring the same wealth to Alberta as
to Pennsylvania, and lumber, on which the saving is as one to four.
Please note one point! It is a point usually ignored in all
comparisons of water and rail rates. While sea and lake are the
cheapest method of transportation in the world, canals (unless some
other nation builds them as the United States built Panama) are not so
cheap as sea and lake. When you add to the cost of canals, the
interest on cost, the maintenance, and charge that up against
traffic--for it doesn't matter, though the government does maintain
canals; you pay the bill in the end--canal rates come higher than rail
rates. But in Canada's use of Panama, Canada is not paying for the
building of the canal; and the Lord pays the upkeep of the canal of the
sea.
Take this question of Vancouver rates, from which Canada is standing
back so inertly! Take the latest rates issued! These are subject to
change and correction, but that does not affect final conclusions. It
costs Manitoba and Saskatchewan from twelve to nineteen cents a hundred
weight to send grain to Fort William, then during open navigation from
four to five cents to reach seaboard at Montreal. It costs Alberta,
being farther west, twenty-five cents to reach Fort William; but, as a
matter of fact, her wheat can seldom reach Fort William before the
close of navigation; so she must pay twenty-five cents more to send her
wheat on down to St. John, and five to six cents from St. John to
Liverpool, or in all fifty-five cents. The Alberta rate is twenty-two
cents plus a fraction to Vancouver, or forty-five cents to Liverpool.
Now, Alberta wants to know: Why is she charged twenty-two and a
fraction cents for six hundred fifty miles west, and only twenty-five
cents for one thousand two hundred miles east?
There is the nub and the rub and the hub of the whole thing, and the
discrimination bears just as vitally on fruit and dairy products and
lumber and coal as on wheat. It is a question that has to be settled
in Canada within the next few years, or her west-bound traffic will
build up Portland and Seattle instead of Vancouver and Prince Rupert.
The whole problem of the effect of Panama is so new in Canada that data
do not exist to make comparisons; but details have been carefully
gathered by American ports, and the cases are a close enough parallel
to illustrate what Panama means in the world of traffic to-day.
Freight on a car of Washington lumber to New York is from three hundred
ninety-five to four hundred eleven dollars; by water, the freight is
from one hundred to one hundred and seventy-five dollars. To bring a
car of Washington fir diagonally across the continent to Norfolk costs
eighty-five cents a hundred weight. To bring it round by Panama costs
twenty cents, or to ship the very same cargo from Norfolk to
England--which many southern dealers are now doing--costs twelve to
fifteen cents, including the handling at both ends. Dry goods from New
York to Texas by water cost eighty-nine cents; by rail, one dollar and
eighty-two cents. Oranges by rail from the Pacific to the Atlantic
cost twenty-three dollars a ton; by water before the canal opened,
breaking bulk twice, ten dollars, and through the canal, when bulk is
not broken, will cost only five to eight dollars. On oranges alone
California will save twenty million dollars a year shipping via Panama.
The Balfour-Guthrie firm of Antwerp can ship a ton of groceries from
Europe to Los Angeles round the Horn for the same amount the Southern
Pacific ships that ton from Los Angeles to San Francisco--namely, six
dollars plus. The rail rate on salt in Washington is eight dollars
seventy cents for eighty-eight miles; the river rate one dollar fifty
cents. I could give instances in the South where cotton by rail costs
two dollars a bale; by water, twenty-five cents.
If Panama works this great reduction, this revolution, in freights,
will that not hurt the railroads? Ask the railroads whether they make
their profit on the long or the short haul. Ask them whether high
rates and sparse population or dense population and low rates pay the
better dividends! Compare New York Central traffic receipts and
Southern Pacific on the average per mile! Now ships that are to use
Panama plan pouring twenty million people into the Pacific Coast in
twenty years.
Will Canada share the coming tide of benefits? Only two things can
prevent her: first, lack of preparation--too much "hot air" and not
enough hustle; too much after-dinner aviating in the empyrean and not
enough muddy mess out on the harbor dredge with "sand hogs" and "shovel
stiffs"; then, second, lack of adequate labor to prepare. After-dinner
speeches don't make the dirt fly. Canada wants fewer platitudes and a
great deal more of good old-fashioned hard hoeing.
CHAPTER XI
TO EUROPE BY HUDSON BAY
I
It must have become apparent to the most casual observer that
transportation has been to Canada more than a system of exploitation by
capital. Transportation has been to Canada an integral part of her
very national life--which, perhaps, explains how with the exception of
extravagance incident to a period of great prosperity her railroad
systems have been founded on sound finance from bed-rock up. In spite
of huge land grants--in all fifty-five million acres--and in the case
of one railroad wild stock fluctuations from forty-eight to three
hundred dollars--it is a question if a dollar of public money has ever
been diverted from roadbed to promoters' pockets. Certainly, in the
case of the strongest road financially in Canada, no director of the
road has ever juggled with underground wires to unload worthless
securities on widows and orphans. Railroad stocks have never been made
the football of speculators. Charters in the old days were juggled
through legislatures with land grants of eight and twelve thousand
acres per mile; but at that time these acres were worthless; and the
system of land grants has for the last ten years been discontinued.
Because railroads are a necessary part of Canada's national
development, state aid of late has taken the form of loans, cash grants
and guarantee of bonds by provincial and federal governments. This has
given Canada's Railway Commission a whip handle over rates and
management, which perhaps explains why railroads in Canada have never
been regarded as lawful game by the financial powers that prey.
Including municipal, provincial and federal grants, stocks and bonds,
Canada has spent on her railroads a billion and a half. Including
capital cost and maintenance, Canada has spent on her canals
$138,000,000. On steamship subsidies, Canada's yearly grants have
gradually risen from a few hundred thousands to as high as two millions
in some years. Nor does this cover all the national expenditure on
transportation; for besides the thirty-eight millions spent on dredging
and improving navigation on the St. Lawrence, twelve millions have been
appropriated for improving Halifax Harbor; and only recently federal
guarantee for bonds to the extent of forty-three millions was accorded
one transcontinental. This road was so heavily guaranteed by
provincial governments that if it had failed it would have involved
four western provinces. Its plight arose from two causes--the
extravagant cost of labor and material in an inflated era, and the
depression in the world money markets curtailing all extension.
Workmen on this road were paid three to seventeen dollars a day, who
would have received a dollar and a half to four dollars ten years ago.
In fact, the owners of the road themselves received those wages thirty
years ago. Sections cost one hundred thousand dollars a mile which
would formerly have been built for thirty thousand; and prairie grading
formerly estimated at six to eight thousand dollars a mile jumped to
twenty and thirty thousand dollars. In coming to the aid of the Canada
Northern, the government did no more than Sir John Macdonald's
government did for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1885, and the
prosperity of the Canadian Pacific Railroad has amply justified that
aid.
Canada's transportation system has been a national policy from the
first. Her first transcontinental she built to unify and bind
confederation. Her second two transcontinentals she launched to carry
commerce east and west, because the United States had built a tariff
wall which prevented Canada moving her commerce north and south. Her
canal system to cut the distance from the Great Lakes to the seaboard
and to overcome the rapids at "the Soo," at Niagara and on the St.
Lawrence--has simply resolved itself into an effort to move seaboard
inland, on the principle that the farther inland the port the shorter
the land haul and the lower the traffic toll. Owing to the enormous
increase in the cargo capacity of lake freighters in recent years,
grain ships reach Buffalo carrying three hundred thousand bushels of
western wheat, and Canada's Welland Canal has worked at a handicap.
Until the Canal is widened, the big cargo carriers can not pass through
it, and the necessity to break bulk here is one explanation of more
than half Canada's western traffic going to seaboard by way of Buffalo
instead of Montreal.
For years the proposal has been under consideration to connect the
Great Lakes with the St. Lawrence by way of a canal from Georgian Bay
through Ottawa River. This would be a colossal undertaking; for the
region up Mattawa River toward Georgian Bay is of iron rock, and to
build a canal wide enough for the big cargo carriers would out-distance
anything in the way of canal construction in the world. Both parties
in Canada have endorsed what is known as the Georgian Bay Ship Canal;
and estimates place the cost at one hundred and twenty-five millions;
but traffic men of the Lakes declare if the big cargo carriers are to
have cheap insurance on this route, the canal will have to be wide
enough to guarantee safe passage; and the cost would be twice this
estimate.
On no section of her national transportation has Canada expended more
thought and effort than improving navigation on the St. Lawrence.
This, in its way, has been as difficult a problem for a people of seven
millions as the construction of Panama for a people of ninety millions.
Consider the geographical position of the St. Lawrence route! It
penetrates the continent from eight hundred to nine hundred sixty
miles. Montreal, the head of navigation on the St. Lawrence, is the
farthest inland harbor of America with the exception of two
ports--Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico and Port Nelson on Hudson Bay.
Galveston is seven hundred miles from the wheat fields of Kansas. Port
Nelson is four hundred miles from the wheat fields of Manitoba.
Montreal is--roughly--a thousand miles from the head of the Lakes, one
thousand five hundred miles from the wheat fields of Manitoba, two
thousand two hundred miles from the wheat fields of Alberta.
Montreal's great advantage is in being situated so far inland. Her
disadvantages are from the nature of the St. Lawrence. First, the port
is closed by ice from November to April. Second, the St. Lawrence is
the drainage bed of inland oceans--the Great Lakes. Third, it passes
into the Atlantic at one of the most difficult sections of the coast.
South of Newfoundland are the fogs of the Grand Banks. North of
Newfoundland the tidal current beats upon an iron coast in storm and
fog. To save detour, St. Lawrence vessels, of course, follow the route
north of Newfoundland through the Straits of Belle Isle.
When Canada began dredging the St. Lawrence in 1850, the channel
averaged a depth of ten feet. By 1888, the channel averaged
twenty-seven and one-half feet at low water. To-day a depth of thirty
to thirty-one feet has been attained. At its narrowest points the St.
Lawrence has a steamship channel four hundred and fifty feet wide and
thirty feet deep from side to side. In the days when high insurance
rates were established against the St. Lawrence route, there was
practically not a lighthouse nor channel buoy from Tadousac to the
Straits of Belle Isle. To-day between Montreal and Quebec are
ninety-nine lighted buoys, one hundred and ninety-five can buoys;
between Quebec and the Straits, three light ships, eighty gas buoys,
one whistling buoy, seventy-five can buoys, four submarine bell ships,
and a line of lighthouses. Telegraph lines extend to the outer side of
Belle Isle, and hydrographic survey has charted every foot of the
river. In spite of these improvements, insurance rates are four to six
per cent. for lines to Canada, where they are one and one-half to two
and one-half to American ports.
II
What with three transcontinentals, a complete canal system from
seaboard to the Great Lakes and an outlet for western traffic through
Panama, one would think that Canada had made ample provision for
transportation; but she has only begun. If she is to be the shortest
route to the Orient, she must keep traffic in Canadian channels and not
divide it with Panama and Suez. If she is to feed the British Empire,
she must establish the shortest route from her wheat fields to the
United Kingdom; and if she is to overcome the disadvantage of harbors
open only half the year, she must secure to herself some other
advantage--such as access to the harbor having the shortest land haul
and therefore the lowest freight rates in America. There is another
consideration. If when Canada is raising less than three hundred
million bushels of wheat her transcontinentals are glutted with traffic
and her harbors gorged, what will happen when her wheat fields raise
eight hundred million bushels of wheat? So Canada has cast about for a
shorter route to Europe by Hudson Bay, and both parties in Dominion
politics have backed the project.
At a time when the food supply of Great Britain must be drawn almost
solely from her colonial possessions and the United States and
Argentina, when her very national existence depends on the sea lanes to
that food supply being kept open--a route which shortens the distance
to that food supply by from one thousand five hundred to three thousand
miles becomes doubly interesting.
Take a mental look at the contour of North America! All the big export
harbors of the Atlantic Coast are situated at the broadest bulge of the
continent--Halifax, St. John, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore
are all where the distance across the continent from the grain fields
is widest. That means a long land haul.
Take another look at the map--this time at a revolving globe! Any
schoolboy knows that a circle round a top is shorter at the ends than
around its middle. The same of the earth. East and west distances are
shorter the nearer you are to the Pole, the farther you are from the
Equator.
To England from Eastern Asia by Suez is fourteen to eighteen thousand
miles. To England from Asia by San Francisco is eleven thousand miles,
by Seattle ten thousand miles, by Prince Rupert and Hudson Bay seven to
eight thousand miles--representing a saving by the northern route of
almost half round the world.
Another point--take a compass! Stick the needle on Hudson Bay and
swing the leg down round New York and up through the wheat plains of
the Northwest. Draw lines to the center of your circle--to your
amazement, you find the lines from the wheat plains to New York are
twice and thrice as long as the lines from the wheat plains to Hudson
Bay. In other words, Mr. Hill's wheat empire is one thousand miles
nearer tidewater to Hudson Bay than to New York. The three prairie
provinces of Northwestern Canada are from four hundred (for Manitoba)
to eight hundred miles (for Alberta) distant from ocean front on Hudson
Bay. They are from one thousand two hundred to two thousand four
hundred miles distant from tidewater at Montreal and New York and
Philadelphia.
That is--if land rates were the same as water rates--the Hudson Bay
route to Europe would cut rates to England from the Orient by half, and
from the wheat plains by the difference between one thousand two
hundred miles and four hundred, and two thousand four hundred miles and
eight hundred. But land rates are not water rates. From Alberta to
the Great Lakes is roughly one thousand two hundred miles. From the
Great Lakes to tidewater is roughly another one thousand two hundred
miles--either by way of Chicago-Buffalo, or Lake Superior-Montreal.
For the one thousand two hundred miles from Alberta to the Great Lakes,
grain shippers at time of writing pay a rate of twenty-two to
twenty-five cents a bushel. For the one thousand two hundred miles
from the head of the Lakes to Buffalo, the rate is three cents, from
the head of the Lakes to Montreal five to six cents. In other words,
the rate by land is just five to eight times higher than the rate by
water.
To the argument--shorter distances by half by the northern route--is
added the argument cheaper rates as eight to one.
That is why for twenty years Canada has gone sheer mad over a Hudson
Bay route to Europe. For obvious reasons the ports in Eastern Canada
have fought the idea and ridiculed the whole project as "an iron tonic
from rusting rails" for the cows. That has not stopped the West.
Grading is under way for the railroad to Hudson Bay from the grain
plains. The Canadian government is the backer and the builder.
Construction engines, dredges, steamers now whistle over the silences
of the northern inland sea; and Port Nelson, which for three centuries
has been the great fur entrepôt of the wintry wastes, now echoes to
pick and hammer and blowing locomotive intent on the construction of
what is known as the Hudson Bay Railroad. Should the war last for
years as wars of old, and Port Nelson become a great grain port as for
three centuries it has been the greatest fur port of the world, the
navies of Europe may yet thunder at one another along Hudson Bay's
shallow shores, as French and English fought there all through the
seventeenth century.
III
The Hudson Bay railroad hung in mid-air for almost a quarter century.
It was regarded by the East as one of the West's mad impossible "boom"
projects. Hadn't Canada, a country of seven million population, a
railroad system of 29,000 miles? Hadn't the Dominion spent
$138,000,000 on canals heading traffic to the St. Lawrence? Why divert
half that traffic north to Hudson Bay? Surely three great
transcontinental systems for a country with a population not larger
than New York State were enough. So argued the East, and a great many
conservative people in the West. Better make haste slowly, especially
as it was becoming more and more evident that Canada would have to come
to the aid of two of the transcontinentals or see them go bankrupt.
Then something happened. In fact, two or three things happened.
The population, which had remained almost stationary for half a
century, jumped two million in less than ten years. Immigrants began
pouring in at the rate of four hundred thousand a year--they were
coming literally faster than the railroads could carry them.
It sometimes takes an outsider's view of us to make us realize
ourselves. Do you realize--they asked--that your three grain provinces
alone are three times the area of the German Empire? Here is a grain
field as long as from Petrograd to Paris and of unknown width north and
south. You have 480,000,000 acres of wheat lands. (The United States
plants only 50,000,000 acres a year to wheat.) You are cultivating
only 16,000,000 acres. If there is a grain blockade now, what will
there be when you cultivate 100,000,000 acres? Yes--we know--you may
send Alberta grain west by Panama to Liverpool; but even with half
going by Panama, can the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence route take care of
the rest? We hear about a constant shortage of cars; of elevators
bulging with grain every September; of miles of lake cargo carriers
waiting to get in and out of their berths every October before
navigation closes. Do you know--they asked--that you have five times
more traffic--seventy-two million tons--going through your canals than
is expected for Panama? Do you know your rail traffic has jumped from
36,000,000 tons in 1900 to 90,000,000 tons in 1912? If you sent
200,000,000 bushels of wheat abroad in 1912 and 158,000,000 bushels in
1914--a poor year--what will you send in 1920 with twice as much land
under wheat?
Two other comparatively unpondered facts were the hammers that drove
the argument for a Hudson Bay route home and forced the Canadian
government, irrespective of party, to back the project. The two facts
were these--of Canada's agricultural exports eighty per cent. went to
Great Britain. In spite of Canada spending a billion on her
transportation system, look at the fact well--it is a poser--only from
thirty-two to forty per cent. of her export trade went out by Canadian
routing. Why was that? The Department of Railroads and Canals in its
annual report explains elaborately that sixty per cent. of Western
Canadian grain went out by the Duluth-Buffalo route instead of Ft.
William-Montreal because the lake rate of the former was cheaper as
three to six cents a bushel; but there is nothing in this argument
because Montreal is tidewater. Buffalo is not. To the cheaper Buffalo
rate you must add five cents to New York, proving the American routing
really two cents a bushel higher. Yet sixty per cent. of Western
Canadian wheat went out by the costlier routing. Why? For the same
reason that if you jam a bag too full it bursts. Because the Canadian
trans-continentals simply could not take care of the traffic blockading
tracks and ports and elevators.
So in spite of the funny man's jokes about a Hudson Bay route being
"iron tonic for the cows," Canada launched on another all-red,
to-the-sea railroad project.
IV
What of the road itself?
I camped in the region a few years ago when the venture was still in
air. The wheat plains terminate just west of Lake Winnipeg in an
interminable swamp region that has been the home of small furs from the
beginning of time. Saskatchewan River here literally widens to seventy
miles of swamp, where you can barely find foot room dry soled except in
winter, when the marsh turns to iron ice twelve feet thick. Through
this swamp country runs a ridge of rock northeasterly to Hudson Bay.
Down this ridge run Nelson and Hayes and Churchill Rivers in a
succession of rapids and lakes, wild rough barren country, where you
can paddle in summer or course by dog-train in winter for four hundred
miles without sight of arable land or human dwelling. Along this ridge
the railroad runs from the wheat plains. It is a route destined for
the present to be barren of local traffic, but that also is true of the
stretches along Lake Superior, or across the desert of the Southwest.
Back from the ridge coal deposits have been found, and traces of
copper, the mines of which have not yet been located. I myself saw
chunks of pure copper from the Churchill River region the size of one's
hand, but the veins from which the Indians brought it have not yet been
located. In time these great deposits may be worked as oil and coal
and gold and silver have been taken from the American Desert, but for
the near future the Hudson Bay Railroad will carry little traffic but
that received at its terminals.
The western terminal connecting with the wheat railroads is the Pas, an
old, very old fur post of the French wood-runner days, on the
Saskatchewan west of Lake Winnipeg. Here the railroad touches the
Canada Northern and will doubtless later connect with the Canadian
Pacific Railroad and Grand Trunk. To any one who knows the region well
it seems almost a pity that the western terminus could not have been
Grand Rapids just northwest of Lake Winnipeg. Here is a fine wooded
high park country with the unlimited water power of nine miles of a
continental river walled into a canyon half a mile wide. But the
country west of Lake Winnipeg is as yet untouched by a railroad, though
one can hardly conceive of a city not some day springing up at this the
head of Manitoba navigation. Eastward from the Pas to Hudson Bay it is
four hundred miles plus. Construction presents no great difficulties
except bridging, and that can hardly be compared to the difficulties of
canyons in the Rockies and drouth in the desert.
For years there was sharp contest whether the terminus on the Bay
should be Nelson or Churchill. Churchill is one of the best harbors in
the world, land locked, rock protected and fathomless; and Nelson is
probably one of the worst--shallow, with sand bars caused by the
confluence of the two great rivers emptying here, exposed to open sea.
But the balance of favor on the Bay is how long can navigation be kept
open. Navigation is open a month earlier and a month later at Nelson
than at Churchill; so the Dominion dredges have gone to work to make
Nelson a fit harbor.
How long is navigation open on the Bay? The Dominion government has
sent three expeditions to ascertain this, though data might have been
obtained from the Archives of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company covering the
record of over two hundred years. Both the Archives and the official
expeditions record the same--navigation opens between the middle of May
and the first of June, and closes about the end of October. Seasons
have been known when navigation remained open till New Year's, but this
was unusual. So as far as the opening and closing of navigation is
considered, the Hudson Bay route is not far different from the Great
Lakes.
Hudson Bay itself is in area about the size of the Mediterranean.
Because it is so far north the impression prevails that it is afloat
with ice. This is a false impression. Hudson Bay lies in the same
latitude as the North Sea and the Baltic, which are freighted with
Russian and German commerce, but the climate, of course, is colder.
The ice, which has given the great inland sea its ill repute, comes
from the Pole and goes out through the Straits, seldom coming down the
Bay in the season of navigation.
The Straits are the real crux of the Hudson Bay route to Europe, and
there is no narrow neck of land to cut a way of escape through to open
sea as at Kiel and Cape Cod. The Straits have been navigated by
fur-traders since 1670, but the fur-traders could take a week or a
month to the four hundred and fifty miles of Straits. They could
afford the time to float back and forward with the ice packs for six
weeks, and as many as seven vessels have been wrecked in ten years. To
this tale of wreckage in the Straits, friends of the Hudson Bay route
answer as follows:
First, the fur-traders' vessels were little discarded admiralty vessels
of small tonnage and rickety construction. Give us ice jammers such as
the Russians use on the Baltic, built narrow and high of oak, not
steel, to ride and crush down through the ice; and we can take care of
high insurance rates. Second, the Straits are still an utterly
uncharted sea four hundred and fifty miles long and from seventy to one
hundred and fifty wide. This is not so long as the passage up the St.
Lawrence. In such an inland sea as these Straits there must exist safe
as well as unsafe channels, shelters, smooth reaches. Let us get the
Straits charted and marked with buoys, with telegraph and cable points,
and we shall navigate these four hundred and fifty miles. The
questions of lighthouses need not bother the Straits, for the season of
navigation is also the season of long daylight.
V
Three advantages must be put on the credit side of the Hudson Bay route:
Distances to tidewater cut by half.
Distances to Europe cut by a third.
Rates reduced on grain as eight to one.
Against these advantages must be placed three handicaps:
The danger of an uncharted sea in the Straits.
High insurance.
Necessity for enormous elevator and storage room.
Mr. Hill's wheat country may begin wheat cutting in July. The Canadian
Northwest is lucky if it cuts before the eighth of August. Consider
the area of the big wheat farms! The whole of August is taken up with
cutting and threshing. It is September or October, before the wheat is
hauled to market, and it is November before it reaches seaboard. In
November navigation on the Bay closes, and one hundred, perhaps two
hundred million bushels of wheat must be held by the farmers, or the
elevators, till May. This means interest on money out of the farmer's
pocket for six months, or storage charges. On the other hand, there
will be no danger of stored wheat "heating" on the Bay. The cold there
is of too sharp a type, but this is a danger in many of the
all-the-year-round open harbors.
For twenty years the Hudson Bay railroad has been a project up in air.
It is now a project on graded roadbed. Before these words are in print
Hudson Bay Railroad will be on wheels and tracks. Then the real
difficulty of the Straits will be faced, and probably--as Russia has
overcome the difficulties of the Baltic--so will the Canadian Northwest
overcome the difficulties of this hyperborean sea.
CHAPTER XII
SOME INDUSTRIAL PROBLEMS
I
The contest between capital and labor in Canada has never become that
armed camp divided by a chasm of hatred known in other lands. This for
two reasons: First, the labor of yesterday is the capital of to-day,
and the labor of to-day is the capital of to-morrow. Second, from the
very nature of Canada's greatest wealth--agricultural lands--the
substantial proportion of the population consists of land owners,
vested righters, respecters of property interests because they
themselves are property holders. The city dweller in Canada has been
from the very nature of things the anachronism, the anomaly, the
parasite, the extraneous outgrowth on the main body of production.
To take the first reason why capital and labor has not been divided in
hostile camps in Canada, because the labor of yesterday is the capital
of to-day--I am not dealing with speculative arguments and opinions. I
am trying to set down facts. The owner of the largest fortune west of
the Rocky Mountains in Canada began life with a pick and shovel. The
owner of the richest timber limits in British Columbia began at a
dollar and twenty-five cents a day piling slabs. The wealthiest meat
packer east of the Rocky Mountains was "bucking" and "breaking"
bronchoes thirty years ago at twenty-five dollars a month. The packer
who comes next to him in wealth began life in Pt. Douglas, Winnipeg,
loading frozen hogs. The richest newspaper man in Canada began life so
poor that he and his father hauled the first editions of their paper to
customers on a hand sled. The four men who are to-day the greatest
powers in the railroad world of the Dominion began life, one as a stone
mason, another as a lumber-jack, a third as a store keeper, a fourth as
a telegraph operator. I do not think I am wrong in saying that the
richest wholesaler in Canada reached the scene of his present
activities with his entire earthly possessions in a pocket handkerchief
and a tin lunch pail. Of two of the most powerful men who ever came
out of the maritime provinces, one swept a village store for his living
at a dollar and fifty cents a week; another reached St. John, New
Brunswick, from his home in the backwoods, dressed in a home-made suit,
which his mother had spun and carded from their own wool. The fact
that the door of opportunity is open to the talented tends to prevent
the opening of a chasm of hatred between capital and labor, though it
must be admitted that the warfare of capital and labor in the States
was developing in the era when Rockefeller and Carnegie were lifting
themselves from penury to the heights of financial power.
Infinitely more important is the second reason. For a long time at
least the stanchest, strongest and stablest part of Canada's people
must be rooted to the soil. Up to the present half her population has
been rural, and less than three per cent. absorbed by the factory, the
railway, the labor union. Of her population of 7,800,000, only 176,000
workers belong to labor organizations, and ninety per cent. of these
have never been on strike. These figures alone explain why class
hatred has never widened into a chasm dividing society in Canada.
Why Big Business has never dominated government in Canada will be dealt
with in a later chapter, but if Big Business can not violate law with
impunity at one end of the social scale, it may be safely said that
anarchy will never violate law at the other end of the scale.
At the same time there are symptoms appearing in the industrial
conditions of Canada as gravely dangerous as anything in her
immigration problems. These need only be stated to be apparent. Where
wages have increased only ten per cent. in a decade, the cost of living
has increased fifty-one per cent.--according to an official commission
appointed by the Ottawa government to report. Though Canada is an
agricultural country, in food products alone, she pays ten million
dollars duty yearly. In one farming province ten million dollars'
worth of food is yearly imported. Why is this? Why is Canada not
producing all the food she consumes? Because in certain sections only
one settler goes out to the farm for four that live in the town.
In the West, if you add up the population of all the cities, you will
find that one-fourth as many people live in the cities as in the
country. In one province you will find that out of half a million
population, three hundred thousand are living in cities and towns.
This is the province that imports such quantities of food. It is also
the province that has more labor trouble than all the other sections of
the Dominion put together. Demagogues harangue the city squares for
"the right to work," "the right to live;" and mill owners, farmers,
ranchers, railway builders go bankrupt for lack of men to work. It is
the province where the highest wages in the world are paid for every
form of labor. It is also the province where the greatest number of
people are idle, and neither you nor I nor anybody else, can convince
the idle stone mason who demands eight dollars a day that he keeps
himself idle by not accepting half that figure. He is not dealing with
"the robber baron" capitalistic class. He is dealing with the humble
householder who wants to build but can not afford workmen at eight
dollars to five dollars a day, when he could afford workmen at four
dollars to a dollar and fifty cents a day.
In 1800 only four per cent. of the United States population was urban,
and ninety-six per cent. was rural. By 1910 only fifty-three per cent.
of the population was rural. Similarly of France and Great Britain.
Sixty-five per cent. of France's population is rural, and France is
prosperous, and her people are the thriftiest and most saving in the
world. They with their tiny savings are the world's bankers. In the
United Kingdom, the rural population has decreased from twenty-eight
per cent. to twenty-three per cent. of the total population. How about
Canada? In 1891 thirty-two per cent. of Canada's people lived in towns
and cities. By 1901 thirty-eight per cent. were town dwellers. By
1914 the proportion in towns and cities is almost fifty per cent.
The entire movement of population from country to city is reflected in
the astounding growth of the cities. In 1800 Montreal had a population
of seven thousand; in 1850, sixty thousand; by 1914, almost half a
million. Similarly of Toronto, of Winnipeg, of Vancouver. From
nothing in 1800, these cities have grown to metropolitan centers of
three hundred thousand, and their growth is the subject of fevered
civic pride. It ought to be cause of gravest alarm. In the history of
the world, when men began to hive in a crowded cave life, those nations
began to decline. The results are always the same--an extortionate
rise in the cost of food, the long bread line, charity where there
ought to be labor and thrift, food riots, terrible tragic contrasts of
the very rich and the very poor, all the vices that go with crowded
housing. When charity workers investigated in Toronto and Montreal and
Winnipeg, they found foreigners living forty-three in five rooms,
twenty-four and fifteen and ten in one. Wherever such proportions
exist as to rural and urban population, ground rentals and values
ascend in price like overheated mercury. Men begin to build
perpendicularly instead of latitudinally. The cave life of the
skyscraper takes the place of the trim home garden, and so greed of
gain--interest on extortionate real estate values--takes its toll of
human life and virtue, clean living and clean thinking. In one section
of Canada during ten years, where there had been an increase of 574,878
in the country population, there was an increase of 1,258,645 in the
city population. Between 1901 and 1911, where 39,951 newcomers settled
in the country districts of Quebec, 313,863 settled in the cities. For
one who chose life in the open, eight chose the tenement and the
sweatshop. In 1901 Canada had 3,349,516 people living in the country,
and 2,021,799 living in the cities. By 1911 there were 3,924,394
living in the country, and 3,280,440 living in the cities.
All this signifies but one thing to Canada--a swift transition from
agricultural status to industrial life; and whether such an artificial
transition bodes good or ill for a land whose greatest wealth lies in
forest and mine and farm remains to be seen. For the time it has
resulted in a cost of living almost prohibitive to the very poor. The
sweatshop, the tenement, the Ghetto, the cave life hovel of Europe have
been reproduced in the crowded foreign quarters of Canadian cities. It
means more than physical deterioration and moral contamination and
degeneration of national stamina. It means if Canada is to become a
great manufacturing country, feeding the human into the hopper of the
machine that dividends may pour out, then she, the youngest of the
nations, must compete against the oldest and the strongest--Germany,
England, France, the United States; but if she is to be a great
agricultural country, then she has few peers in the whole world.
Neither need she have any fear. The nations of the world must come to
her, as they went down to Egypt, for bread. The man on his own land,
be his work good or ill owns his own labor and takes profit or loss
from it and can blame no one but himself for that profit or loss. With
the renting out of a man's labor to some other man for that other man's
profit or loss come all the discontent and class strife of industrial
warfare. Of industrial strife, of labor riots, of syndicalism, of
social revolution, of the few plundering the many, and the many
threatening reprisal in the form of legislation for the many to plunder
the few--of this dog-eat-dog, internecine industrial strife--Canada has
hitherto known next to nothing; but she is at the parting of the ways.
The day that a preponderance of her population becomes urban instead of
rural, that day a preponderance of her population must ask leave to
live from some other man--must ask leave to work for some other man,
must ask leave to put the collar of the industrial serf on the neck as
the sign of labor owned by some other man. That day the preponderance
of Canada's population will cease owning their own vested rights and
will begin attacking the vested rights of other men. That day
plutocracy will begin plundering democracy, and the unfit will begin
plundering the fit, and the many will demand the same rewards as the
few, not by winning those rewards and rising to the plane of the few,
but by expropriating those rewards and pulling the few down to the
level of the many. To me it means the sickling over a robust
nationhood with the yellowing hue of a dollar democracy, the yellowing
hue of gnashing social jealousy, the yellowing hue of moral putridity
and decadence and rot. Hitherto every man has stood on his own legs in
Canada. There has been no weak-kneed, puling greedy mob bellowing for
pap from the breasts of a state treasury--demanding the rewards of
industry and thrift which they have been too weak and shiftless and
useless to earn. But Canada is at the parting of the ways. The day
more men live in the cities demanding food than live on the soil
producing it--which God forfend--that day Canada goes down in the
welter of industrial war and social upheaval.
Hitherto no statesman has arisen in Canada who remotely sensed the
impending evil, much less made an effort to avert the doom that has
come like a cloud above the well-being of every modern country. The
man who makes it a national policy in Canada to attract the settler to
the soil rather than to the city hovel will in the future annals of
this great nation be rated above a Napoleon or a Bismarck.[1] This to
me is the crux of the very greatest and most acute problem confronting
the Dominion's future destiny.
II
In a country where organized labor numbers only 176,000 out of
7,800,000, labor problems can hardly be set down as acute. They do not
split society asunder as they do elsewhere. I am glad of it. I am
glad that in Canada up to the present labor is only capital in the
inchoate. I should be sorry if the day ever came when labor was the
serf, and capital the robber baron, as--let us frankly acknowledge--it
is elsewhere.
In this connection three points should be emphasized. Whether they
should be praised or blamed I do not know; but the points are these:
The Senate in Canada being appointed for life has acted as a breakwater
of adamant and reinforced concrete against all labor or capital
legislation that has arisen from the passions of the moment. More than
once when labor or capital, holding the whip handle in the Commons,
would have forced through hasty legislation as to compensation, as to
liability, as to non-liability--the leaders in the Commons have said
frankly in caucus to the Senate: We are dependent on the vote for our
places here. You are not. We are letting this fool bill through, but
we are letting it through because we know you will kill it. Kill it!
In the next place, "the twilight zone" between federal and provincial
power in matters of labor has proved an unmitigated curse. When the
syndicalists of Europe, known in America as the Industrial Workers of
the World, succeeded in tying up railroad construction and almost
ruining the contractors of two transcontinental systems in British
Columbia a few years ago, endless delay in terminating an impossible
situation occurred through the province trying to throw the burden of
dealing with the matter on the Dominion, and the Dominion trying to
throw the burden on the province. Both province and Dominion were
afraid of the labor vote. The losses caused during that three months'
strike in the construction camps indirectly afterward fell on the
Canadian people; for the embarrassed transcontinentals had to come to
the Dominion government for aid; and the Dominion government is, after
all, the people.
"I pray God," said a Cabinet Minister in Ottawa to me at the time,
"that Imperial Federation may never come; if it adds to our woes
another 'twilight zone' as to Dominion and Imperial powers."
III
It seems almost ungracious in this connection to say that Canada's
far-famed Arbitration Act has been overrated. That it has accomplished
some good and settled many controversies no reasonable person will
deny, but it is not a panacea for all ills.
Here is the difficulty as to arbitration. It is not unlike the
situation of Belgium regarding Germany in the great war. Arbitration
depends on "a scrap of paper." What if some one tears up "the scrap of
paper"? What if one side says there is nothing to arbitrate? Twenty
years ago--yes--wages, hours, conditions of labor--could have been
arbitrated; but to-day the contest in the industrial world is often not
for wages and hours of labor.
"Demand three dollars a day for an eight-hour day, to-day," I heard an
Industrial Worker of the World shout in a Vancouver strike. "Demand
four dollars a day to-morrow, till you secure four dollars a day for a
four-hour day--till your ascending wages expropriate capital--take over
capital and all industry to be operated for labor."
In the great struggle between the railroads and the I. W. W.'s in
British Columbia, Canada's Arbitration Act fell down hopelessly simply
because there was nothing to arbitrate. Labor said: We shall paralyze
all industry, or operate all industry for labor's profit solely.
Capital said--you shall not. There the two tied in deadlock for
months, and there all arbitration acts must often tie in deadlock in
industrial warfare. That is why I hope industrial warfare will never
become a part of Canada's national life. That is why I hope and pray
every Canadian settler will become a vested righter by owning and
operating his own acres till Death lays him in God's Acre.
IV
In a country where the public debt is only $350,000,000 or forty-five
dollars per head, and the national income is $1,500,000,000 from farm,
factory, forest and mine--or two hundred dollars per head and that
fairly well distributed--for the present there is little to fear of
social revolution. It is not the social revolution that I fear for
Canada. It is the canker of social hate and jealousy preceding
revolution. If fifty per cent. of the population can be kept owning
and operating their own land, that social canker will never infect
Canada's national life as a whole.
[1] Thomas Jefferson desired such a rural future for the United States
and deplored the day of cities and industrialism. It came,
nevertheless.--THE EDITOR.
CHAPTER XIII
HOW GOVERNED
I
Reference has been made to the facts that Big Business has up to the
present been unable to get control of the reins of government in Canada,
that the courts have been kept comparatively free of political influence
and that the doors of underground politics are not easily pried open by
corruption. Why is this? Canadians would fain take unction to
themselves that it is owing to their superior national integrity, but
this is nonsense.
Exuberant forest growth is always characterized by some fungus and dry
rot. How has Canada escaped so much of this fungus excrescence of
representative government? To get at the reason for this it is necessary
to trace back for a little space the historic growth of Canada's form of
government. We speak of Canada's constitution being the British North
America Act. As a matter of fact, Canada's constitution is more than an
act--more than a dry and hard and inflexible formula to which growth must
conform. Rather than plaster cast into which growing life must fit
itself, Canada's constitution is a living organism evolved from her own
mistakes and struggles of the past and her own needs as to the present.
Canada's constitution is not some pocket formula which some
doctrinaire--with apologies to France--has whipped out of his pocket to
remedy all ills. Canada's constitution is like the scientific data of
empirical medicine; it is the result of centuries' experiments, none the
less scientific because unconscious.
One need not trace the growth of government to the days prior to English
rule. When England took over Canada by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the
main thing to remember is that the French-Canadian was guaranteed the
free exercise of his religion. This--and not innate loyalty to an alien
government--was the real reason for Quebec refusing to cast in her lot
with the revolting American colonies. This was the reason for Quebec
remaining stanch in the War of 1812, and this is the reason for Quebec
to-day standing a solid unit against annexation. We must not forget what
a high emissary from Rome once jocularly said of a religious quarrel in
Canada--Quebec was more Catholic than the Pope.
Following the military régime of the Conquest came the Quebec Act of
1774.--Please note, contemporaneous with the uprising of the American
colonies, Canada is given her first constitution. The Governor and
legislative council are to be appointed by the Crown, and full freedom of
worship is guaranteed. French civil law and English criminal law are
established; and the Church is confirmed in its title to ecclesiastical
property--which was right when you consider that the foundations of the
Church in Quebec are laid in the blood of martyrs. Just here intervenes
the element which compelled the reshaping of Canada's destiny. When the
American colonies gained their independence, there came across the border
to what are now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and Ontario some forty
thousand Loyalists mainly from New England and the South. These
Loyalists, of course, refused to be dominated by French rule; so the
Constitutional Act was passed in 1791 by the Imperial Parliament. The
people of Canada were represented for the first time in an assembly
elected by themselves, The Governor-General for Quebec--Lower Canada--and
the Lieutenant-Governor for Ontario--Upper Canada--were both appointed by
the Crown. The Executive, or Cabinet, was chosen by the Governor. The
weakness of the new system was glaringly apparent on the surface. While
the assembly was elected in each province by the people, the assembly had
no direct control over the Executive. Downing Street, England, chose the
Governors; and the Governors chose their own junta of advisers; and all
the abuses of the Family Compact arose, which led to the Rebellion of '37
under William Lyon MacKenzie in Ontario and Louis Papineau in Quebec.
Judges at this time sat in both Houses, and Canada learned the bitter
lesson of keeping her judiciary out of politics. As the power of
appointment rested exclusively with the Governor and his circle, it can
be believed that the French of Quebec suffered disabilities and prejudice.
Hopelessly at sea as to the cause of the continual unrest in her colonies
and undoubtedly sad from the loss of her American possessions, England
now sent out a commissioner to investigate the trouble; and it is to the
findings of this commissioner that the United Kingdom has since owed her
world-wide success in governing people by letting them govern themselves.
People sometimes ask why England has been so successful in governing
one-fifth of the habitable globe. She does not govern one-fifth the
habitable globe. She lets much of it govern itself; and it was Lord
Durham, coming out as Governor-General and high commissioner at this
time, who laid the foundations of England's success in colonizing. His
report has been the Magna Charta and Declaration of Independence of the
self-governing colonies of the British Empire.
First of all, government must be entrusted to the house representing the
people. Second, the granting of moneys must be controlled by those
paying the taxes. Third, the Executive must be responsible not only to
the Crown but to the representatives of the people. It is here the
Canadian system differs from the American. The Secretary, or Cabinet
Minister, can not hold office one day under the disapproval of the House,
no matter what his tenure of office.
The Act of 1840 resulted from Durham's report. Upper and Lower Canada
were united under one government--which was really the forerunner of
confederation in '67. The House was given exclusive control of taxation
and expenditure. Nothing awakened Canada so acutely to the necessity of
federating all British North America as the Civil War in the United
States, when the States Right party fought to secede. Red River and
British Columbia had become peopled. The maritime provinces settled by
French from Quebec and New England Loyalists were alien in thought from
Upper and Lower Canada. The cry "54-40 or fight," the setting up of a
provisional government by Oregon, the Riel Rebellion in Manitoba, the
rush of California gold miners to Cariboo--all were straws in a restless
wind blowing Canada's destiny hither and whither. Confederation was not
a pocket theory. It was a result born of necessity, and the main
principles of confederation embodied in the British North America Act had
been foreshadowed in Durham's report. Durham himself suffered the fate
of too many of the world's great. He had come out to Canada to settle a
bitter dispute between the little oligarchy round the royal Governor and
the people. He sided with neither and was abjured by both. The
sentences against the patriots he had set aside or softened. The
royalists he condemned but did not punish. Both sides poured charges
against Durham into the office of the Colonial Secretary in England,
Durham died of a broken heart, but his report laid the foundation of
England's future colonial policy.
II
By the British North America Act of 1867, passed by the Imperial
Parliament, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick came into the
Union. Later Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories
and British Columbia joined. Up to the present Newfoundland has stood
aside. Under the British North America Act, Canada is ruled to-day.
There is first the Imperial government represented by a Governor-General.
The commandant of Canada's regular militia is also an Imperial officer.
There is second the federal government with executive, legislative and
judicial powers; or a cabinet, a parliament, a supreme court.
There are third the provincial governments with executive, legislative
and judicial powers.
Details of each section of government can not be given here; but several
facts should be noted; for they explain the practical workings of
Canada's system.
The Witenagemot--or Saxon council of wise men--stands for Canada's ideal
of a parliament. It is not so much a question of spoils. It is not so
much a case of "the outs" ejecting "the ins." I have never heard of any
party in Canada taking the ground, "Here--you have been in long enough;
it's our turn." I have never heard a suggestion as to tenure of office
being confined to "one term" for fear of a leader becoming a Napoleon.
If a leader be efficient--and it is thought the more experienced he is,
the more efficient he will be--he can hold office as long as he lives if
the people keep on electing him.
The Cabinet--or inner council of advisers to the Governor-General--must
be elected by the people and directly responsible to the House. At its
head stands the Premier.
Within her own jurisdiction Canada's legislature has absolute power. If
her treaties or acts should conflict with Imperial interests, they would
be disallowed by the Imperial Privy Council as unconstitutional, or ultra
vires. Likewise of the provinces, if any of their acts conflicted with
federal interests, they would be disallowed as ultra vires.
Should the Governor-General differ from the Cabinet in office, he must
either recede from his own position or dismiss his advisers and send them
to the country for the verdict of the people. Should the people endorse
the Ministry, the Governor-General must either resign or recede from his
stand. I know of no case where such a contingency has arisen. A
Governor-General is careful never to conflict with a Ministry endorsed by
the electorate.
Once a man has received an appointment to a position in the civil service
of Canada he must keep absolutely aloof from politics. This is not a law
but it is a custom, the violation of which would cost a man his position.
The Parliament in the Dominion consists of the Commons and the Senate.
The Commons are elected by the people. The Senators are appointed by the
Governor-General, strictly under advice of the party in office, for life.
Senators must be thirty years of age and possess property over four
thousand dollars in value above their liabilities. The Senator resides
in the district which he represents. The Commoner may represent a
district in which he does not reside, and, on the whole, this is more of
an advantage than a disadvantage. It permits a district that has special
needs to choose a man of great character and power resident in another
district. If he fails to meet the peculiar needs of that district, he
will not be reelected. If he meets the needs of the district which he
represents he has the additional prestige of his influence in another
electoral district. A Senator can be removed for only four reasons:
bankruptcy, absence, change of citizenship, conviction of crime.
At a time when the United States is so generally in favor of the election
of Senators by direct vote, when England is trending so preponderately in
favor of curbing the veto power of the House of Lords, it seems
remarkable that Canada never questions the power of the Senator appointed
for life.
Though officially supposed to be appointed by the Governor-General, the
Senator is in reality never appointed except on recommendation of the
prevailing Cabinet which means--the party in power. The appointments
being for life and the emolument sufficient to guarantee a good living
conformable with the style required by the official position, the Senator
appointed for life--like the judge appointed for life--soon shows himself
independent of purely party behests. He is depended upon by the
Commoners to veto and arrest popular movements, which would be inimical
to public good, but which the Commoner dare not defeat for fear of defeat
in reelection. For instance, a few years ago a labor bill was introduced
in the Commons as to compensation for injuries. In theory, it was all
right. In practice, it was a blackmail levy against employers. The
Commoners did not dare reject it for fear of the vote in one particular
province. What they did was meet the Senate in unofficial caucuses.
They said: We shall pass this bill all three readings; but we depend on
you--the Senate--to reject it. We can go to the province and say we
passed the bill and ask for the support of that province; but because the
bill would be inimical to the best interests of other provinces, we
depend on you, the Senate, to defeat it. And the Senate defeated it.
When older democracies are curtailing the strength of veto power in upper
houses, it is curious to find this dependence of a young democracy on
veto power. Instead of the life privileges leading to an abuse of
insolence and Big Business, up to the present in Canada, life tenure
independent of politics has led to independence. The appointments being
for life guarantees that many of the incumbents are not young, and this
imparts to the Upper House that quality of the Witenagemot most valued by
the ancient Saxons--the council of the aged and the experienced and the
wise.
Active, aggressive power, of course, resides chiefly with the Commons.
Representation here is arranged according to the population and must be
readjusted after every census. "Rep. by Pop." was the rallying cry that
effected this arrangement. No property qualification is required from
the member of the House of Commons, but he must be a British subject. He
must not have been convicted of any crime, minor or major.
Franchise in Canada is practically universal suffrage. At least it
amounts to that. Voters must be registered. They must be British
subjects. They must be twenty-one years of age. They must not be
insane, idiots or convicts. They must own real property to the value of
three hundred dollars in cities, two hundred dollars in towns, one
hundred and fifty dollars in the country; or they must have a yearly
income of three hundred dollars. A farmer's son has the right to vote
without these qualifications, evidently on the ancient Saxon presumption
that a free-holder represents more vitally the interests of a country
than the penniless floater, who neither works nor earns. In other words,
the carpet-bag voter does not yet play any part in Canadian politics.
Bad as the corruption is in some cases among the foreigners, when votes
are bought at two dollars to five dollars, the point has not yet been
reached when a carpet-bag gang of boarding-house floaters and saloon
heelers can be transferred from a secure ward to a doubtful ward and so
submerge the political rights of permanent residents.
Judges can not vote in Canada. In fact, they can take no part, direct or
indirect, by influence or speech, in politics. This was one of the
things fought out in the '37 Rebellion and forever settled. Canada could
not conceive of a man who had been a judge being nominated for the
premiership or as Governor. Of course, when Liberals are in power, as
advisers of the Governor-General, they recommend more Liberals for
judgeships than Conservatives; and when Conservatives are in power, they
recommend for judgeships more Conservatives than Liberals. I think of
attorneys who were penniless strugglers in the Liberal ranks of my
childhood days in Winnipeg who are to-day dignified judges; and I think
of other attorneys, who were penniless strugglers in Conservative ranks
who have been advanced under the Borden regime to judgeships; but the
point is, having been so advanced, they pass a chasm which they can never
retrace without impeachment--the chasm is party politics. They are
independent of popular favor. They can be impeached and displaced. They
are forever disgraced by defalcation in office. By observing the duties
of office, they are secure for life and held in an esteem second only to
that of the Governor-General.
You will notice that it is all more a matter of public sentiment than a
law; of custom than of court. That is what I mean when I say that
Canada's constitution is a vital, living, growing thing, not a dead
formula by which the Past binds and impedes the Present and the Future.
There must be a session of the Dominion Parliament once every year. Five
years is the limit of any tenure of office by the Commons. Every five
years the Commoners must go to the country for reelection. Usually the
government in power goes to the country for reendorsement before the term
of Parliament expires.
Laws on corrupt practices are very strict and what is more--they are
generally enforced. The slightest profit, direct or indirect of a
member, vacates his seat. Corruption on the part of underlings, of which
they have known nothing, vacates an election. A member of Parliament can
not participate directly or indirectly in any public work benefiting his
district. He is not in it for what he can get out of it. He is in it
for what he can give to it. Expenses of election to a postage stamp must
be published after election.
The methods of conducting business in Parliament need not be discussed
here, except to say that any member can introduce a bill, any member can
present a petition from the humblest inhabitant of the commonwealth, and
any member can speak on a motion provided he gains the floor first.
Judges are appointed and paid by the Dominion government, not by the
provincial. Decisions by provincial judges--appointed by the Dominion
government--can be appealed to a Supreme Court of Canada. Judges can be
removed only on petition to the Governor-General for misbehavior.
Dominion taxes in Canada are indirect--on imports. As stated elsewhere,
the main power in Canada is vested in federal authorities. Only local
affairs--education, excise, municipal matters, drainage, local railroads,
etc.--are left to the provinces.
Every man in Canada is supposed to be liable for military training if
called on, but the number of men annually drilled is about fifty
thousand. Hitherto a man appointed from the Imperial Forces has been the
commanding general in Canada. It need scarcely be said that if Canada is
to hold her own in Imperial plans, if she is to become a power in the
struggle for ascendency on the Pacific, her equipment both as to land
forces and marine are ridiculously inadequate. They are the equipment of
a member in Imperial plans who is skulking his share.
Provincial courts are, of course, administered by provincial officers;
but these are appointed by the Governor-General advised by the Cabinet of
the federal party in power. The Lieutenant-Governor of the province is
appointed by the Governor-General advised by the party in power. He is
paid by the Dominion. Judges of superior courts must be barristers of
ten years' good standing at the bar of their provinces. All judges and
justices of the peace must have some property qualification. Rascals
with criminal records are not railroaded into judgeships in Canada. I
know of a judge in San Francisco who until the advent of the woman vote
literally held his position by reason of his alliance with the white
slavers. I know of another judge in New York who held his position in
spite of a criminal record by reason of the fact he could get himself
elected by the disreputable gangs. These things are virtually impossible
under the Canadian system. In the future the system may prove too rigid.
At the present time it works and keeps the courts clear of political
influence.
Juries are not so universal in Canada as in the United States. In civil
cases, where the points of law are complicated, the tendency is to let
the judge guide the verdict of the court.
III
There is one feature of Canadian justice which sentimentalists deplore.
It is that the lash is still used for crimes of violence against the
person and for bestiality. This is not a relic of barbarism. It is the
result of careful thought on the part of the Department of Justice--the
thought being that it is useless to speak to a man capable of bestiality
in terms not articulate to his nature; and the fact remains that
criminals of this class seldom come back for second terms of punishment
for the same sort of crimes.
If you ask why few homicides are punished in the United States, and few
escape in Canada--I can not answer. Political expediency, party heelers,
technicalities--the dotting of an i, the crossing of a t, the omission of
a comma--have no effect whatsoever on Canadian justice. The courts are
never defied, and the law takes its course.
The law not only takes its course relentlessly but the pursuit of crime
literally never desists. This feature of Canadian justice is a rude
sharp shock to the unruly element pouring in with the new colonists. A
Montana gunman blew into a Canadian frontier town and in accordance with
custom began "to shoot up" the bar rooms. In twenty-four hours he
awakened from his spree under sentence of sixty days' hard labor. "Let
me out of this blamed Can-a-day," he cursed. "Who'd 'a' thought of
takin' any offense from touchin' up this blamed dead town?"
A Texas outlaw succeeded in inducing a young Englishman of the verdantly
bumptious and moneyed sort to go homestead hunting with him. The Indians
saw the two ride into the back country. In spring only the Texan came
out. I forget what his explanation of the Englishman's disappearance
was. In any other country under the sun, who would have ridden two
hundred miles beyond nowhere to investigate the story of an outlaw about
a young fool, who had plainly been a candidate for trouble? But an old
Indian chief meandered into the barracks of the nearest Mounted Police
station, sat him down on the floor and after smoking countless pipes let
drop the fact that two settlers had "gone in" and only "one man--he come
out." That was enough. Two policemen were detailed on the case. They
rode to the abandoned homesteads. In the deserted log cabin nothing
seemed amiss, but some distance away on a bluff a stained ax was found;
yet farther away a mound not a year old. Beneath it the remains of the
Englishman were found with ax hacks in the skull. It was now a year
since the commission of the crime and the murderer was by this far enough
away. Why put the country to the expense of trailing down a criminal who
had decamped? Those two young Mounted Policemen were told to find the
criminal and not come back till they had found him. They trailed him
from Alberta to Montana, from Montana to the Orient, from China back to
Texas, where he was found on a homestead of his own. Now the proof of
murder was of the most tenuous sort. One of the Mounted Policemen
disguised himself as a laborer and obtained work on an adjoining
homestead. It took two years to gain the criminal's confidence and
confession. The man was arrested and extradited to Canada. If I
remember rightly, the trial did not last a week, and the murderer was
hanged forthwith.
Instances of this kind could be retailed without number, but this one
case is typical. It is something more than relentlessness. It is more
than keeping politics out of the courts. It is a tacit national
recognition of two basic truths: that the protection of innocence is the
business of the courts more than the protection of guilt; that having
delegated to the Department of Justice the enforcement of criminal law,
Canada holds that Department of Justice responsible for every infraction
of law. The enforcement is greatly aided by the fact that criminal law
in Canada is under federal jurisdiction. An embezzler can not defalcate
in Nova Scotia, lightly skip into Manitoba and put both provinces to
expense and technical trouble apprehending him. In the States I once was
annoyed by a semi-demented blackmailer. When I sent for the
sheriff--whose deputy, by the way, hid when summoned--the lunatic stepped
across the state border, and it would have cost me two hundred dollars to
have apprehended him. As the culprit was a menace more to the community
than to me, I went on west on a trip to a remote part of Alberta. I had
not been in Alberta twenty-four hours before the chief constable called
to know if this blackmailer of whom he had read in the press, could be
apprehended in Canada. The why of this vigilance on one side of the line
and remissness on the other, I can no more explain than why American
industrial progress is so amazingly swift and Canadian industrial
progress is so amazingly slow.
There is very little wish-washy coddling of the criminal in Canada.
While in the penitentiary he is cared for physically, mentally and
spiritually. When released, he is helped to start life afresh; but if he
keeps falling and falling, he is put where he will not propagate his
species and hurt others in his back-sliding.
"I regret," said a judge in a Winnipeg court, "to sentence such a
youthful offender." The prisoner was a young foreigner who attacked
another man viciously in a drunken brawl. "But foreigners must learn
that Canadian law can not be broken with impunity," and he sent the young
man to what was practically a life sentence.
"Hard on the poor devil," said a court attendant.
"Yes," retorted a westerner who lived in the foreign settlement, "but
it's an all-fired good thing for Canada."
The case of a judge in British Columbia is famous on the Pacific Coast.
It was in the old days of murder and robbery on the trail to the gold
diggings of Cariboo. In the face of the plainest evidence the jury had
refused to convict. The astounded judge turned amid tense silence in
fury on the prisoner.
"The jury pronounces the prisoner not guilty," he said, "and I strongly
recommend him to go out and cut their throats."
Reference has been made to an Imperial court official assassinated by an
angry Hindu conspirator in a Vancouver court room. The assassin was
sentenced to death nine days from the commission of the crime, and if any
newspaper had attempted to make a head-line affair out of it, or "to try
the jury" for trying the prisoner, the editors and owners of that paper
would have been sent to jail for contempt.
IV
The gradual rise of the two political parties dates from the adoption of
a high tariff by the Conservatives after confederation. Prior to 1837
Canadian parties consisted simply of the Outs and the Ins. The advanced
Radicals, who formed themselves into a party to oust the Family Compact,
called themselves Liberals. The entrenched oligarchy called themselves
Conservatives. After confederation, by force of circumstances, namely
the refusal of tariff concessions from the United States, the
Conservatives, who were in power, became the high tariff party. The
Liberals, when out of power, advocated tariff for revenue only. Also by
force of circumstances until the transfer of the balance of power from
Quebec to the New West, the party in office had a tendency to play for
the French Catholic vote of Quebec; the party out of office coquetted
with the ultra-Protestant vote of Ontario. This naturally worked toward
the provincial governments being Liberal, when the federal government was
Conservative; and vice versa. The Liberal in provincial politics was
Liberal in federal politics, and the Conservative in federal politics was
Conservative in provincial politics; but the policy has always been for
the Outs first to attack the Ins provincially--to win the outposts before
attacking the entrenched power of the federal government. Before Sir
John Macdonald's Conservative administration was defeated there was a
long series of victories by the Liberals in the provinces, and before Sir
Wilfred Laurier's Liberal government was defeated the Conservatives had
captured the most of the provincial governments. With the Conservatives
professing high tariff as economic salvation and the Liberals regarding
high tariff as economic damnation, it seems almost heresy to set down
that the line of demarkation between the two great parties in practice is
really one of Outs and Ins. The only tariff reductions made by the
Liberals were on British imports, and this did not lower the average on
British imports to the level of the average duty on American imports;
when the high tariff Conservatives came back to power, the duties were
not shoved to higher levels. This, too, has all been by force of
circumstances. When both parties would have grasped eagerly at tariff
reductions from the United States, those concessions could not be
obtained. When the tariff concessions were offered, Canada had already
built up such intrenched interests of her own in factory, mill and
transportation that she was not in a position to accept the offer.
Laurier did not see this, but many of his party did and refused to
support him in reciprocity.
At time of writing, to an outsider, there is in practice no difference
between the two parties; but this can hardly remain a permanent
condition. As long as the war lasts both parties will be a unit in
support of Imperial defense. The day the war is over Canada may have to
consider, not Imperial, but Dominion defense; and this is bound to split
the parties up on entirely new lines. The French Nationalists are for
standing aside from all European entanglements and resting secure under
the Monroe Doctrine. The two million Americans in the West may be
expected to advocate the same policy. The British and the Canadians of
British descent in Canada may be expected to take an aggressive stand for
active self-defense; for defense may be one of Canada's next big problems.
Up to the present, Canadians have considered it a superiority that their
constitution--the British North America Act--could be so easily amended.
As long as Canada is peopled by Canadians, it is an advantage to work
under a constitution that may be modified to suit the growing need of a
growing nation, but one is constrained to ask what if Galicians and
Germans ever acquired the balance of voting power in Canada? There are
half as many German-born Germans in the United States as there are
native-born Canadians in Canada. What if such a tide of German
immigration came to Canada? Would it be an advantage or a disadvantage
that the country's constitution could be so easily amended by the
Imperial Parliament? Or more striking still, suppose the Hindu, a
British subject, began peopling Western Canada by the million. Suppose
the Hindu, a British subject, voted in Canada for a change in the
constitution! Can one conceive for one minute of the Imperial government
refusing to amend the British North American Act? Canadians sometimes
refer to the American Constitution as too fixed and inelastic for modern
conditions. They sometimes wonder how certain famous constitutional
lawyers could make a living without the American Constitution to
interpret and argue before the Supreme Court, but Americans and Canadians
are to-day working out from different angles a great world experiment in
self-government. It remains to be seen which experiment will stand the
stress of world-convulsing changes. We need not theorize. Time will
arbitrate.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE
I
Some one has said that the life of a nation is but the shadow of the
units composing it; or the life of a nation is but the replica of the
life of the individuals in it. Massed figures on gross exports are but
the total thrift of a multitude of toiling men. Wheat production to
feed a hungry empire is but one farmer's tireless vigilance multiplied
by hundreds of thousands of other farmers. What manner of man is the
Canadian behind all these figures attesting material prosperity? What
manner of being is the Canadian woman, his partner? Is the Canadian a
Socialist, or an Individualist? Does he believe that each man should
stand upon his own feet or lean upon a state crutch? There is no state
church in Canada. Then, what part does religion play? Is it a shadow,
or a substance? Is it a refuge for the unfit and the weak to shift the
responsibility for their own failure to the fatalism of the will of
God; or is religion a terrible and dynamic force that compels right for
right's sake independent of compromise? How does the Canadian live in
his home? Is he beer-drinking, lethargic, dreamy and flabby in will
power; or is he whisky-drinking, fiery, practical and pugnacious? Why
hasn't he a distinctive literature, a distinctive art? Nature never
was more lavish to any people in beautiful landscape from the quiet
rural scenery of the maritime provinces, Quebec and Ontario, to the
far-flung epic of the fenceless prairies and the Homeric grandeur of
the mountains. Why are quiet rural beauty and illimitable freedom and
lofty splendor not reflected in poem and novel and ballad and picture?
The Canadian may answer--We go in more for athletics than aesthetics:
we are living literature, not writing it. In our snow-covered prairies
edged by the violet mist, lined in silver and pricked at night by the
diamond light of a million stars, we are living art, not painting it.
That our mountains are dumb and inarticulate, that our forests chant
the litany of the pines untranslated to the winds of heaven, and that
our cataracts thunder their diapasons inimitable to art--is no proof
that though we are dumb and inarticulate, we are not lifted and
transported and inspired by the wondrous beauties of the heritage God
has given us. The Canadian may say this theoretically, but is he
strengthened in body and made greater in soul by the mystic splendors
of his country? In a word, has the Canadian found himself? He is not
self-conscious, if that be what is meant by finding self; and that may
be a good thing; for self-consciousness is of one of two things--the
vanity of femininity in its adolescence, or the picayune pecking
introspection of natures thrown in on self instead of exuberantly
spending energy in effort outside of self. Self-consciousness is too
much ego, whether it be old or young; and the devil must be cast out
into the swine over the cliff into the sea, before there can enter into
men, or nations, that Spirit of God which makes for great service in
Destiny.
Has Canada found herself?
II
Without any brief for or against Socialism as a system, it may be said
that for many years Socialism will play little part in Canadian
affairs. In areas like Germany, where the population is three hundred
and ten per square mile; or France, where the population is one hundred
and eighty-nine per square mile; or England, where the population is
over five hundred per square mile; or Saxony, where the population is
eight hundred and thirty per square mile--one can understand the claim
of the most rabid and extreme Socialist that the great proportion of
the people can never by any chance own their own freehold; that the
great proportion of the toilers are not having a fair chance in an open
field; but in Canada where there are millions of acres untaken, where
the population is not quite two to the square mile, it is impossible to
raise the cry that every man, and any man, can not have all the
freehold he is manly enough to go out and take. The grievance becomes
preposterous and a joke. There is more land uninhabited and open to
preemption in Canada than is owned in freehold. There are more forests
standing in Canada than have been cut. There are more mines than there
are workmen, and only the edge of Canada's mineral lands have been
explored. There are more fish uncaught than have ever been hooked. I
have heard soap-box orators in Canada rant about the plutocrats
gobbling the resources of the country; and I have gone to their offices
and shown them on the map that any man could become a plutocrat by
going out and gobbling some more, provided he had brains and brawn and
gobbled hard enough instead of gabbled; and I have been answered these
very words: "But we don't want that. We want to inflame the masses
with hatred for the classes so that the laborer will take over all
industry." When I have pointed out that there are "no masses" nor
"classes" in Canada--that all are laborers, I have been met with a
blank stare.
The case is a standing joke in one province of a man who as an agitator
used to rave at "the British flag as a bloody rag." The police were
never quite sure whether to arrest him for treason or let him blow off
steam and exhaust. They wisely chose the latter course. Prosperity
came to the town. The man sold his small bit of real estate for
something under a hundred thousand. He didn't stay to divide his
unearned increment among his fellow agitators. He hied him to retire
to the land where "the flag was a bloody rag." This, of course, proves
nothing for or against Socialism as a system. There was a Judas among
the apostles; but it illustrates the point that Canada is still at the
stage where every man may become a capitalist, a vested righter, the
owner of his own freehold. When every man may have a vested property
right in a country--not as a gift but as the reward of his own effort
in a fair field with no favors--it is a fairly safe prophecy that the
vested rights earned and held by the fit and the strong will never be
handed over as a gift to the unfit and the weak and the don't-trys.
The savings of the man who has not squandered his earnings on saloons
and reckless living will never be taxed to support in idleness--even an
idle old age--the feckless who have spent on stomach and lust what
other men save. Sounds hard; doesn't it, in the face of almost
universal nostrums for the salvation and propagation of the useless?
But it is like Canada's climate. Perhaps the climate has a good deal
to do with it. Hard it may be; but the issue is clean-cut and crystal
clear--work, or starve; be fit, or die; make good, or drop out; here is
a fair field and no favors! Gird yourself as a man to it, and no
puling puny whining for pity!
Can Canada keep a fair field and no favors? Her destiny as a power
depends on the answer to that question. In every city in Canada to-day
are growing up crowded foreign quarters peopled by men and women who
have never had a fair field--with class hate in their hearts for
inherited social wrongs; derelicts, no-goods, unfits, born unfit
through no fault of their own. Have they no claim? Can Canada as a
foster mother redeem such as these? Her destiny as a power depends on
the answer to this question, too. These people are coming to her. In
every city are tens of thousands of them. She needs these people.
They need her. Will it be a leveling down process for Canada or a
leveling up process for them? Before the nineties the average number
of inhabitants per house in urban Canada was three. By 1901 the
average was up to four. By 1911 it was up to five. In the crowded
centers as many as twenty a room have been found. If this sort of
thing continue and increase, Socialism will become a factor in Canada.
It will become a factor because every man or woman who has not had a
fair chance has a right to demand a change to a system that will give a
fair chance. Canada's economic stability and freedom from social
unrest will depend on getting her foreign denizens out to the land.
Unfortunately high tariff fosters factory; and factory fosters cheap
foreign labor; and cheap foreign labor as inevitably leads to social
ferment as heat sours milk.
III
What part does religion play in Canada? In marked distinction to the
United Kingdom and the United States, Canada is a church-going nation.
You hear a great deal of the orthodoxy of the Britisher; but if you go
to England and go to his church, even to a festal service such as
Christmas, you will find that he leaves the orthodoxy mostly to the
clergy and the women. I have again and again seen the pews of the most
famous churches in England with barely a scattering of auditors in
them. Of churches where the hard-working manual toiler may be found
side by side with the cultured and the idle and the leisured--there is
none. You also hear a great deal about the heterodoxy of the American;
but if you go to his church--with the exception of the Catholic--you
find that he, too, is leaving his heterodoxy to the clergy and the
women. A few years ago it was almost impossible to gain entrance to a
metropolitan church in the United States, where the preacher happened
to be a man of ability or fame. Try it to-day! Though church music
has been improved almost to the excellence of oratorios or grand opera,
unless it be a festal service like Easter or Christmas, the pews are
only sparsely filled. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say this
is as true of the country districts as of the city. All through New
England are countless country churches that have had to be permanently
closed for lack of attendance. But between the churches of the United
Kingdom and the United States is a marked difference--it is the air of
the preacher. The Englishman is positively sublime in his
unconsciousness of the fact that he had lost a grip of his people. The
American knows and does not blink the fact and is frantically
endeavoring by social service, by popular lectures, by music, by
current topics, by vehement eloquence to regain the grip of his people;
and it must cut a live manly man to the quick to know that his best
efforts on salvation are too often expended on dear old saintly ladies,
who could not be damned if they tried.
Now the curious thing about Canada, which I don't attempt in the least
to explain, is this: whether the preacher pules, or whines, or moons,
or shouts to the rafters, or is gifted with the eloquence to touch "the
quick and the dead"; whether the music be a symphony or a dolorous
horror of discords; whether there be social service or old-fashioned
theology; whether, in fact, the preacher be some raw ignorant stripling
from the theological seminary, or a man of divine inspiration and
power--whatever is or is not, if the church is a church, from Halifax
to Vancouver, you find it full. I have no explanation of this fact. I
set it down. Canadians are a vigorously virile people in their
church-going. They do it with all their might. I sometimes think that
the church does for Canada what music does for continental nations,
what dollar-chasing and amusement do for the American nation--opens
that great emotional outlet for the play of spiritual powers and
idealization, which we must all have if we would rise above the
gin-horse haltered to the wheel of toil. "The Happy Warrior" in Watts'
picture dreamed of the spirit face above him in his sleep. So may
Canada dream in her tireless urgent business of nation-making; and
religion may visualize that dream through the church.
Understand--the Canadian is no more religious than the American or the
Britisher. He drinks as much whisky as they do light wines and beer.
He "cusses" in the same unholy vernacular, only more vigorously. He
strikes back as quickly. He hits as hard. He gives his enemy one
cheek and then the other, and then both feet and fists; but the
Canadian goes to church. One of the most amazing sights of the new
frontier cities is to see a church debouching of a Sunday night. The
people come out in black floods. In one foreign church in Winnipeg is
a membership of four thousand. I think of a little industrial city of
Ontario where there is a church--one of three--with a larger membership
than any single church in the city of New York.
Canadians not only go to church but they dig down in their pockets for
the church. In little frontier cities of the West more is being spent
on magnificent temples of worship than has been spent on some European
cathedrals. Granted the effects are sometimes garish and squarish and
dollar-loud. This is not an age when artisans spend a lifetime carving
a single door or a single facade; but when a little place--of say
seventeen thousand people--spends one hundred thousand dollars on a
church, somebody has laid down the cash; and the Canadian is not a man
who spends his cash for no worth. That cash represents something for
which he cares almightily in Canadian life. What is it? Frankly I do
not know, but I think it is that the church visualizes Canada's ideal
in a vision. We love and lose and reach forward to the last. Where?
We toil and strive and attain. To what end? Our successes fail, and
our failures succeed. Why? And love lights the daily path. But where
to? Religion helps to visualize the answers to those questions for
Canada.
Another characteristic about religion in Canada, which is very
remarkable in an era of decadence in belief, is that the church is a
man's job. Unless in some of the little semi-deserted hamlets in the
far East, you will find in Canada churches as many men as women. In
the West you will find more men than women. The church is not
relegated to "the dear sisters." Shoulder to shoulder men and women
carry the burden joyfully together, which, perhaps, accounts for the
support the church receives from young men. An episode concerning "the
dear sisters" will long be remembered of one synod in Montreal. A poor
little English curate had come out as a missionary to the Indians of
the Northwest. Such misfits are pitiable, as well as laughable. When
you consider that in some of these northern parishes a man can reach
his different missions only by canoe or dog-train, that the missions
are forty miles apart, that the canoe must run rapids and the dog-train
dare blizzards--an effeminate type of man is more of a tragedy than a
comedy. I think of one mission where the circuit is four hundred miles
and the distance to railroad, doctor, post-office, fifty-five miles.
This little curate had had a hard time, though his mission was an easy
one. When his turn came to report, his face resembled the reflection
on an inverted teaspoon. Hardship had taken all the bounce and laugh
and joy and rebound out of him. The other frontier missionaries grew
restless as he spoke. One magnificent specimen, who had been a gambler
in his unregenerate days, began to shuffle uneasily. When the little
curate whined about the vices of the Indians, this big frontier
missionary pulled off his coat. (He explained to me that it was "a hot
night"; besides it "made him mad to hear the poor Indians damned for
their vices, when white men, who passed as gentlemen, had more.")
Finally, when the little curate appealed to "the dear sisters to raise
money to build a fence," the big man could stand it no longer. He
ripped his collar loose and sprang to his feet. "Man," he thundered,
"pull off your coat and build your own fence and don't trouble the Lord
about such trifles. I'm rich on thirty dollars a year. When I need
more, I sell a steer. Don't let us bother God-Almighty with such
unmanly puling and whining," and much more, he said--which I have told
elsewhere--which brought that audience to life with the shocks of a
galvanic battery. One of the most successful Indian missionaries in
Canada is a full blood Cree. It does not detract from his services in
the least that if in the middle of his prayers he hears the wild geese
coming in spring, he bangs the Holy Book shut and shouts for the
congregation to grab their guns and get a shot.
The virile note in religious life is one of the chief reasons for its
support in Canada; and I have been amused to watch English and American
friends who have gone to Canada first indifferent to the church-going
habit, then touched and finally caught in the current. Does the habit
react on public life? Undoubtedly and most strongly! Catholic Quebec
and Protestant Ontario for years literally dictated provincial and
federal policies; but, with the shift of the balance of power from East
to West, that shuffling of Catholic against Protestant and vice versa
has ceased in Canadian politics; and those newspapers that gained their
support playing on religious prejudice have had to sell and begin with
a new sheet. At the same time no policy could be put forward in
Canada, no man could stay in public life against the voice of the
different churches. If it were not invidious, examples could be given
of public men relegated to private life because they violated the
principles for which the church stands. The church in Canada is not a
dead issue. It is not the city of refuge for the failures and the
misfits. It voices the ideals of Canadian men and women busy
nation-building. It has been cynically said that the church in
England, as far as public men are concerned, lays all its emphasis on
the Eighth Commandment, and none at all on the Seventh; and that the
church in the United States lays all its emphasis on the Seventh
Commandment and none at all on the Eighth. I do not think a politician
could be a special acrobat with either of these Commandments and stay
in public life in Canada. The clergy would "peel off" those coats and
roll up their sleeves and get into the fight. There would be a lot of
mud-slinging; but the culprit would go--as not a few have gone in
recent years.
IV
Deeply grounded, then, so deeply that the Canadian is unconscious of
it, put the belief in the economic principle of vested rights! Still
more deeply grounded, put a belief in religious ideals as a working
hypothesis! Does any other factor enter deeply in Canadians' every-day
living? Yes--next to economic beliefs and religious beliefs, I should
put love of outdoor sport as a prime factor in determining Canadian
character.
Professional sport has comparatively little place in Canada, though
professional baseball has gained a firm foothold in the Northwest,
where the American influence is strong, while the International League
reaches over the boundary in the East. But it is the amateur who
enjoys most favor. If a picked team of bank clerks and office hands
and young mechanics in Winnipeg practises up in hockey and comes down
from Winnipeg and licks the life out of a team in Montreal or Ottawa,
or gets licked, the whole population goes hockey mad. This churchly
nation will gamble itself blue in the face with bets and run up gate
receipts to send a professional home sick to bed, and I have known of
employers forgiving youngsters who bet and lost six months' salary in
advance. Montreal will cheer Winnipeg just as wildly when Winnipeg
wins in Montreal, as Winnipeg will cheer Montreal when Montreal wins in
Winnipeg. It is not the winning. It is the playing of clean good
sport that elicits the applause. The same of curling, of football, of
cricket, of rowing, of canoeing, of snowshoeing, of yachting, of
skeeing, of running. When an Indian won the Marathon, he was lionized
almost to his undoing. When hardest frost used to come, I knew a dear
old university professor, who would have considered it sin to touch the
ace of spades, who used to hie him down to the rink with "bessom" and
"stane" and there curl on the ice till his toes almost froze on his
feet; and one Episcopal clergyman used to have hard work holding back
hot words of youthful habit on the golf links; and his people loved him
both because he golfed and because he almost said things, when he
golfed. They would rather have a clergyman who golfed and knew "a cuss
word" when he saw it, than a saint who couldn't wield a club and might
faint at such words as golf elicits.
In one of Canada's best rowing crews, a millionaire merchant was the
acting captain of the crew and among his men were a printer, an
insurance canvasser, a bank clerk, a clerk in a dry goods store. In
one of the most famous hockey teams was a bicycle repairer. Sport in
Canada, as in the United States, is the most absolute democracy. I can
think of no man in Canada who has attained a permanently good place in
social life through catering to women's favor with dandified
mannerisms, though not a few have got a leg up to come most terrible
croppers; but I do think of many men to whom all doors are permanently
open because they are such clean first-rate sportsmen. Until the last
ten years of opulent fevered prosperity came to the Dominion, Canada
might have been described as a nation of athletes. This does not mean
that Canada neglected work for play. It means that she worked so
robustly because she had developed strength on the field of play.
Three truths are almost axiomatic about nations and sport. It is said
that a nation is as it spends its leisure; that nations only win
battles as their boys have played in their youth; that man's work is
only boy's sport full grown. The religious little catechist may win
prizes in the parochial school; but if he doesn't learn to take kicks
and give them good and hard, in play, he will not win life's prizes.
Fair play, nerve, poise, agility, act that jumps with thought, the
robust fronting of life's challenge--these are learned far more on the
toboggan slide where you may break your neck, in a snowshoe scamper,
than poring over books, or in a parlor. I do not know that Canada has
analyzed it out, but she lives it. Young Canada may be bumptious, raw,
crude. Time tones these things down; but she is not tired before she
has begun the race. She is not nerve-collapsed and peeved and
insincere.
V
As to why Canada has no distinctive and great literature--I confess
frankly I do not know. England had only Canada's population when a
Shakespeare and a Milton rose like stars above the world. Scotland and
Ireland both have a smaller population than Canada, and their ballads
are sung all over the world. Canada has had a multitude of sweet
singers pipe the joys of youth, but as life broadened and deepened
their songs did not reach to the deeps and the heights. Something
arrested development. They did not go on. Why? It may be that
literature rises only as high as its fountain springs--the people; and
that the people of Canada have not yet realized themselves clearly
enough to recognize or give articulation to a national literature. It
may be that Canada is living her literature rather than writing it. If
Scott had not found appreciation for his articulation of Scottish life
and history in poems and novels, he would not have gone on. In fact,
when Byron eclipsed Scott in public favor as a poet, Scott stopped
writing poetry. It may be that Canada has not become sufficiently
unified--cemented in blood and suffering--to appreciate a literature
that distinctively interprets her life and history. It may be that she
has been swamped by the alien literature of alien lands, for the
writers of English to-day are legion. Or it may be the deeper cause
beneath the dearth of world literature just now--lack of that peace,
that joyous calm, that repose of soul and freedom from distraction,
that permits a creator to give of his best.
One sometimes hears Canadians--particularly in England--accused of
crudity in speech. I confess I like the crudities, the rawness, the
colloquialisms. They smack of the new life in a new land. I should be
sorry if Canadians ever began to Latinize their sentences, to "can"
their speech and pickle it in the vinegar pedantry of the peeved
study-chair critic. Because it is a land of mountain pines and
cataracts and wild winds, I would have their speech smack always of
their soil; and I would bewail the day that Canadians began to measure
their phrases to suit the yard stick of some starveling pedant in a
writer's attic, who had never been nearer reality than his own
starvation. I can see no superiority in the Englishman's
colloquialisms of "runnin'," "playin'," "goin'," to the Canadian's "cut
it out," "get out," "beat it." One is the slovenliness of languor.
The other is the rawness of vigor.
VI
When one comes to consider woman in a nation's life, it is always a
little provoking to find "woman" and "divorce" coupled together; for
there never was a divorce without a man involved as well as a woman.
The marriage tie is not easily dissolved in Canada. Divorce pleas must
go before a committee of the Federal Senate. Without legal fees, it
costs five hundred dollars to obtain a divorce in Canada; with fees,
one thousand dollars; so that Canada's divorce record is 1,530 for
7,800,000 of population in 1913; or one divorce for every 5,000 people.
This seems a laudably low record, and Canada takes great credit to
herself for it. I am not sure she should, for her system makes divorce
a luxury available only to the rich. Divorce is not a cause. It is a
result. I am not sure that people ill-mated do not do more harm to
their children staying together than separating; and marriage is not
for the man or the woman, but for the race. This opinion, however,
would be considered heresy in Canada, and a great many factors conspire
to help woman's status in the Dominion. To begin with, there are half
a million more men than women. A woman need never give herself so
cheaply as to spend her life paying for her precipitancy. She is not a
superfluous. Another point in which some other countries could emulate
Canada is in the protection of women and children. A woman ill-mated
has the same protection under the law as though she were single.
Infringement of her rights is punishable with penalties varying from
seven years and the lash to death. A man living on a woman's illicit
earnings is not coddled by ward heelers and let off with light bail, as
in certain notorious California cases. He is given the lash and seven
years. Such offenders seldom come up for sentence twice.
On the other hand, compared to punishments for property violations, the
protection of women and children is ridiculously inadequate. A man
abducting a girl is liable to sentence of five years; a man stealing a
cow, to sentence of fourteen years. Counterfeiting coin is punished by
life imprisonment. Misusing a ward or employee is punished by two
years' imprisonment. This remissness is no index to a subordinate
position by women in Canada. It is rather simple testimony to the fact
that before the influx of alien peoples certain types of crime were
unknown.
There is little of sex unrest in Canada. In fact, sex as sex is not in
evidence, which is a symptom of wholesome relationships. Perhaps I
should say there is little of that feminine discontent and revolt so
strident in older lands. This I attribute to two facts: an overplus of
men, and boundless opportunity and freedom for the expenditure of
unused energies. In certain sections of England, women over-balanced
men before the war as ten to one. What the over-balance will be after
the war, one can only guess. When women who want to marry are not
married, or married to types different from themselves--which must
happen when the sexes are in disproportion--unhappiness must result.
Woman is at war, she knows not with what. When women who are full of
energy and ability have nothing to do, there is bound to be
unhappiness. In Canada a woman has perfect freedom to do anything she
chooses. Her opportunity is limited only by her own personality. What
she wills, she may, if she can. If she can't, then her quarrel must be
with self, not with life. Children can not choose their parents; but a
woman can choose the parent of her child; and when her choice is high
and wide and happy, it bodes better for the race than when conditions
have forced her into an alliance that must be more or less of an armed
truce on a low plane.
As an example of the fairness of marriage laws in Canada, if a
fur-trader marry an Indian woman--according to the custom of the tribe,
simply taking her to wife without ceremony, she is his legal heir, and
her children are his legal heirs. This was established in a famous
trial in the courts of Quebec. A trader became contractor and
politician. When prosperity came, he discarded his Indian wife and
married an English girl. On his death the Indian wife and children
sued for his estate. It was awarded to them by the courts and
established a precedent that guaranteed social status to the children
of such unions. This is one of the things that easterners can not
comprehend. I have never heard the opprobrious phrase "squaw man" used
on the Canadian frontier; and descendants of the MacKenzies, the
Isbisters, the Hardistys, the Strathconas, the Macleans, the
MacLeods--blush, not with shame but pride, in acknowledging the Indian
strain of blood.
The fact that some of the western provinces notoriously ignore a
woman's property rights in her husband's estate--is sometimes quoted to
prove the unfairness of Canada's laws to women. I am no defender of
those lax property laws. They ought to, and will soon, be changed; but
let us give even the devil his dues; and the devil in this case was the
mad real estate speculation. When thousands of adventurers poured in
from everywhere and began buying and selling and reselling property, it
impeded quick turn overs to reserve the absent wife's third.
Sometimes, as in the case of a famous actor, the wives numbered four.
Ordinarily in Canada--certainly in eastern provinces--a third is the
wife's reserve unless she sign it away. How four wives could each have
a third was a poser for the speculator and the knot was cut by ignoring
the wife's claims. Now that the fevered mad mania of speculation is
over this remissness of the law in two provinces will doubtless be
remedied.
CHAPTER XV
EMIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT
I
You can ascribe the different characteristics of different nations to
the topography of their native land--up to a certain point only.
Beyond that the difference becomes one of psychology and soul rather
than geography, and that is why nations hold to a large extent their
destiny in their own hands. Undoubtedly the unfenced illimitable
reaches of the prairie have reacted on the human soul, unshackling it
from the discouragements of failure in the past and have given a sense
of freedom that explains the dauntless optimism of the West; but if the
people who went to the West had not had the courage to face the
hardships of the pioneer, their optimism could not have triumphed over
difficulties. The very qualities that sent pioneers forth on the trail
to the setting sun guaranteed their success as empire builders.
Japan was long an island empire, but it was only when the soul of that
empire awakened to the Western Renaissance that Japan became a world
power. The German people existed on the map many centuries before they
came into existence as a nation. It was only when the national idea
came that Germany became a power. Likewise of England as mistress of
the seas--the source of her commerce and wealth. England had been a
seagirt nation from the beginning of time. It was only when by the
defeat of the Armada England learned what mastery of the sea meant that
she shot into front rank as a great world power.
How does all this bear on Canada? It is a puzzling question. Ask the
average Canadian why the development of Canada has been slow; and he
denies that it has been slow; or he proves that it is a good thing it
has been slow; or he compares Canada's progress with that of some other
country which has gone too fast, or too slow. All this is a mere
clever dodging of fact. Blinking one's eyes to a fact doesn't
eliminate the fact.
II
What are the facts?
De Monts' first charter to Arcadia dates 1605. The first charter for
Virginia plantations comes in 1606, and the first New England charter
dates the same year. The United States and Canada are both fertile.
They have almost the same area in square miles. One has a population
of over ninety millions and a foreign commerce of four billions. The
other has a population of about eight millions and a foreign commerce
of one billion. One raises from seven hundred to nine hundred million
bushels of wheat; the other, from two hundred to three hundred
millions. One produces thirty million metric tons of steel a year; the
other, less than a million tons; one is worth a hundred and fifty
billion dollars, the other perhaps ten billions.
It is explained that the northern belt of Canada lying in a semi-arctic
zone should hardly be included in comparisons with the area of the
United States lying altogether in a temperate zone; but if cultivation
is proving one thing more than another, it is that Canada's arctic
region recedes a little every year, and her isothermal lines run a
little farther north every year. To put it differently, it is being
yearly more and more proved that the degree of northern latitude
matters less in vegetable growth than heretofore thought, if the arable
land be there; for the simple reason that twenty hours of sunlight from
May to September force as rapid a growth as twelve to fifteen hours'
sunlight from March to September, and the product grown in the North
may be superior to that grown farther south. Wheat from Manitoba is
better than wheat from Georgia. Apples from Niagara have a quality not
found in apples--say from the Gulf states. All things will not grow in
northern latitudes. You can't raise corn. You can't raise peaches. I
doubt if any apple will ever be found suitable for the northwestern
prairie. At any rate, it has not yet been found.
Half a century ago the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company in
perfectly good faith testified before a committee of the Imperial
Commons that farming could never be carried on in Rupert's Land, or
what are now known as Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. He proved
that grain could not be grown there. I recall the day when the idea of
fall wheat west of Lake Superior elicited a hoot of derision. I have
lived to wander through fields of six hundred acres north of the
Saskatchewan. Thirty years ago any one suggesting settlement on Peace
River, or at Athabasca, would have been regarded as a visionary fool.
Yet wheat is ground into flour on Peace River, and the settler is at
Athabasca; and soft Kansas fall wheat sent to Peace River has by a few
years' transplanting been transformed into Number One Hard spring
wheat. Canada's arctic belt has shrunk a little each year, and her
isothermal lines gone a little farther north. The only limit to growth
in the North Country is the nature of the soil. I am not, of course,
speaking of the Arctic slope, but I am of the great belt of wild land
north of Saskatchewan River. And where the arable land stops, the
great fur farm of the world begins---a fur farm which may change but
can never be exhausted. Of course, Canada has a great northern belt of
land that is not arable, but in that belt are such precious minerals as
were discovered in the Yukon. Land that can't be plowed isn't
necessarily waste land, and Canada's great northern belt is partly
balanced by the desert belt of the Southwest in the United States--the
perpetual Indian land of Uncle Sam.
III
With this argument--you come back just where you began. The two
countries were first settled almost contemporaneously. Their area is
not far different. They are both fertile. Each has great
belts--having spent months in each belt, I hesitate to call them
barren--of land that can not be plowed. Why has one country progressed
with such marvelous rapidity; and the other progressed in fits and
starts and stops? Why did a million and a half Canadians--or
one-fourth the native population--leave Canada for the United States?
The Canadian retort always is--for the same reason that two million
Americans have left the United States for Canada--to better their
position. But the point is--why was it these million and a half
Canadians found better opportunities in the United States than in
Canada? Opportunities knock at every man's door if he has ears to
hear, but they are usually supposed to knock loudest and oftenest in
the new land. It is a truism that there are ten chances on the
frontier for a man to rise compared to one in the city. One can
understand American settlers thronging to Canada. They have used and
made good the opportunities in their own land. Now they are sending
their sons to a land of more opportunities. The Iowa farmer who has
succeeded on his three hundred and twenty acres sends forth his sons
each to succeed on his one hundred and sixty acres in Canada; or he
sells his own land for one hundred dollars an acre and forthwith buys a
thousand acres in Canada. When the farmers of Ontario flocked to
Wisconsin and Michigan and Minnesota and the two Dakotas, their land
was worth thirty per cent. less than when they bought it. To-day that
same land is worth one hundred per cent. more than for what they sold
it.
It is easy to look over another land and diagnose its ills. Any
Canadian will acknowledge that Ireland's population dropped from
8,500,000 in 1850 to 4,400,000 in 1908 solely owing to mismanagement,
if not gross misgovernment; but he will not acknowledge that his own
country lost a million and a half people from the same cause. Ireland
lost her population at the rate of one hundred thousand a year for
forty years, and that lost population helped to build up some of the
greatest cities in the United States. The Irish vote is to-day a
dominant power solely owing to that population lost to Ireland. It is
no exaggeration to say that from 1880 to 1890 Canada lost her
population to the United States at a higher rate than one hundred
thousand a year. Why?
Go back a little in history! The most pugnacious United Empire
Loyalist that ever trekked from the American colonies to Ontario and
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would hardly deny that Canada was grossly
misgoverned under the French régime. Laborers were forced to work
unpaid on fortifications, on roads, on governors' palaces. The farmer
was taxed to death in tithes to the seignior. Shipping was confined to
French vessels owned by royal favorites. Fishing was permitted only
under a license. The fur trade was a corrupt monopoly held by a closed
ring round the Royal Intendant. New France was so mis-governed that
the sons of the best families took to the woods and the _Pays d'en
Haut_--to which fact we owe the exploration of three-quarters of the
continent.
And the most pugnacious Loyalist will hardly deny that under the
British régime from 1759 to Durham's Report in 1840 the mismanagement
was almost as gross as the misgovernment under the French. If any one
entertain doubts on that score, let him look up the record on grants of
thousands of acres to favorites of the Family Compact; on peculations
of public funds in Quebec by irresponsible executives; on mistrials of
disorders in the Fur Country, when North-Wester and Hudson's Bay
traders cut each other's throats; on the constant bicker and bark
between Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec, which kept the country
rent by religious dissensions when men should have been empire-building.
Set down the cause of Canada's slow progress up to 1840 to
misgovernment. Durham's Report remedied all that; and confederation
followed in 1867. Was Canada's progress as swift after 1867 as it
ought to have been? Examine a few figures:
In 1790 the United States population was four millions.
In 1800 the United States population was five millions.
In 1914 the United States population was ninety-eight millions.
In 1891 Canada's population was five millions.
In 1900 Canada's population was five million three hundred thousand.
In 1914 Canada's population was seven million eight hundred thousand.
In point of population Canada is just one hundred years behind the
United States. Why? Granted her foreign trade is one-fourth as great
as that of the United States. How is it that a people with such a
genius for success in foreign trade have been so dilatory in their work
of nation-building? Slow progress can no longer be ascribed to
misgovernment. Her system of justice is one of the most perfect in the
world. Her parliamentary representation could hardly be more complete.
No people has stricter bit and rein on executive ministers. Through an
anguish of travail Canada has worked out an excellent system of
self-government. Why is her progress still slow?
Of course one reason for her slow progress in the past was the
impression that long prevailed regarding Canada's climate and
agricultural possibilities. The officials of the Hudson's Bay Company
contended that the Northwest was unfit for settlement, and it was only
within recent times that the contrary view gained a hearing and proved
to be true. With vast tracts of unoccupied land in the milder climate
of the United States still open to settlement and with Canadians
themselves denying that the great Northwest could be cultivated, it is
not strange that most immigrants passed Canada by. Furthermore in
those days the glamour of democracy fascinated dissatisfied Europeans
who swarmed to the New World. Canada was practically as free as the
United States, but she was a possession of the British Crown, and many
emigrants, especially from the Emerald Isle, preferred to try the
experiment of living in a republic.
But there are other reasons. It was after the Civil War that the
American high tariff struck Canada an unintended but nevertheless
staggering blow. She had no market. She had to build up
transportation system and trade routes, but this was well under way by
1890. Has her progress since 1890 kept pace with the United States?
One has but to compare the population between the Mississippi and
Seattle with the population between Red River and Vancouver to have the
answer to this question.
Is it something in the soul; a habit of discouragement; of marking
time; of fighting shy on the defensive instead of jumping into the
aggressive; of self-derogation; of criticism instead of construction;
of foreshortened vision? A diagnosis can be made from symptoms. I set
down a few of the symptoms. There may be many more, and the thinker
must trace up--a surgeon would "guess"--his own diagnosis.
IV
If it were not such a tiresome task, it could be shown from actual
quotations that there is not a paper published in Canada that at some
time during the year does not deliver itself of sentiments regarding
the United States which may be paraphrased thus: "We thank God we are
not as Thou art!" Now the point may be well taken; and Canada should
be thankful to God (and keep her powder dry) that crimes are punished,
that innocence is protected, that vice is not a factor in civic
government; but it is a dangerous attitude for any people to assume
toward another nation. It does not turn the soul-searchings in on
self. It does not get down beneath the skin of things; down, for
instance, beneath a hide of self-righteousness to meanness or nobility
of motive. A big ship always has barnacles; the United States is a big
ship, and she keeps her engine going and her speed up and in the main
her prow headed to a big destiny. It ill becomes a little ship to bark
out--but let it be left unsaid!
While this curious assumption of superiority exists internationally,
there is the most contradictory depreciation nationally. "We," they
say, "are only a little people." So was Switzerland. So was Greece.
So was Belgium. So, indeed, were the Jews.
You never mention a Jim Hill, a Doctor Osler, a Schurman, a Graham
Bell--or a host of similar famous expatriates--in a Canadian gathering
but some one utters with a pride of gratulation that fairly beams from
the face: "They are Canadians." Canada is proud these famous men are
Canadians. It has always struck me as curious that she wasn't
ashamed--ashamed that she lost their services from her own
nation-building. To my personal knowledge three of these men had to
borrow the money to leave Canada. Their services were worth untold
wealth to other lands. Their services did not give them a living in
Canada.
At time of writing--with only three exceptions--Canada imports the
presidents of her great universities; though she exports some of the
greatest presidents and deans who have ever graced Princeton, Cornell,
Oxford. She thinks she can not afford to keep these men. Is it a
matter of money, at all; or of appreciative intelligence? No matter
what the cost, can Canada afford to lose them from her young nationals?
It is a truism that to my knowledge has not a single exception that
Canada has never given the imprimatur of her approval to a writer, to
an inventor, to a scholar, to an artist, till he has gone abroad and
received the stamp of approval outside his own land. By the time Paul
Peel was acclaimed in Paris and Horatio Walker in New York each was
lost to his own land. It is an even wager nine Canadians out of ten do
not know who these men were or for what they were acclaimed. Try it as
an experiment on your first train acquaintance.
You can not read early records of Congress without the most astounding
realization that Washington, Monroe, Jefferson, Adams, big statesmen
and little politicians, voicing solemn convictions or playing to the
gallery--all were deadly in earnest and serious about the business of
building up a nation. They never lost sight of the idea of conserving,
up-building, protecting, extending their country. The national idea is
in Canada so recent that most men have not grasped it. "Build a navy?"
Canada hooted and made the vote a party football. "Canada should have
her own shipyards?" Men look at you! What for? "Panama will reverse
the world conduits of trade." Bah! Hot-air! I have heard these and
similar comments not once but a thousand times.
Americans say of opportunity--"How much can we make of it?" Canadians
say--"How little can we pay for it?" And each takes out of opportunity
exactly the amount of optimism put into it.
So one could go down the list enumerating symptoms, but beneath them
all, it is plain, lies a cause psychological, not physical. It may be
a psychology of discouragement and disparagement from long years of
hardship, but whatever it is, if Canada is to be as big nationally as
she is latitudinally, as great in soul as in area, she must get rid of
this negative thing in her attitude to herself and life. It makes for
solidity, but it also makes for stolidity. Nations do not grow great
by what they leave undone. Psychologists say all mentality divides
itself into two great classes: those giving off negative response to
stimulus; those giving off positive. One class of people stands for
carping criticism; the other, for constructive attempts. One is safe,
to be sure, and sane; and the other is distinctively rash and
dangerous; but of rashness and danger is valor made. "I know thy
works," said the Voice to the Laodiceans, "that thou art neither hot
nor cold: I would thou wert hot or cold . . . because thou art
lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue thee out of my mouth."
And the Voice is the verdict of destiny to every nation that has taken
its place at the world's council board.
CHAPTER XVI
DEFENSE
Having spent a hundred years working out a system of government almost
perfect in its democracy, and having spent fifty more years working out
a system of trade and transportation that gives Canada sixth rank in
the gross foreign trade of the world nations--one would think the
Dominion entitled to lie back resting on her laurels reaping the reward
that is undoubtedly hers.
But nations can no more rest in their development than men. To stop
means to go back. To rest means to rust, and Canada to-day must face
one of the most serious problems in her national history. What is
worth having is worth holding, and what is worth holding must always be
defended. The strong man does not go out challenging a fight. The
very fact that he is strong prevents other men challenging him to a
fight, and Canada must face the need of national defense.
So remote did the need of national defense seem to Canada that as late
as May of 1913 the Senate rejected Premier Borden's plan for Canada to
contribute her quota in cost to the British navy. The Laurier
government had proposed building a small navy for the Dominion. This
was hooted by the French Nationalists, and when the Borden government
came into power, the policy was modified from building a small navy to
bearing a quota of the cost of a navy built and equipped by Imperial
power. In the rejection of this policy, the composition of the Senate
and Commons should be observed. The Commons were Conservative, or
supporters of Premier Borden, and the Government Navy Bill passed the
Commons by one hundred and one to sixty-eight. The Nationalists voted
with the opposition or the Liberals. The Nationalists are the small
French party pledged against Canada's intervention in European affairs.
Laurier having been in power for almost two decades, the Senate was, of
course, tinged with the Liberal policy. They could not completely
reject a naval policy without repudiating Laurier's former policy; so
they rejected the Borden Naval Bill on the ground that it ought to have
been submitted to the electorate. The vote in the Senate was fifty-one
to twenty-seven. In the Senate were fifty-four Liberals--or supporters
of Laurier--and thirty-two Conservatives, or supporters of Borden. In
other words, so remote did the possible need of defense seem that both
parties played politics with it.
For a hundred years Canada had been at peace. The Rebellion of 1837
can hardly be called a war. In 1870 the Indian unrest known as the
First Riel Rebellion had occurred, but this amounted to little more
than a joy jaunt for the troops under Lord Wolseley to Red River. The
Riel Uprising of 1885 was more serious; but every Canadian who gave the
matter any thought at all knew there had been genuine cause for
grievance among the half-breeds; and fewer lives were lost in this
rebellion than in many a train or mine accident. Canada sent to the
South African War troops who distinguished themselves to such an extent
as to give a feeling of almost false security to the Dominion. On
every frontier are men born to the rifle and the saddle--ready-made
troopers; but as the frontier shrinks, this class deteriorates and
softens.
For a hundred years Canada has been at peace with the outside world.
For three thousand miles along her southern border dwells a neighbor
who has often been a rival in trade and with whom Canada has had many a
dispute as to fisheries and boundaries and tariff, but along this
borderland of three thousand miles exists not a single fort, points not
a single gun, watches not a single soldier. It is a question if
another such example of international friendship without international
pact exists in the history of the world. Where international
boundaries in Europe bristle with forts and cannon, international
boundaries in America are a shuttle of traffic back and forth of great
migrations of population, of great waves of friendship and good feeling
which all the trade rivalries and hostile tariffs of a half century
have failed to stem. The pot shot of some fishery patrol across the
nets of a poacher on the wrong side of the international line fails to
excite anybody. Even if some flag lunatic full of whisky climbs a
flagstaff and tears down the other country's national emblem--the
boundary does not go on fire. The authorities cool such alcoholic
patriotism with a water hose, or ten days in the lock-up. The papers
run a half column, and that is all there is about it.
So why should Canada become excited over national defense? On the
south is a boundary without a fort, without a gun, guarded by a
powerful nation with a Monroe Doctrine challenging the world neither to
seize nor colonize in the Western Hemisphere. On the east for three
thousand miles washes the Atlantic, on the west for five thousand miles
the Pacific--what has Canada to fear? "Why," asked the Conservatives,
"should we support the Laurier policy of building a tin-pot navy?"
"Why," retorted the Liberals when Laurier went out and Borden went in,
"should we support the Borden Navy Bill to contribute good Canadian
cash to a British navy?"
Besides, in the back of Canada's collective head--as it were--in a sort
of unspoken consciousness was the almost religious conviction that the
Dominion had contributed her share toward Imperial defense in her
transportation system. Had she not granted fifty-five million acres of
land for the different transcontinentals and spent far over a billion
in loans and subsidies and guarantees? Value that land at ten dollars
an acre. That was tantamount to an expenditure of two hundred dollars
per capita for a transportation system of use to the empire in Imperial
defense. Seventy trainloads of Hindu troops were rushed across Canada
in cars with drawn blinds and transported to Europe before the enemy
knew such a movement was contemplated. Should Turkey ever cut off
Suez, Canada and Panama would be England's route to India. In
addition, Canada considers herself the granary of the empire. Should
Suez ever cut off the path to India and Australia, what colony could
feed England but Canada?
You will note that Canada's thought concerned the empire, not herself.
The reason for the navy bills proposed by both parties has been
Imperial defense. That Canada might some day be compelled to fight for
her own existence--and fight to the death for it--never dawned on her
legislators; and their unconsciousness of national peril is the
profoundest testimony to the pacific intentions of the United States
that could be given. It seems almost treason at this era of world war
to call Canada's attention to the fact that the greatest danger is not
to Imperial defense. It is to Canada's national defense. Uncle Sam
has been Canada's big brother, but what if when the danger came, his
arms were tied in a conflict of his own? Whatever comes to menace the
United States will menace the safety of Canada; and with swift
cruisers, Europe and Asia are nearer Canada to-day than Halifax is near
Vancouver. Either city could be attacked by foreign powers before
military aid could be transported across the width of Canada. We are
nearer Europe to-day than the North was near the South in the Civil
War. It takes a shorter time to transport troops across Atlantic or
Pacific than it formerly took to send a Minnesota regiment to Maryland.
Including Quebec, Montreal, old Port Royal, Annapolis, Louisburg and
the forts on Hudson Bay, Canada's chief strongholds of defense have
been taken and retaken seven times by European enemies in one hundred
and sixty years--between 1629 and 1789. Day was when Quebec
fortifications cost so much that the King of France wanted to know if
they were laid in gold. Before the fall of Quebec in 1759,
Louisburg--a forgotten fortress of Cape Breton--was considered one of
France's strongholds. Have Canadians forgotten the frightful wreck of
the British fleet in the St. Lawrence in 1711 under Sir Havender
Walker; or the defeat of the admiralty ships manned by the Hudson's Bay
fur-traders up off Port Nelson in 1697 by Lemoyne d' Iberville? Before
La Pérouse reduced Churchill it was regarded as a second Gibraltar.
Yet Churchill and Nelson and Quebec and Louisburg all fell before a
foreign foe, and Europe is nearer to-day than she was in those eras of
terrible defeat. What additional fortifications or defenses has Canada
to be so cocksure that history can never repeat itself? She is not
resting under the Monroe Doctrine. It is a safe wager that many
Canadians have never heard of the Monroe Doctrine. Besides, the minute
Canada voluntarily enters a European war, does she forfeit American
"protection" under that Monroe Doctrine? The idea of being "protected"
by any power but her own--and Britain's--right arm Canada would scout
to derision. Yet what are her own national defenses?
Her regular forces ordinarily consist of less than three thousand men;
her volunteer forces of forty-five to sixty thousand. By law it is
provided that the Dominion militia consist of all male inhabitants of
the age of eighteen and under sixty, divided into four classes: from
eighteen to thirty years of age unmarried or widowers; from thirty to
forty-five unmarried or widowers; from eighteen to forty-five married
or widowers; men of all classes between forty-five and sixty. In
emergency, those liable to service would be called in this order. The
period of service is three years. Up to the present service has been
voluntary, and the period of drill lasts sixteen days. Except for
fishing patrols and insignificant cruisers, Canada has no marine force,
absolutely none, though she can requisition the big merchant liners
which she subsidizes. Canada has an excellent military school in
Kingston and a course of instruction at Quebec, but the majority of
graduates from these centers go into service in the British army simply
because there is no scope for them in their own land. At Esquimalt off
Victoria, British Columbia, and at Halifax, Nova Scotia, before the
outbreak of the present war, were Imperial naval stations; but these
were being reduced to a minimum. Perhaps to these defenders should be
added some thirty thousand juvenile cadets trained in the public
schools, but if one is to set down facts not fictions, much of the
training of the volunteers resolves itself into a yearly picnic. One
wonders on what Canada is pinning her faith in security from attack in
case disaster should come to the British navy. Whether Canada is
conscious of it or not, her greatest defense is in the virility of her
manhood. Her men are neither professorial nor an office type. They
are big outdoor men who shoot well because they have shot from boyhood
and lived a life in the open. All this, however, is not national
defense. It is unused but splendid material for national defense.
Up to the outbreak of the present war Canada has not spent ten million
a year on national defense. That is--for the security of peace for a
century, she has spent less than one dollar and fifty cents per head a
year. A year ago naval bills were rejected. To-day there are few
people in Canada who would not acknowledge that Canada is spending too
little on defense. Stirred profoundly but, as is the British way,
saying little, the Dominion is setting herself in earnest to the big
new problem. To the European War, Canada has sent sixty thousand men;
and she has promised one hundred thousand more. A nation that can
unpreparedly deliver on such promises to the drop of the hat can take
care of her defense, and that may be Canada's next national job.
Would any power have an object in crippling Canada? The question is
answered best by another. If Suez were cut off and Canada were cut
off, where would England look for her food supply? And if it were to
the advantage of a hostile power to cripple Canada, could she be
conquered? Any one familiar with Canada will answer without a moment's
hesitation. She could be attacked. Her coastal cities could be laid
waste as the cities of Belgium. To reach the interior of Canada, an
enemy must do one of three things, all next to impossible: penetrate
the St. Lawrence--a treacherous current--for a thousand miles exposed
to submarine and mine and attack from each side; cross the United
States and so violate American sovereignty, cross the Rockies to reach
inland. Any one of these feats is as impossible as the conquest of
Switzerland or the Scottish Highlands. Canada could be attacked and
laid waste; she could be financially ruined by attack and set back
fifty years in her progress; but she could no more be conquered than
Napoleon conquered Russia. The conquest would be at a cost to destroy
the conqueror, and the conqueror could no more stay than Napoleon
stayed in Moscow. Canada has a vast, an illimitable back country--the
area of all Russia; and to the lakes and wild rivers and mountain
passes of that country her people are born and bred. To her climate
her people are born and bred. The climate would take care of the rest.
You can't exactly despatch motors and motor guns down swamps for a
hundred miles and over cataracts and through mountain passes on the
perpendicular. Canada's back country is her perpetual city of refuge.
Nevertheless, the day of dependence on false security is past.
National status implies national defense, and at time of writing the
indications are that the whole military system of the Dominion will be
put on a new basis, training to patriotism and defense and service from
the public school up through the university.
"Then what becomes of your co-eds and woman movement?" a militarist
asked.
The question can be answered in the words of a great doctor--more men
die on the field of battle from lack of women nurses than ever die from
the bullet of the enemy. The time seems to have come for woman's place
on the firing line. That womanhood which gives of life to create life
now claims the right to go out on the field of danger to conserve and
protect life; and in the embodiment of military training in public
education that, too, may be part of Canada's new national defense.
When an admiral's fleet is sunk within ten days' sail of Victoria and
Vancouver, Laurier's naval policy to build war vessels, and Borden's to
contribute to their purchase for service in the British Navy take on
different aspect to Canada; and the Dominion enters a new era in her
development, as one of the dominant powers in the North Atlantic and
the North Pacific. That is--she must prepare to enter; or sit back the
helpless Korea of America. A country with a billion dollars of
commerce a year to defend cuts economy down to the danger line when she
spends not one per cent. of the value of her foreign commerce to
protect it. Like the United States, Canada has been inclined to sit
back detached from world entanglements and perplexities. That day has
passed for Canada. She must take her place and defend her place or
lose her identity as a nation. The awakening has gone over Canada in a
wave. One awaits to see what will come of it.
Much, of course, depends upon the outcome of the great war. If Britain
and her allies triumph--and particularly if peace brings partial
disarmament--the urgency of preparation on Canada's part will be
lessened. But should Germany win or the duel be a draw, then may
Canada well gird up her loins and look to her safety.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DOMAIN OF THE NORTH
I
Canada does not like any reference to her fur trade as a national
occupation. Of course, it is no longer a national occupation. It
occupies, perhaps, two thousand whites and it may be twenty or thirty
thousand Indians. More Indians in Canada earn their living farming the
reserves than catching fur, but the Indians north of Athabasca and
Churchill and in Labrador must always earn their living fur hunting.
Of them there is no census, but they hardly exceed thirty thousand all
told. The treaty Indians on reserves now number a hundred thousand.
Yet, though only two thousand whites are fur-trading in Canada, no
interpretation of Canadian life is complete without reference to that
far domain of the North, where the hunter roams in loneliness, and the
night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound
breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the
call of the wolf pack. It will be recalled that Canada's first
settlers came in two main currents from two idealistic motives. The
French came to convert the Indians, not to found empire, and the
English Loyalists came from the promptings of their convictions. Both
streams of settlers came from idealistic motives, but both had to live,
and they did it at first by fur hunting. Jean Ba'tiste, the Frenchman,
who might have been a courtier when he came, promptly doffed court
trappings and donned moccasins and exchanged a soldier's saber for a
camp frying-pan and kept pointing his canoe up the St. Lawrence till he
had threaded every river and lake from Tadousac to Hudson Bay and the
Rockies. It was the pursuit of the little beaver that paid the piper
for all the discovering and exploring of Canada. When John Bull
came--also in pursuit of ideals--he, too, in a more prosperous way
promptly exchanged the pursuit of ideals for the pursuit of the little
beaver. It was the little beaver that led the way for Radisson, for La
Salle, for La Verandryé, for MacKenzie, for Fraser, for Peter Skene
Ogden, from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia, from the Athabasca to the
Sacramento.
While all this is of the past, the heritage of a fur-hunting ancestry
has entered into the very blood and brawn and brain of Canada in a kind
of iron dauntlessness that makes for manhood. Some of her greatest
leaders--like Strathcona and MacKenzie--have been known as "Men of the
North"; and whether they have fur-traded or not, nearly all those "Men
of the North" who have made their mark have had the iron dauntlessness
of the hunter in their blood. It is a sort of tonic from the
out-of-doors, like the ozone you breathe, which fills body and soul
with zest. Canada is sensitive to any reference to her fur trade for
fear the world regard her as a perpetual fur domain. Her northern
zones are a perpetual fur domain--we may as well acknowledge that--they
can never be anything else; and Canada should serve notice on the
softer races of the world that she does not want them. They can stand
up neither to her climate nor to her measure of a man, but far from
cause of regret, this is a thing for gratulation. Canada can never be
an overcrowded land, where soft races crowd for room, like slugs under
a board. She will always have her spacious domain of the North--a
perpetual fur preserve, a perpetual hunting ground, where dauntless
spirits will venture to match themselves against the powers of death;
and from that North will ever emerge the type of man who masters life.
II
The last chapter of the fur trade has not been written--as many assert.
The oldest industry of mankind, the most heroic and protective against
the elements--against Fenris and Loki and all those Spirits of Evil
with which northern myth has personified Cold--fur hunting,
fur-trading, will last long as man lasts. We are entering, not on the
extermination of fur, but on a new cycle of smaller furs. In the days
when mink went begging at eighty cents, mink was not fashionable. Mink
is fashionable to-day; hence the absurd and fabulous prices. Long ago,
when ermine as miniver--the garb of nobility--was fashionable and
exclusive, it commanded fabulous prices. Radicalism abolished the
exclusive garb of royalty, and ermine fell to four cents a pelt,
advanced to twenty-five cents and has sold at one dollar. To-day, mink
is the fashion, and the little mink is pursued; but to-morrow fashion
will veer with the caprices of the wind. Some other fur will come into
favor, and the little mink will have a chance to multiply as the ermine
has multiplied.
In spite of the cry of the end of fur, more furs are marketed in the
world than ever before in the history of the race--forty million
dollars' worth; twenty millions of which are handled in New York and
Chicago and St. Louis and St. Paul; some five millions passing through
Edmonton and Winnipeg and Montreal and Quebec; three millions for home
consumption, two millions plus for export. Some years ago I went
through all the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company in London from 1670
to 1824 and have transcripts of those Minutes now in my library. In
not a single year did the fur record exceed half a million dollars'
worth. Compare that to the American traffic to-day of twenty millions,
or to the three and four hundred thousand dollar cargoes that each of
the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillons' ships bears to Europe from
Canada yearly.
"How much can a good Indian hunter make in a season?" I asked a
fur-trader of the Northwest, because in nearly all accounts written
about furs, you read a wail of reproach at milady for wearing furs when
trapping entails such hardship and poverty on the part of the hunter.
"A good hunter easily earns six hundred dollars or seven hundred
dollars a winter if he will go out and not hang around the minute he
gets a little ahead. It takes from three thousand dollars to four
thousand dollars to outfit a small free-trader to go up North on his
own account. This stock he will turn over three or four times at a
profit of one hundred per cent. on the supplies. For example, ten
dollars cash will buy a good black otter up North. In trade, it will
cost from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars. On the articles of trade,
the profit will be fifty per cent. The otter will sell down at
Edmonton for from twenty dollars to thirty dollars. It's the same of
muskrat. At the beginning of the season when the kits are plentiful
and small, the trader pays nine cents for them up North. Down at the
fur market he will get from twenty-five to sixty cents for them,
according to size. There were one hundred and thirty-two thousand
muskrat came to one firm of traders alone in Edmonton one year, which
they will sell at an advance of fifty per cent."
"How much fur comes yearly to Edmonton?" I asked an Edmonton trader.
If you look at the map you will see that Edmonton is the jumping off
place to three of the greatest fur fields of North America--down
MacKenzie River to the Arctic, up Peace River to the mountain
hinterland between the Columbia and the Yukon, east through Athabasca
Lake to the wild barren land inland from Churchill and Hudson Bay.
"Well, we can easily calculate that. I know about how much is brought
in to each of the traders there."
I took pencil while he gave me the names. It totaled up to six hundred
thousand dollars' worth for 1908. When you consider that in its
palmiest old days of exclusive monopoly the Hudson's Bay Company never
sold more than half a million dollars' worth of furs a year, this total
for Edmonton alone does not sound like a scarcity of furs.
III
The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the
hunting to extinction of fur-bearing animals? I do not think so.
Take a map of the northern fur country. Take a good look at it--not
just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian government has again and again
advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of square miles
of free land. Latitudinally, that is perfectly true. Wheat-wise, it
isn't. When you go one hundred miles north of Saskatchewan River
(barring Peace River in sections) you are in a climate that will grow
wheat all right--splendid wheat, the hardest and finest in the world.
That is, twenty hours of sunlight--not daylight but sunlight--force
growth rapidly enough to escape late spring and early fall frosts; but
the plain fact of the matter is, wheat land does not exist far north of
the Saskatchewan except in sections along Peace River. What does
exist? Cataracts countless--Churchill River is one succession of
cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by
which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once
lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs--areas of amber stagnant water full
of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and
sand overgrown with coarse goose grass and "the reed that grows like a
tree," muskrat reed, a tasseled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet
high--areas of such muskeg mile upon mile. I traversed one such region
above Cumberland Lake seventy miles wide by three hundred long where
you could not find solid camping ground the size of your foot. What
did we do? That is where the uses of a really expert guide came in; we
moored our canoe among the willows, cut willows enough to keep feet
from sinking, spread oilcloth and rugs over this, erected the tents
over all, tying the guy ropes to the canoe thwarts and willows, as the
ground would not hold the tent pegs.
It doesn't sound as if such regions would ever be overrun by
settlement--does it? Now look at your map, seventy miles north of
Saskatchewan! From the northwest corner up by Klondike to the
southeast corner down in Labrador is a distance of more than three
thousand miles. From the south to north is a distance of almost two
thousand miles. I once asked a guide with a truly city air--it might
almost have been a Harvard air--if these distances were "as the crow
flies." He gave me a look that I would not like to have a guide give me
too often--he might maroon a fool on one of those swamp areas.
"There ain't no distances as the crow flies in this country," he
answered. "You got to travel 'cording as the waters collect or the ice
goes out."
Well, here is your country, three thousand by two thousand miles, a
great fur preserve. What exists in it? Very little wood, and that
small. Undoubtedly some minerals. What else exists? A very sparse
population of Indians, whose census no man knows, for it has never been
taken; but it is a pretty safe guess to say there are not thirty
thousand Indians all told in the north fur country. I put this guess
tentatively and should be glad of information from any one in a
position to guess closer. I have asked the Hudson's Bay Company and I
have asked Revillons how many white hunters and traders they think are
in the fur country of the North. I have never met any one who placed
the number in the North at more than two thousand. Spread two thousand
white hunters with ten thousand Indians--for of the total Indian
population two-thirds are women and children--over an area the size of
two-thirds of Europe--I ask you frankly, do you think they are going to
exterminate the game very fast? Remember the climate of the North
takes care of her own. White men can stand only so many years of that
lonely cold, and then they have "to come out" or they dwarf mentally
and degenerate.
Take a single section of this great northern fur preserve--Labrador,
which I visited some years ago. In area Labrador is 530,000 square
miles, two and a half times the size of France, twice the size of
Germany, twice the size of Austria-Hungary. Statistical books set the
population down at four thousand; but the Moravian missionaries there
told me that including the Eskimo who come down the coast in summer and
the fishermen who come up the coast in summer the total population was
probably seventeen thousand. Now Labrador is one of the finest game
preserves in the world. On its rocky hills and watery upper barrens
where settlement can never come are to be found silver fox--the finest
in the world, so fine that the Revillons have established a
fur-breeding post for silver fox on one of the islands--cross fox
almost as fine as silver, black and red fox, the best otter in the
world, the finest marten in America, bear, very fine Norway lynx, fine
ermine, rabbit or hare galore, very fine wolverine, fisher, muskrat,
coarse harp seal, wolf, caribou, beaver, a few mink. Is it common
sense to think the population of a few thousands can hunt out a fur
empire here the size of two Germanies? Remember it was not the hunter
who exterminated the buffalo and the beaver and the seal and the otter!
The poacher destroyed one group of sea furs; the railway and the farm
supplanted the other. West of Mackenzie River and north of British
Columbia is a game region almost similar to Labrador in its furred
habitat, with the exception that the western preserve is warmer and
more wooded. Northward from Ontario is another hinterland which from
its very nature must always be a great hunting ground. Minerals
exist--as the old French traders well knew and the latter-day
discoveries of Cobalt prove--and there is also heavy timber; but north
of the Great Clay Belt, between the Clay Belt and the Bay, lies the
impenetrable and--I think--indestructible game ground. Swamp and rock
will prevent agricultural settlement but will provide an ideal fur
preserve similar in climate to Labrador.
Traveling with Indian guides, it is always a matter of marvel and
admiration to me how the fur companies have bred into the very blood
for generations the careful nurture of all game. At one place canoeing
on Saskatchewan we heard of a huge black bear that had been molesting
some new ranches. "No take now," said the Indian. "Him fur no good
now." Though we might camp on bare rocks and the fire lay dead ash, it
was the extra Indian paddler who invariably went back to spatter it
out. You know the white's innate love for a roaring log fire in front
of the camp at night? The Indian calls that
"a-no-good-whitemen-fire-scare-away-game."
Now take another look at the map. Where the Saskatchewan makes a great
bend three hundred miles northeast of Prince Albert, it is no longer a
river--it is a vast muskeg of countless still amber water channels not
twice the width of your canoe and quaking silt islands of sand and
goose grass--ideal, hidden and almost impenetrable for small game.
Always muskeg marks the limit of big game and the beginning of the
ground of the little fellows--waupoos, the rabbit; and musquash, the
muskrat; and sakwasew, the mink; and nukik, the otter; and wuchak or
pekan, the fisher. It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions
upon millions of little pelts--hundreds of thousands of muskrat are
taken out of this muskeg alone--exceed by a hundredfold the profits on
the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross
fox and marten.
Look at the map again! North of Cumberland Lake to the next fur post
is a trifling run of two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles by
dog-train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake--more muskeg cut by
limestone and granite ridges. Here you can measure four hundred miles
east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on
the west and Hudson's Bay on the east. North of Lac du Brochet is a
straight stretch of one thousand miles--nothing but rocks and cataracts
and stunted woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them--and
sky-colored waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking
muskeg goose grass and muskrat reed, cut and chiseled and trenched by
the amber water ways.
IV
If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the
muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south
end of this field.
We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you
could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran.
Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds,
brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down
from the forests of the Rocky Mountains--such a tangle as I have never
seen in any swamp of the South--the skeleton of a moose, come to its
death by a jump among the windfall, marked the eastern limit of big
game; and presently the river was lost--not in a lake--but in a swamp.
A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air,
looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile,
evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on
the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," sixteen feet high on each
side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple
of our canoe. Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which
the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie.
We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three
openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike
canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed. MacKenzie, the half-breed
rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of
Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant
waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We
were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path
teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to
swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it--leg it" plain as a quack could
speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run,
the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length
ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped
broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be
caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady
dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.
"You old fool," said our head man, "your wing is no more broken than
mine is. We're not going to hurt your babies. Shut up there and stop
that lying."
Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more
than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her
hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl. When we drew in
for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by
the butt of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose grass, kindled
fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get
footing ashore. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when
canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up
the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac
La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a
hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man
was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter. The
cold water hardened it, and that repair carried them along to the first
birch tree affording a new strip of bark.
Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp we could hear the
laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing "wild goose" among
the trembling black poplars and whispering birches, and where we landed
at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters. In
fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with the Indian
families to prevent lapses to barbarism.
Again and again we passed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks
above the reach of animal marauders--testimony to the honesty of the
passing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized eastern city
can not boast of its denizens.
"I've gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times,"
declared the head of one of the big fur companies, "and left five
hundred dollars' worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our
way out, and when we came that same way six months afterward we never
found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians
who were passing and repassing under the food in those trees were
starving owing to the rabbit famine."
In winter this region is traversed by dog-train along the ice--a matter
of five hundred miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or six hundred to
Prince Albert and back. "Oh, no, we're not far," said a lonely-faced
Cambridge graduate fur-trader to me. "When my little boy took sick
last winter, I had to go only fifty-five miles. There happened to be a
doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge."
But even winter travel is not all easy in a fifty-below-zero climate
where you can't find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night
fire, I know the story of one fur-trader who was running along behind
his dog sleigh in this section. He had become overheated running and
had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel
shirt, fur gauntlets, corduroy trousers and moccasins. At a bend in
the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes. Before he had
thought he had sicked the dogs on them. With a yell they were off out
of sight amid the goose grass and reeds with the sleigh and his
garments. Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom
corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet. To make
matters worse, a heavy snowstorm came on. The wind was against the
direction the dogs had taken and the man hallooed himself hoarse
without an answering sound. It was two o'clock in the morning before
the wind sank and the trader found his dogs, and by that time between
sweat and cold his shirt had frozen to a board.
Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of
the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling
of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may
laugh but they all do it--make offerings of tobacco to the Granny
Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and
orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside
at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the
waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter
and life to the slow keel.
One channel but opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had
vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood
of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color
intoxications. There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese
against a flaming sky--a far honk--then stillness. Then the flackering
quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our
shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and
ripple of the dead waters among the reeds. Suddenly there lifted
against the lonely red sunset sky--a lob stick--a dark evergreen
stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or
sacred memory. We steered for it. A little flutter of leaves like a
clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we
rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch
canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba'tiste Buck--eighty years old he
was--squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to
nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than
an emperor--the first living being we had seen for a week in the
muskegs. We camped together that night on the sandbars--trading Sam
Ba'tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks. He had been
storm-stead camping in the goose grass for three days. Do you think he
was to be pitied? Don't! Three days' hunting will lay up enough meat
for Sam for the winter. In the winter he will snare some small game,
while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and
clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven
hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther
north--more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then
in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and
be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the
morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling
away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter's free
tobacco. In town Sam would be poverty-stricken, hungry, a beggar.
Here he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and
care-free than you are--peace to his aged bones!
Another night coming through the muskegs we lost ourselves. We had
left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest two
hundred miles to the next fur post by the sun, but there was no sun,
only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the
amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks. If there was any
current, it was reversed by the wind. We should have thwarted the main
muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow
the main river by taking the broadest opening. It led us into a lake
seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the
long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble
when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the
width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun'l of a
canoe to the broadside of a big wave. We scattered our dunnage and all
three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe.
Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.
Nightfall found us back in the channel again scudding before thunder
and a hurricane wind looking for a camping place. It had been a
back-breaking pace all day. We had tried to find relief by the
Indian's choppy strokes changing every third dip from side to side; we
had tried the white man's deep long pulling strokes; and by seven in
the evening with the thunder rolling behind and not a spot of dry land
visible the size of one's foot, backs began to feel as if they might
break in the middle. Our canoe and dunnage weighed close on seven
hundred pounds. Suddenly we shot out of the amber channel into a
shallow lagoon lined on each side by the high tufted reeds, but the
reeds were so thin we could see through them to lakes on each side. A
whirr above our heads and a flock of teal almost touched us with their
wings. Simultaneously all three dropped paddles--all three were
speechless. The air was full of voices. You could not hear yourself
think. We lapped the canoe close in hiding to the thin lining of
reeds. I asked, "Have those little sticks drifted down fifteen hundred
miles to this lagoon of dead water?"
"Sticks," my guide repeated, "it isn't sticks--it isn't drift--it's
birds--it's duck and geese--I have never seen anything like it--I have
lived west more than twenty years and I never heard tell of
anything--of anything like it."
Anything like it? I had lived all my life in the West and I had never
heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven
miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without
disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as
I have never seen classified or named in any book on birds. We sat
very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We
couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding
places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult
nests where the duck had congregated before their long flight south.
That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a
foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oilcloth on top; and
all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the
thwarts of the canoe. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief
trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe--the big, white
banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch
craft--with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake.
That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north
of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg
and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of
all the little furs, mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit
and ermine, the furs that clothe--not princes and millionaire, who buy
silver fox and sea otter--but you and me and the rest of us whose
object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that
one muskeg hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since
1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, came the first of the
fur-traders inland from the Bay. And the game--save in the year of the
unexplained rabbit pest--shows no sign of diminishing.
Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would
ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is
the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall
erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game preserves.
To be sure, if you ask a fur-trader, "How are furs?" he will answer,
"Poor--poorer every year." So would you if you were a fur-trader and
wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur-trader who did not
make that answer.
To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost
exterminated; but even to-day if the governments of the world,
especially Canada and the United States, would pass and enforce laws
prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea
otter for fifty years, these species would replenish themselves.
"The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The
oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts.
V
I read also that "the last chapter of the fur romance has been
written." That is the point of view of the man who spends fifty weeks
in town and two weeks in the wilds. It is not the point of view of the
man who spends two weeks in town and fifty in the wilds; of the man who
goes out beyond the reach of law into strange realms the size of Russia
with no law but his own right arm, no defense but his own wit. Though
I have written history of the Hudson's Bay Company straight from their
own Minutes in Hudson's Bay House, London, I could write more of the
romance of the fur trade right in the present year than has ever been
penned of the company since it was established away back in the year
1670.
Space permits only two examples. You recall the Cambridge man who
thought it a short distance to go only fifty-five miles by dog-train
for a doctor. A more cultured, scholarly, perfect gentleman I have
never met in London or New York. Yet when I met his wife, I found her
a shy little, part-Indian girl, who had almost to be dragged in to meet
us. That spiritual face--such a face as you might see among the
preachers of Westminster or Oxford--and the little shy Indian girl-wife
and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not
to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the
story of heartache and tragedy--I asked myself, as we stood in our tent
door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under
a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their
beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those
northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has no end.
I did not learn the story till I had come on down to civilization and
town again. That Cambridge man had come out from England flush with
the zeal of the saint to work among the Indians. In the Indian school
where he taught he had met his Fate--the thing he probably
scouted--that fragile type of Indian beauty almost fawn-like in its
elusiveness, pure spirit from the very prosaic fact that the seeds of
mortal disease are already snapping the ties to life. It is a type you
never see near the fur posts. You have to go to the far outer
encampments, where white vices have not polluted the very air. He fell
in love. What was he to do? If he left her to her fate, she would go
back to the inclement roughness of tepee life mated to some Indian
hunter, or fall victim to the brutal admiration of some of those white
sots who ever seek hiding in the very wilderness. He married her and
had of course to resign his position as teacher in the school. He took
a position with the company and lived no doubt in such happiness as
only such a spiritual nature could know; but the seeds of the disease
which gave her such unearthly beauty ripened. She died. What was to
become of the children? If he sent them back to England, they would be
wretched and their presence would be misunderstood. If he left them
with her relatives, they would grow up Indians. If he kept them he
must have a mother for them, so he married another trader's
daughter--the little half-breed girl--and chained himself to his rock
of Fate as fast as ever martyr was bound in Grecian myth; and there he
lives to-day. The mail comes in only once in three months in summer;
only once in six in winter. He is the only white man on a watery
island two hundred miles from anywhere except when the lumbermen come
to the Ridge, or the Indian agent arrives with the treaty money once a
year.
And "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written"?
"The last chapter of the fur romance" will not have been written as
long as frost and muskeg provide a habitat for furtive game, and strong
men set forth to traverse lone places with no defense but their own
valiant spirit.
The other example is of a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and
Chicago and St. Paul--Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the
Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own
words--in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid
the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing
and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening
counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around
his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in
British Columbia--a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal scale. He
had been sent eastward with a party to bring some furs across from
MacLeod Lake in the most heavily wooded mountains. It was mid-winter.
Fort MacLeod was short of provisions. On their way back travel proved
very heavy and slow. Snow buried the beaten trail, and travel off it
plunged men and horses through snow crust into a criss-cross tangle of
underbrush and windfall. The party ran out of food. It was thought if
Hall, the youngest and lightest, could push ahead on snowshoes to
Stuart Lake, he could bring out a rescue party with food.
He set off without horse or gun and with only a lump of tallow in his
pocket as food. The distance was seventy-five miles. At first he ran
on winged feet--feet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily
with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack
down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with
hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches
sticking up through the drifts. By the time you have run half a day
beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped
mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail--you are
hungry. Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to snatch
handfuls of snow to quench his thirst. At night he kindled a roaring
big white-man fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from
his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness
off, heard the muffled echo come back to him in smothered voice, and at
first streak of dawn ran on, and on, and on.
By the second night Hall had eaten all his tallow. He had also reefed
in his belt so that his stomach and spine seemed to be camping
together. The snow continued to fall. The trees swam past him as he
ran. And the snowdrifts lifted and fell as he jogged heavily forward.
Of course, he declared to himself, he was not dizzy. It was the snow
blindness or the drifts. He was well aware the second night that if he
would have let himself he would have dug a sleeping hole in the snow
and wrapped himself in a snow blanket and slept and slept; but he
thrashed himself awake, and set out again, dead heavy with sleep, weak
from fatigue, staggering from hunger; and the wings on his feet had
become weighted with lead.
He knew it was all up with him when he fell. He knew if he could get
only a half hour's sleep, it would freshen him up so he could go on.
Lots of winter travelers have known that in the North; and they have
taken the half hour's sleep; and another half hour's; and have never
wakened. Anyway, something wakened Hall. He heard the crackle of a
branch. That was nothing. Branches break to every storm, but this was
like branches breaking under a moccasin. It was unbelievable; there
was not the slightest odor of smoke, unless the dream odor of his own
delirious hunger; but not twenty paces ahead crackled an Indian fire,
surrounded by buckskin tepees, Indians warming themselves by the fire.
With an unspeakable revulsion of hope and hunger, Hall flung to his
feet and dashed into the middle of the encampment. Then a tingling
went over his body like the wakening from death, of frost to
life--blind stabbing terror obsessed his body and soul; for the fire
was smokeless, the figures were speechless, transparent, unaware of his
presence, very terribly still. His first thought was that he had come
on some camp hopeless from the disaster of massacre or starvation.
Then he knew this was no earthly camp. He could not tell how the
figures were clothed or what they were. Only he knew they were not
men. He did not even think of ghosts. All he knew was it was a death
fire, a death silence, death tepees, death figures. He fled through
the woods knowing only death was behind him--running and running, and
never stopping till he dropped exhausted across the fort doorstep at
two in the morning. He blurted out why he had come. Then he lapsed
unconscious. They filled him with rum. It was twenty-four hours
before he could speak.
"I don't know these modern theories about hallucination and delusions
and things," concluded Mr. Hall, gazing reflectively on the memories of
that night. "I'm not much on romance and that kind of thing! I don't
believe in ghosts. I don't know what it was. All I know is it scared
me so it saved my life, and it saved the lives of the rest, too; for
the relief party got out in time, though they didn't see a sign of any
Indian camp. I don't know what to make of it, unless years ago some
Indian camp had been starved or massacred there, and owing to my
unusual condition I got into some clairvoyant connection with that
past. However, there it is; and it would take a pretty strong argument
to persuade me I didn't see anything. All the other things I thought I
saw on that trip certainly existed, and it would be a queer thing if
the one thing which saved my life did not exist. That's all I know,
and you can make anything you like of it."
So while Canada resents being regarded as a fur land, her domain of the
North sends down something more than roaring winds--though winds are
good things to shake dead leaves off the soul as well as off trees.
Her domain of the North rears more than fur-bearing animals. It rears
a race with hardihood, with dauntlessness, with quiet dogged unspeaking
courage; and that is something to go into the blood of a nation. A man
who will run on snowshoes eighteen hundred miles behind a dog-train as
a Senator I know did in his youth, and a woman of middle life, who will
"come out"--as they say in the North--and study medicine at her own
expense that she may minister to the Indians where she lives--are not
types of a race to lie down whipped under Fate. Canada will do things
in the world of nations shortly. She may do them rough-handed; but
what she does will depend on the national ideals she nurtures to-day;
and into those ideals has entered the spirit of the Domain of the North.
CHAPTER XVIII
FINDING HERSELF
I
One of the questions which an outsider always asks of Canada and of
which the Canadian never thinks is--Why is Newfoundland not a part of
Canada? Why has the lonely little Island never entered confederation?
On the map Newfoundland looks no larger than the area of Manitoba
before the provincial boundaries were extended to Hudson Bay. In
reality, area has little to do with Newfoundland's importance to
England's possessions in North America. It is that part of America
nearest to Europe. If you measure it north to south and east to west
it seems about two hundred and fifty by three hundred and fifty miles;
but distance north and south, east and west, has little to do with
Newfoundland's importance to the empire. Newfoundland's importance to
the empire consists in three fundamental facts: Newfoundland is the
radiating center for the fisheries on the Grand Banks, that submarine
plateau of six hundred by one hundred and fifty miles, where are the
richest deep-sea fisheries in the world; Newfoundland lies gardant at
the very entrance to Canada's great waterways; and Newfoundland's coast
line is the most broken coast line in the whole world affording
countless land-locked, rock-ribbed deep-sea harbors to shelter all the
fighting ships of the world.
What have the deep-sea fisheries of the Grand Banks to do with a
Greater Britain Overseas? You would not ask that question if you could
see the sealing fleets set out in spring; or the whaling crews drive
after a great fin-back up north of Tilt Cove; or the schooners go out
with their dories in tow for the Grand Banks fisheries. Asked what
impressed him most in the royal tour of the present King of England
across Canada and Newfoundland several years ago, a prominent official
with the Prince answered: "Newfoundland and the prairie provinces."
"Why?" he was asked. "Men for the navy and food for the Empire." That
answer tells in a line why Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a
Greater Britain Overseas. You can't take landlubbers, put them on a
boat and have seamen. Sailors are bred to the sea, cradled in it,
salted with it for generations before they become such mariners as hold
England's ascendency on the seas of the world. They love the sea and
its roll and its dangers more than all the rewards of the land. Of
such men, and of such only, are navies made that win battles. Come out
to Kitty Vitty, a rock-ribbed cove behind St. John's, and listen to
some old mother in Israel, with the bloom of the sea still in her
wilted cheeks, tell of losing her sons in the seal fisheries of the
spring, when men go out in crews of two and three hundred hunting the
hairy seal over the ice floes, and the floes break loose, and the
blizzard comes down! It isn't the twenty or thirty or fifty dollar
bonus a head in the seal hunt that lures them to death, in darkness and
storm. It is the call, the dare, the risk, the romance of the sea born
in their own blood. Or else watch the fishing fleets up off the North
Shore, down on the Grand Banks! The schooner rocks to the silver swell
of the sea with bare mast poles. A furtive woman comes up the hatchway
and gazes with shaded eyes at passing steamers; but the men are out in
the clumsy black dories that rock like a cradle to the swell of the
sea, drawing in--drawing in--the line; or singing their sailor
chanties--"Come all ye Newfoundlanders"--as meal of pork and cod
simmers in a pot above a chip fire cooking on stones in the bottom of
the boat. It isn't the one or two hundred dollars these fishermen
clear in a year--and it may be said that one hundred dollars cleared in
a year is opulence--that holds them to the wild, free, perilous life.
It is the call of the sea in their blood. Of such men are victorious
navies made, and if Canada is to be anything more than the hanger-on to
the tail of the kite of the British Empire, she, too, must have her
navy, her men of the sea, born and cradled and crooned and nursed by
the sea. That is Newfoundland's first importance to a Greater Britain
Overseas.
Perhaps, if the present war had not broken out, Canada would never have
realized Newfoundland's second importance to a Greater Britain Overseas
as the outpost sentinel guarding entrance to her waterways. It would
require shorter time to transport troops to Newfoundland than to Suez.
Should Canada ever be attacked, Newfoundland would be a more important
basis than Suez. Two centuries ago, in fact, for two whole centuries,
St. John's Harbor rang to the conflict of warring nations. If ever war
demanded the bottling up and blockading of Canada, the basis for that
embargo would be Newfoundland.
It may as well be acknowledged that Canada's east coast affords few
good land-locked harbors. Newfoundland's deep-sea land-locked harbors
are so numerous you can not count them. Your ship will be coasting
what seems to be a rampart wall of sheer black iron towering up three,
four, six hundred feet flat as if planed, planed by the ice-grind and
storms of a million years beating down from the Pole riding thunderous
and angry seas. You wonder what would happen if a storm caught your
ship between those iron walls and a landward hurricane; and the captain
tells you, when the wind sheers nor'-east, he always beats for open
sea. It isn't the sea he fears. It is these rock ramparts and
saw-tooth reefs sticking up through the lace fret. Suddenly you twist
round a sharp angle of rock like the half closed leaf of a book. You
slip in behind the leaf of rock, and wriggle behind another
angle--"follow the tickles o' water" is, I believe, the term--and there
opens before you a harbor cove, land-locked, rock-walled from sea to
sky, with the fishermen's dories awash on a silver sea, with women in
brightly colored kirtles and top-boots and sunbonnets busy over the
fishing stages drying cod. Dogs and hogs are the only domestic animals
visible. The shore is so rocky that fences are usually little sticks
anchored in stones. There are not even many children; for the children
are off to sea soon as they can don top-boots and handle a line. There
is the store of "the planter" or outfitter--a local merchant, who
supplies schooners on shares for the season and too often holds whole
hamlets in his debt. There is the church. The priest or parson comes
poling out to meet your ship and get his monthly or half-yearly mail,
and there are the little whitewashed cots of the fisher folk. It is a
simpler life than the existence of the habitant of Quebec. It is more
remote from modern stress than the days of the Tudors. On the north
and west shore and in that sea strip of Labrador under Newfoundland's
jurisdiction and known in contradiction to Labrador as The
Labrodor--are whole hamlets of people that have never seen a railroad,
a cow, a horse. They are Devon people, who speak the dialect of Devon
men in Queen Elizabeth's day. You hear such expressions as "enow,"
"forninst," "forby"; and the mental attitude to life is two or three
centuries old.
"Why should we pay for railroads?" the people asked late as 1898. "Our
fathers used boats and their own legs." And one hamlet came out and
stoned a passing train. "Checks--none of your checks for me," roared
an out-port fisherman taking the train for the first time and lugging
behind him a huge canvas bag of clothes. "Checks--not for me! I know
checks! When the banks busted, I had your checks; and much good they
were." This was late as '98, and back from the pulp mills of the
interior and the railroad you will find conditions as antiquated to-day.
If Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a Greater Britain Overseas,
why is she not part of Canada? Because Canada refused to take her in.
Because Canada had not big enough vision to see her need of this
smallest of the American colonies. For the same reason that
reciprocity failed between Canada and the United States--because when
Newfoundland would have come in, Canada was lethargic. Nobody was big
enough politically to seize and swing the opportunity. Because when
Canada was ready, Newfoundland was no longer in the mood to come in;
and nobody in Newfoundland was big enough to seize and swing an
opportunity for the empire.
It was in the nineties. Fish had fallen to a ruinous price and for
some temporary reason the fishing was poor. There had been bank kiting
in Newfoundland's financial system. She had no railroads and few
steamships. Her mines had not been exploited, and she did not know her
own wealth in the pulp-wood areas of the interior. In fact, there are
sections of Northern Newfoundland not yet explored inland. Every bank
in the colony had collapsed. Newfoundland emissaries came to Ottawa to
feel the pulse for federation. The population at that time was
something under two hundred thousand.
Now Canada has one very bad British characteristic. She has the John
Bull trick of drawing herself up to every new proposal with an air of
"What is that to us?" At this time Canada herself was in bad way. She
had just completed her first big transcontinental. Times were dull.
The Crown Colony of Newfoundland did not come begging admission to
confederation. No political party could do that and live; for politics
in Newfoundland are a fanatical religion. I have heard the warden of
the penitentiary say that if it were not for politics he would never
have any inmates. It is a fact that out-port prisons have been closed
for lack of inmates, but long as elections recur, come broken heads.
So the Crown Colony did not seek admission. It came feeling the Ottawa
pulse, and the Ottawa pulse was slow and cold. "What's Newfoundland to
us?" said Canada. One of the commissioners told me the real hitch was
the terms on which the Dominion should assume the Crown Colony's small
public debt; so the chance passed unseized. Newfoundland set herself
to do what Canada had done, when the United States refused reciprocity.
She built national railways. She launched a system of national ships.
She nearly bankrupted her public treasury with public works and
ultimately handed her transportation system over to semi-private
management. Outside interests began buying the pulp-wood areas. Pulp
became one of the great industries. The mines of the east shore picked
up. There was a boom in whaling. World conditions in trade improved.
By the time that the Dominion had awakened to the value of Newfoundland
no party in Newfoundland would have dared to mention confederation, and
that is the status to-day. One can hardly imagine this status
continuing long. The present war, or the lessons of the present war,
may awaken both sides to the advantages of union. Sooner or later, for
her own sake solely, Canada must have Newfoundland; and it is up to
Canada to offer terms to win the most ancient of British colonies in
America. British settlement in Newfoundland dates a century prior to
settlement in Acadia and Virginia. Devon men came to fish before the
British government had set up any proprietary claim.
II
And now eliminate the details of Canada's status among the nations and
consider only the salient undisputed facts:
Her population has come to her along four main lines of motive; seeking
to realize religious ideals; seeking to realize political ideals;
seeking the free adventurous life of the hunter; seeking--in modern
day--freehold of land. One main current runs through all these
motives--religious freedom, political freedom, outdoor vocations in
freedom, and freehold of land. This is a good flavor for the
ingredients of nationality.
Conditioning these movements of population have been Canada's climate,
her backwoods and prairie and frontier hardship--challenging the
weakling, strengthening the strong. No country affords more
opportunity to the fit man and none is crueler to the unfit than
Canada. I like this fact that Canada is hard at first. It is the
flaming sword guarding the Paradise of effort from the vices of inert
softened races. Diamonds are hard. Charcoals are soft, though both
are the very same thing.
Canada affords the shortest safest route to the Orient.
Canada has natural resources of mine, forest, fishery, land to supply
an empire of a hundred million; to supply Europe, if need arose.
She must some day become one of the umpires of fate on the Pacific.
She yearly interweaves tighter commercial bonds with the United States,
yet refuses to come under American government. It may be predicted
both these conditions will remain permanent.
Panama will quicken her west coast to a second Japan.
Yearly the West will exert greater political power, and the East less;
for the preponderance of immigration settles West not East.
As long as she has free land Canada will be free of labor unrest, but
the dangers of industrialism menace her in a transfer of population
from farm to factory.
In twenty years Canada will have as many British born within her
borders as there were Englishmen in England in the days of Queen
Elizabeth.
In twenty years Canada will have more foreign-born than there are
native-born Canadians.
Her pressing problems to-day are the amalgamation of the foreigner
through her schools; a working arrangement with the Oriental fair to
him as to her; the development of her natural resources; the anchoring
of the people to the land; and the building of a system of powerful
national defense by sea and land.
Her constitution is elastic and pliable to every new emergency--it may
be, too pliable; and her system of justice stands high.
She has a fanatical patriotism; but it is not yet vocal in art, or
literature; and it is--do not mistake it--loyalty to an ideal, not to a
dynasty, nor to a country. She loves Britain because Britain stands
for that ideal.
Stand back from all these facts! They may be slow-moving ponderous
facts. They may be contradictory and inconsistent. What that moves
ever is consistent? But like a fleet tacking to sea, though the course
shift and veer, it is ever forward. Forward whither--do you ask of
Canada?
There is no man with an open free mind can ponder these facts and not
answer forthwith and without faltering--_to a democratised edition of a
Greater Britain Overseas_. Only a world cataclysm or national upheaval
displacing every nation from its foundations can shake Canada from that
destiny.
Will she grow closer to Britain or farther off? Will she grow closer
to the United States or farther off? Will she fight Japan or league
with her? Will she rig up a working arrangement with the Hindu?
Every one of these questions is aside from the main fact--England will
not interfere with her destiny. The United States will not interfere
with her destiny. Canada has her destiny in her own hands, and what
she works out both England and the United States will bless; but with
as many British born in her boundaries anchored to freehold of land as
made England great in the days of Queen Elizabeth, unless history
reverse itself and fate make of facts dice tossed to ruin by malignant
furies, then Canada's destiny can be only one--a Greater Britain
Overseas.
THE END
INDEX
ALBERTA: size of, 16, 39; coal deposits of, 38; investment of British
capital in, 104; distance from seaboard, 180; rate from on wheat to
Fort William, 187-188; distance from Montreal, 195; from Great Lakes,
199.
"AMERICANIZING OF CANADA," discussion of, 61-79.
AMERICANS: emigration of to Canada, 65, 72, 273; investments of in
Canada, 66, 80, 92; as pioneers, 74, 76; sell ranches as rawnches, 105;
trade of with Canada, 128; attitude of Americans in Canadian Northwest
to Monroe Doctrine, 244; view of opportunity, 280. See also UNITED
STATES.
ARBITRATION ACT, defects of, 220.
BELL, GRAHAM, a Canadian, 278.
BIG BUSINESS, does not dominate government in Canada, 212, 223.
BORDEN, ROBERT: social prestige of, 4; a self-made man, 53; new
premier, 91; one of Canada's great men, 109; naval policy of, 283, 285.
BRITISH COLUMBIA: demands self-government, 11; railway to planned, 14;
larger than two Germanies, 16; climate of, 22; coal deposits of, 38;
description of, 40-41; investment of British capital in, 104; opposes
Oriental immigration, 129-133; coming of Hindus into and problem of,
141 et seq.
BRITISH NORTH AMERICA ACT: the Canadian Constitution, 11; mentioned,
42, 111, 245; elasticity of, 51; constitution of Canada, 223;
provisions of, 228.
BROWN, GEORGE, favors reciprocity, 82.
CABINET, how chosen and to whom responsible, 229.
CANADA NORTHERN: builds repair shops at Port Mann, 179; uses electric
power in tunnels, 182; aided by government, 193.
CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY: builds repair shops at Coquitlam, 179; tunnel
of through Mount Stephen, 182; aided by government, 193.
CANADIAN SOO CANAL; tonnage passing through, 14; influence of in
reducing freight rates, 38.
CHINA, an awakened giant, 168.
CHINESE: agitation against on West Coast, 129; head tax upon, 130,164;
a separate problem from that of the Hindu, 138; in British Columbia,
159-167.
CHURCHES, well attended in Canada, 252-255.
COBALT: discovery of silver at, 34; boom in, 67.
"COBDEN-BRIGHT SCHOOL," mentioned, 82, 84.
COCKNEYS, Canadian hostility toward, 52.
CONNAUGHT, DUKE OF, rebukes lip-loyalist, 48.
CONSERVATIVES: tariff views of, 81-86; and appointment of judges, 234;
support Family Compact, 242; principles of, 242-244; support Navy Bill,
283; oppose Laurier's naval program, 285.
DAWSON, GEORGE, on coal deposits of Alberta and British Columbia, 38.
"DIRECT PASSAGE" LAW: enacted, 130, 142; attempt to evade, 143, 153.
DIVORCE, low rate of, 264.
DOUKHOBORS: are accumulating wealth, 117; law-abiding, 118; influence
of priests upon, 124.
DURHAM, LORD: work of in Canada, 226-228; report of, 274.
ENGLAND, see GREAT BRITAIN.
"FAMILY COMPACT": a governing clique, 9; mentioned, 14, 226, 242.
FRANCHISE, in Canada, 232-233.
FUR TRADE, account of, 294-322.
GEORGE, LLOYD: mentioned, 56, 57; Canada not interested in theories of,
58; effects of tax system of upon investment in Canada, 104.
GEORGIAN BAY SHIP CANAL, proposed, 194.
GLADSTONE, EDWARD E., attitude of toward colonies, 42.
GORDON, CHARLES, investigates mining strike, 117.
GOVERNOR-GENERAL: appointment and powers of, 43-44, 228-230; appoints
provincial judges, 236.
GRAND BANKS, mentioned, 323.
GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC: has dock in Seattle, 173, 174; its low mountain
grade, 182.
GREAT BRITAIN: withholds self-government from Oregon region, 11; food
requirements of, 36; grants no trade favors to her colonies, 43;
dependence of Canada upon, 43-45; trade of with the United States,
62-63; her dependencies, 95; immigration from, 95-110; allied with
Japan, 127, 132; as a world policeman, 137; shipyards of, 171; need of
shortest wheat route to, 197; eighty per cent. of Canada's agricultural
products go to, 202; acquires Canada, 224; secret of her success as a
colonial power, 269; overplus of women in, 265; rise of as a world
power, 269; her navy Canada's chief defense, 289; what defeat of her
navy would mean to Canada, 292-293; importance of Newfoundland to her
possessions in America, 323; will not interfere with Canada's destiny,
333.
GREAT CLAY BELT; described, 33; mentioned, 303.
HENDRY, ANTHONY, first white fur-trader in Saskatchewan country, 314.
HILL, JAMES: he and associates buy large coal areas, 66; predicts bread
famine in United States, 88; on rights of the public, 175; on western
fruit crop, 181; wheat empire of, 198, 208; a Canadian, 278.
HINDUS: agitation against in British Columbia, 129; problem of in
Canada, 138-167; possible effects on constitution of unlimited
immigration of, 245; troops rushed across Canada, 286.
HOPKINSON: murder of, 144; had secret information regarding Hindus,
144, 153.
HUDSON BAY RAILROAD, account of, 191-209.
HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY; monopoly of, 11; journals of mention mineral
deposits, 35; governor of testifies that farming can not succeed in
Rupert's Land, 271; effect of contentions regarding Northwest, 276;
trade of, 297-298; former monopoly of, 299; mentioned, 302.
HUDSON STRAITS, the crux of the Hudson Bay route, 206-209.
HUNTERS' LODGES, raids of, 8.
ICELANDERS, story of in Manitoba, 122-123.
IMMIGRATION: increase in ten years, 20; from Great Britain, 51, 95-110;
American immigration into Canada, 61-79; from continental Europe,
111-126; from the Orient, 127-167; probable effect of Panama Canal
upon, 176.
IMPERIAL FEDERATION, a dead issue in Canada, 47.
INDIANS: number of in the fur trade, 294; rights of Indian wives
married to white men, 266.
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD: in Canada, 219; program of, 221.
JAPAN: dominates fishing industry of the Pacific, 24; alliance of with
Great Britain, 127; attitude of on equality question, 130-132; activity
of on West Coast, 134-136; controls seventy-two per cent. of the
shipping of the Pacific, 136, 178; future influence of, 137; attempt to
draw into Hindu quarrel, 146; demands room to expand, 168; becomes a
world power, 269; future relations of with Canada, 333.
JAPANESE: inrush of into British Columbia, 129; limitations on
immigration of, 130; exclusion of becomes party shibboleth, 133; a
separate problem from that of the Hindu, 138.
JUDGES, position and powers of, 233-236.
KOOTENAY, mining boom in, 66-67.
LABRADOR, as a fur country, 302-304.
LABRODOR, THE, under jurisdiction of Newfoundland, 327
LAURIER, SIR WILFRED: social prestige of, 4; helps allay racial
antagonisms, 7; prediction of as to Canada's future, 17; supports Boer
War, 31-32; a self-made man, 53; a free-trader, 82; and reciprocity,
89-91; one of Canada's great men, 109; and a Dominion navy, 283, 285;
mentioned, 243.
LESSER GREAT LAKES, fisheries of, 39.
LIBERALS: favor free trade, 82; seek reciprocity agreement, 83-85;
launch two more transcontinentals, 86; and appointment of judges, 234;
organize to oust Family Compact, 242; principles of, 242-244; oppose
Naval Bill, 283, 285.
LITERATURE: no great national in Canada, 262; Canadians slow to
recognize writers, 279; most Canadian books first published out of
Canada, 79.
LORD SELKIRK'S SETTLERS, come to Canada, 6.
LOYALISTS, see UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS.
MACDONALD, SIR JOHN: influence of upon Canadian constitution, 11-12;
comes up from penury, 53; seeks tariff concessions from the United
States, 81; tariff views of, 83; launches Canadian Pacific Railway, 86;
one of Canada's great men, 109; mentioned, 243.
MACKENZIE, ALEXANDER: comes up from penury, 53; mentioned, 81; a
free-trader, 82; a man of the North, 295.
MACKENZIE, WILLIAM LYON, a leader in rebellion of 1837-8, 226.
MANITOBA: almost as large as British Isles, 16, 39; coal deposits in,
38; distance of from Montreal and Hudson Bay, 195.
MANITOBA SCHOOL CASE, mentioned 44, 83.
MANN, DAN, comes up from penury, 53,
MARITIME PROVINCES, described, 221.
MONROE DOCTRINE: mentioned, 32, 45, 285; Canadian opinion of, 169, 288;
attitude of French Nationalists toward, 244.
MOUNTED POLICE: say crime in Northwest is increasing, 118; efficiency
of, 238-240.
MUNRO, DOCTOR, quoted regarding Oriental immigration, 162-163.
NATIONALISTS; oppose Navy Bill, 283, 285; and outside entanglements,
244.
NAVY BILL: defeated, 284.
NEW BRUNSWICK, mentioned, 22.
NEWFOUNDLAND; mentioned, 195; description of, 323-328; why not a part
of Canada, 323-330.
NEW FRANCE, conquest of, 6.
NORTH AMERICA ACT, see BRITISH NORTH AMERICA ACT.
NOVA SCOTIA, mentioned, 22.
ONTARIO: first settlement of, 3; more ultra-English than England, 4;
description of, 33-35.
OSLER, WILLIAM, a Canadian, 278.
PANAMA CANAL; mentioned, 14; influence of upon commerce, 27; turns
Pacific into a front door, 41; what it means to Canada, 168-190; will
reverse conduits of trade, 280.
PAPINEAU, LOUIS, a leader in the rebellion of 1837-8, 226.
PARLIAMENT: composition and powers of, 230-233; a session every year,
234.
PEACE RIVER COUNTRY: mentioned, 16; wheat grown in, 271; wheat lands
of, 300.
PEEL, PAUL: lost to Canada, 279.
PRAIRIE PROVINCES: resources of, 350; probable wheat production of in
twenty years, 183.
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, mentioned, 22.
QUEBEC, PROVINCE OF: more Catholic than the Pope, 4; size of, 16;
description of, 27-32.
QUEBEC ACT, first constitution of Canada, 225.
RAILWAY COMMISSION, 192.
REBELLION OF 1837: significance of, 8.
RECIPROCITY: Canadians seek, 15; why rejected, 80-94.
RED RIVER, demands self-government, 11.
RELIGION, influence of in Canada, 252-259.
REVILLONS: yearly fur trade of, 298; inquiry made of as to number of
white hunters, 302.
RIEL REBELLION, mentioned, 227, 284.
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE, sends fleet round the world, 128.
ROYAL NORTHWEST MOUNTED POLICE, absence of flunkeyism among, 49.
SASKATCHEWAN: area of, 16, 39; coal deposits in, 38.
SCHURMAN, JACOB G., a Canadian, 278.
SIFTON, CLIFFORD: a self-made man, 53; campaign for immigrants, 70-74,
87.
SMITH, GOLDWIN, opinion of Canadian loyalty, 47-48.
SOCIALISM: plays little part in Canadian affairs, 248-251; in Canada,
210, 222.
SOCIALISTS, have never collected money to buy rifles, 149.
SPORT, interest in and forms of, 259-262.
ST. LAWRENCE RIVER, improvements along, 192-196.
STRATHCONA, LORD: prophecy of regarding the prairie provinces, 39, 170;
once a fur-trader, 295.
STRATHCONA HORSE, daring of in South Africa, 49.
SUDBURY, nickel mines of, 34.
TAFT, WILLIAM H., and reciprocity, 45, 89-91.
TEACHERS, lack of recognition of services of, 125-126.
"TWILIGHT ZONE": borderland between Dominion and provincial powers,
145; embarrassing in labor disputes, 219.
UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS: first people Ontario, 3; mentioned, 6, 7, 9,
225, 274, 295.
UNITED STATES: effects of Civil War upon unity of, 2; emigration to
from Canada, 15; population of compared with that of Canada, 18, 269,
275; absorption of immigration by, 20; spring wheat production of, 37;
government of compared with that of Canada, 50-51; transportation
facilities between Canada and the United States, 64; trade of with
Canada, 64-65; lumbermen from our timber lands in Dominion, 76; and
reciprocity, 81-94; increase in value of fruit lands in, 105;
similarity to Canada, 113; political corruption in, 116; why she built
Panama Canal, 128, 187; problems of immigration in, 120, 130, 176;
emigration to Canada from, 170; shipyards in, 171; expectations of
Panama, 174; little aid given by to shipping, 179; how it transports
its wheat crop, 183; a source of the British wheat supply, 197; acreage
of wheat in, 201; increase of urban population in, 214; as a competitor
of Canada, 216; churches of poorly attended, 252; friendly relations of
with Canada, 273; comparison of with Canada, 269-277; Canadians
grateful they are not as, 277; a "big ship," 278; what menaces United
States menaces Canada, 287; foreign policies of two countries similar,
292; even closer commercial relations of with Canada, 332; will not
interfere with Canada's destiny, 332.
VAN HORNE, SIR WILLIAM C, comes up from penury, 53.
WALKER, HORATIO, lost to Canada, 279.
WAR OF 1812, cripples Canada financially, 7.
WELLAND CANAL, not wide enough, 194,
WILSON, WOODROW, tariff reductions under, 94.
YUKON: mentioned, 16; gold discovered in, 23.
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