VINDUSTRIES AND TRANSPORT

THE BIG TREE, VANCOUVER

THE most important industry of Canada is, of course, agriculture, which employs nearly twice as many people as any other class of industries, and has a greater annual product. With comparatively few exceptions, the farmers of Canada own their own land. Considered from the point of view of its returns, the greatest crop is wheat. Saskatchewan ranks first as a wheat-growing province; Manitoba and Alberta coming respectively second and third. In the older provinces the farmers are going in to a great extent for mixed farming, and for the raising of apples and other fruit. British Columbia is also giving much attention to the fruit industry. At present many of the prairie farms are devoted solely to the growing of grain; but already the leaders of the agricultural world of the Dominion are urging the extension of “mixed farming,” for the sake of saving the fertile soil from exhaustion and for the simplification of the labour problem, which is aggravated by the crowding of all the work of the farms into a few brief weeks of summer.

The second great industry of those depending directly on natural resources is lumbering. When the French settled on the St. Lawrence, they perceived at once the value of the forest wealth of the land, reporting to the home government that the colony would prove a rich source for the supply of masts and spars for the royal navy; and soon “stringent regulations were issued for the preservation of the standing oak.” The early British governors were also instructed to take measures for the preservation of lumber likely to be useful for the navy.

The export of Canada’s forest products began, it is said, in 1667, when the first shipload of lumber was sent to Europe. For years forest products came first in value on the list of exports. During the earlier part of the nineteenth century, Canada’s lumber went chiefly to Great Britain; but during the last forty years much has been exported to the United States. This has, however, been offset in part by considerable imports of American lumber into Canada.

In Canada there is, of course, an immense domestic demand for wood. Over half the people live in wooden houses, immense quantities of wood are still used as fuel, our thousands of miles of railway tracks are laid on wooden ties or “sleepers;” fleets of wooden ships and boats still ply on our coast and inland waters—in fact, it has been saidthat “our civilization is built on wood. From the cradle to the coffin in some shape or other it surrounds us as a convenience or necessity.” Our childhood’s toys, our furniture, the very paper on which the news of the day is printed, are forest products strangely transmuted. No sane person would dispute the value of the forests, and Canada is richly endowed in this respect; though, perhaps, hardly so richly as some estimates would lead us to believe.

In time past there has been most reckless waste of the Dominion’s forest wealth. In early pioneering days, perhaps it was unavoidable that the immigrants, far from markets, and hemmed in by great woods, should treat the trees as natural enemies, and clear them off the face of the earth as rapidly and as thoroughly as they could. So, in Ontario, were destroyed millions of magnificent trees; in many instances of kinds that would now be of immense value for the making of the better kinds of furniture; but black walnut trees were used to make fences of, and beeches and maples, too heavy to raft down the lakes to the seaports, as was done with the pine, were drawn together and burned in great heaps so that the settler could plant his first little crops of corn and vegetables amongst their stumps, and could turn an honest penny by selling the potash he made from their ashes.

Not only the pioneers, however, have been responsible for the destruction of trees. The Indians and hunters of game in the woods, the lumbermen, leaving their great heaps of dry brush and other inflammable refuse, only needing a chance spark from the lighting of a pipe, or a camp fire carelessly left burning, to turn it into kindling, ready laid for a great conflagration; the railways with the unguarded smoke stacks of their engines, have all had their share in the destruction of the forests; and it has been estimated that more timber has been destroyed in the Dominion by fire than by the axe. The nation is, however, awakening to the seriousness of the situation. For the last fourteen years the Canadian Forestry Association, with branches all over the Dominion, has been doing excellent work in disseminating information and rousing public interest concerning the preservation of the forests, and a new governmental policy has been inaugurated. Large areas of land have been set apart in Ontario and other provinces and by the Dominion government, where it has direct control, as “Forest Reserves.”

In 1909 there was established the non-partizan “Conservation Commission,” upon which each province is represented in the person of the cabinet minister most definitely connected with the administration of natural resources. Ontario’srepresentative, for instance, is the Minister of Lands and Mines. The several universities of Canada are also represented. The functions of the Commission are advisory and educational, and its members are carefully studying the various natural resources. But it is recognized that the people are the greatest asset the country possesses; and while the Commission endeavours to devise plans for avoiding wasteful methods in lumbering and mining, to prevent the depletion of the fish in the waters and the game in the woods, it is concerned above all to discover means of stopping the fearful waste of human life by industrial accidents, unhealthy conditions, preventable diseases, and the ignorant treatment of infants and young children, which last results in such appalling mortality in the first five years of life.

It must not, however, be inferred from this reference to infant mortality that the climate of Canada is by any means unhealthy. The experience of immigrants from the British Isles and from all European countries shows that it is well fitted for Europeans; and, as a general rule, the children especially enjoy the cold months, finding delight in the sports that winter brings. Often the snow is too firm and powdery for that favourite sport of British youngsters—snowballing! But little ones who have not long learned to toddle alone can find amusement with theirsmall sleighs, and for bigger children and young boys and girls there are the endless delights of “coasting” and toboganning and skating and snow-shoeing and ski-ing.

Of course, here the country children have the best of it. But if one wants to realize the delights offered by a brisk winter’s day, he cannot do better than visit some open hilly spot within the limits of one of Canada’s cities—especially on a Saturday afternoon when the fathers have time to join in the fun. Then the white hillside is fairly alive with children in gay blanket-coats (often of scarlet) and knitted French-Canadian “tuques” ending in saucy bobs on the top, or long bag-like arrangements finished with dangling tassels; but it is the eagerness of the children and their quaint attitudes which give the picture its chief interest. A favourite way of making the descent is prone on the little sleighs, head foremost, legs stuck stiffly up from the knees, or trailing out behind, as an excellent rudder. Sometimes two “bob-sleighs,” connected by a long board, form a more ambitious vehicle for half a dozen boys and girls at once, and loud are the shrieks and the laughter, as the “bobs” jolt over some rough bit of the track or shoot their passengers off at last into some heap of snow. As a rule, the mothers see that the youngsters are warmly clad in woollen garments from head to heel,and then no one is hurt by a roll in the soft snow.

But all this is, I am afraid, a long digression from the serious subject of industries. Canada’s mineral products come next after those of the forest, and make a various list. It includes gold and silver, copper, nickel and lead; coal and iron; petroleum, natural gas, cement, clay products and building stones. These are widely distributed, and every day fresh discoveries are being made of deposits of useful minerals. In several instances the cutting of railways has led accidentally to such discoveries. This was the case with the copper ores at Sudbury and the silver at Cobalt; but scientists sent out by government and prospectors are always busily searching for new mineral fields. The central provinces of Canada import immense quantities of coal; though both in Nova Scotia to the east, and Alberta and British Columbia to the west, there are immense coal beds, which are being worked at the present time.

Government has made great efforts by the giving of bounties and by protective legislation to stimulate the manufacture of iron in this country. The result is that Canada, which in 1883 had only three or four small blast furnaces, had in 1913 eighteen furnaces, many of them large and of an up-to-date type, employing 1,778 men.

The fisheries of Canada are one of her greatest assets. In fact, it has been claimed that they are the most extensive in the world. But here, as with lumber, untold recklessness has reigned for generations, with the result that in some of the great lakes the fisheries are of much less value than they used to be. It is so with Lake Ontario, in which case the Americans must share the responsibility of depletion with the Canadians. Accounts of the catches of salmon and white fish made in the lake in the pioneer days read now like fables.

But the coast waters of the Maritime Provinces and British Columbia, and hundreds of the lakes in the interior, still abound with fish, and for a number of years “conservation” of the fisheries has been receiving careful attention. There are close seasons in fishing, regulated by act of parliament, to prevent reckless destruction, and there are now forty-one fish-breeding hatcheries.

Government has endeavoured to stimulate the fishing industry by a system of bounties; by establishing intelligence bureaux, with reporting stations along the coasts of the Maritime Provinces, which give “timely warning to the fishermen of a strike in of fish, of the weather and of other facts, early information about which is important to success.” Cold storage establishments at different places for the keeping of supplies of bait have also been helpful to the fishing industry.

In the year 1911-12 the value of the fish taken and of fish exported was greater than ever before, but the figures of the returns do not by any means represent the whole value, for fish is used extensively as food, wherever it is caught. In order of value, salmon, caught chiefly on the Pacific Coast, comes first on the list of Canadian food fishes, the worth of the catch last year amounting to $10,333,000 or about £2,067,000. Next in order come cod, lobsters (of which fifty millions were caught in the year), herring, halibut, and oysters. In addition to fish, 1,244 whales were taken in Canadian waters. Canada’s inland sea—Hudson Bay—is said to be one of “the richest whaling grounds in the world.” It is also believed to be richly supplied with valuable fish of many kinds, but its fisheries are yet inaccessible to markets and are undeveloped. The great northern lakes are full of valuable freshwater fish. Nearly a hundred thousand men, including those who work on shore, find employment in the fisheries.

From the fisheries the next step is naturally to the shipping interests. 1912 was a year of great expansion in the industry, and Canada moved from the tenth to the ninth place in the list of shipping nations; but she was fifth in the year 1874, at which period many ships were built in her yards. The reason for the falling off was the change from wooden to iron and steel ships. Butthe shipbuilding industry is beginning to revive, and at seven different points on the Atlantic, the Pacific, the St. Lawrence, and the Great Lakes, there are large dry docks for the construction and repair of vessels. In this connection it may be of interest to remark that the first vessel to cross the Atlantic under steam the whole way was the “Royal William,” built at Wolfe’s Cove, near Quebec, in the winter of 1830-31. Her historic voyage was made in 1833 from Pictou, in Nova Scotia, to London.

If the tonnage of vessels owned in Canada shows a decrease from the figures of forty years ago, it is hardly necessary to say that this is by no means the case with the tonnage of vessels required for the transportation of freight and Canadian passengers. In fact, little over one-tenth of Canada’s exports is carried in Canadian vessels. The shipping employed is divided (so far as statistics are concerned) into three branches, according to whether it is employed in the overseas carrying trade between Canada and other countries; the inland lakes and rivers transport service; and the coasting trade, which, oddly enough, includes the activities of vessels voyaging from a Canadian port on the Atlantic, round Cape Horn to another Canadian port on the Pacific. The opening of the Panama Canal will enable these “coasters” to shorten theirjourney from Montreal to Vancouver (for example) by 7,221 miles.

Perhaps no nation is more favoured than Canada in the possession of inland waterways—though to take advantage of them to the present extent (and great expansion is possible) has required the construction of numerous canals and locks, to overcome differences of level; and, in some instances, to connect natural systems of navigable water. There is one great inland waterway in Canada, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the head of Lake Superior, by which large steamers can make a voyage equal to that from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Liverpool. In this distance of two thousand two hundred miles there are only seventy-three miles of canals, with forty-eight locks overcoming five hundred and fifty-one feet of height.

Already, it is stated, the tonnage passing through the Sault Ste. Marie canals to avoid the rapids between Lake Superior and Huron is in amount three times that which passes through the Suez canal. By this route immense quantities of grain are brought to the ocean ports; and it is anticipated that within a short time when the deeper Welland canal is completed, ocean-going steamers will be able to carry their cargoes, without transhipment, all the way from the Lake Superior ports to those of Great Britain.

What this will mean to the Canadian West is evident, when one considers the cheapness of water-carriage compared with railway transport. The advantage of the former is indeed so great that, when time is not a primary consideration, freight from Liverpool for Vancouver or Victoria is carried all the way round by Cape Horn in preference to sending it by the more direct route to St. John or Montreal, and thence by rail across the continent to its destination. The first attempt to improve artificially the inland navigation was made in 1779, when canals were begun to overcome the rapids immediately above the Lachine rapids. But there are miles upon miles of navigable lakes and rivers in the Dominion which have needed no improvement.

Nevertheless, though the importance of the inland waterways can hardly be over-estimated, it is perhaps not too much to say that the Dominion of Canada has been made by her railways, for it was these which made possible a real union between the widely separated provinces of her earlier years; and the American description of “the Canadian Pacific Railway” as the “Dominion on wheels” expressed a most interesting fact. The building of railways began in 1836—with a sixteen-mile line (on which horses instead of locomotives were first used) between Laprairie, near Montreal, and St. John’s on the Richelieu.Three years later another short line of six miles was made in Nova Scotia, upon which a steam-engine was used to draw coal from the Albion mines to New Glasgow.

It was not till the fifties that railway building in Canada was begun in earnest; but before that decade had half gone by, there were five hundred and sixty-three miles of railway, and by 1867 this length was multiplied by four. Since Confederation Canada’s miles of railway have been multiplied almost by twelve, exclusive of sidings. Piling up figures, however, is a tiresome way to tell what is really a very interesting chapter in the history of Canada.

The railways linking Canada together have, indeed, cost the people and the Dominion and the provincial governments millions of money; and in early days, many municipalities, for the sake of having railways, seriously embarrassed themselves with debt. But the need seemed great. Lord Durham advised the building of the “Intercolonial Railway”—the line owned and operated by the Dominion government—to knit together the Maritime Provinces with the Canadas; but the difficulties and delays over this railway were endless, and it was not completed till 1876. For many years it was operated at a loss, but it has developed the country through which it passes and has greatlyincreased the trade between the several eastern provinces.

Before the era of railways, dwellers in New Brunswick who wished to go to Quebec used not infrequently to go on foot through the intervening wilderness in the winter time. So the first Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick once tramped through the snowy woods to visit his brother the Governor-General, Lord Dorchester; and so in 1813, when the war with the United States was raging, some companies of New Brunswick troops marched on snowshoes to the aid of their hard-pressed brethren in Canada. Much later, if a traveller wished to go from Nova Scotia to Toronto, it was the easiest way to take ship to Boston, and go thence through the “States” by rail to “Canada”—as the Nova Scotians continued to call the provinces touching on the St. Lawrence for long after the name was extended to the whole Dominion. This journey to “Canada” was quite an adventure to an untravelled person who had been born and brought up almost within sound of the sea. But the long-delayed construction of the “Intercolonial” gradually changed that condition of affairs.

The Grand Trunk is the pioneer of the several great company-owned railway systems, having absorbed many of the smaller railways begun in the fifties. For years it was not a profitableundertaking to its shareholders; but now its lines make a regular network in the older portions of Canada; and the Grand Trunk Pacific is being rapidly pushed to completion north of its older competitor in the West, the Canadian Pacific Railway. It is expected that when this “National Transcontinental Line” is finished it will shorten the trip round the globe by a week.

It is helping, moreover, to give Canada breadth from south to north. Already settlers are going into the so-called “Great Clay Belt” of good agricultural land in Northern Ontario. Already a string of little towns has sprung up along the Grand Trunk Pacific in the western provinces. Already its new seaport—“Prince Rupert”—five hundred and fifty miles north-west of Vancouver, and five hundred miles nearer to the east than any other Pacific Coast port, is an accomplished fact, where a population of four or five thousand is impatiently awaiting the uniting of the two portions of the railway which are being built westward and eastward, to meet in the mountains. Prince Rupert is close to some of the best fishing grounds in the world; and when the Grand Trunk Pacific line is completed it will put the fisheries of the North Pacific Coast in touch with a host of new markets.

It is difficult for people who have lived always in small well-settled countries to imagine whatthe opening of a great new railway means to the Dominion.

Over seventy years ago the people who see visions and dream dreams were prophesying a new trade route between east and west, by which the teas and silks of China and Japan would be brought by steam power along rivers, canals and railways across what is now the Dominion of Canada. In 1846 Sir Richard Bonnycastle, lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Engineers, predicted “We shall yet place an iron belt from the Atlantic to the Pacific—a railway from Halifax to Nootka Sound—and thus reach China in a pleasant voyage.” Three years later another officer of the Royal Engineers, Major Carmichael Smith, published a pamphlet urging the construction of an “Inter-oceanic railway from Halifax to the mouth of the Fraser river,” with a map upon which he traced a line almost identical with the routes ultimately adopted for the Intercolonial and Canadian Pacific Railways. But it was not until 1870, when British Columbia agreed to come into Confederation on condition that the inter-oceanic railway should be built, that any definite step was taken towards the construction of Canada’s first “transcontinental line.”

In the following year surveys for the line were begun under Mr. (afterwards Sir) Sandford Fleming. But the end was not yet in sight. Theconstruction of the line was an immense task to be undertaken by a country so young and so sparsely settled as Canada, and fourteen strenuous years of political strife and struggle against all kinds of difficulty were to pass before the last spike of the railway was driven by Lord Strathcona (then Sir Donald Smith) at Craigellachie in the Eagle pass.

To the company, which finally built the line, the government gave $25,000,000 (£5,130,000) in cash, an even greater value in portions of the road already constructed, and twenty-five million acres of land, scattered through the prairie provinces, and the Canadian Pacific Railway is now a very wealthy corporation, which carries on numerous enterprises outside the actual business of railway transportation. For instance, there is a fleet of seventy-three Canadian Pacific Railway steamships, most of which are large vessels sailing the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Great Lakes. These ships carry annually over half a million passengers and give employment to over twelve thousand men. The company also owns a number of luxurious hotels, including the happily-named “Château Frontenac,” which the new arrival from Europe, coming up the St. Lawrence, can scarcely fail to notice, crowning the rock of Quebec, near to the spot where old Count Frontenac, from his little “Château St. Louis,” lorded it over the rough bushrangers and determined churchmen of New France.

The company still owns some ten or eleven million acres of land in the four western provinces; and during recent years has inaugurated a policy of irrigating some naturally rather arid lands in Alberta and preparing there what are known as “ready-made farms,” for suitable immigrants. This experiment has inspired the governments of some of the provinces to make similar preparation for immigrant farmers. The preparation of the farms for their future owners is, of course, a business enterprize; none the less it has smoothed the way for many newcomers.

Looking at the map of the country served by the Canadian Pacific, we see no longer a line but a network of lines (even in the West) where fifty years ago it was generally supposed that nothing would grow. It is Canada’s vast wheat fields, which have made possible her huge railway systems, and while new lands are year by year being brought under cultivation, the railways will continue to add to their mileage. On the other hand, every year the new lines of railway open fresh lands to settlers.

Another Canadian railway that has a remarkable record is the Canadian Northern, which claims to have grown at the rate of a mile a day for the last sixteen years. This railway also has obtained most liberal government assistance and is a transcontinental system in the making. In fact,contracts are let for the completion of the whole distance between the city of Quebec and Port Mann in British Columbia; but it has gone on the plan of building short lines in different districts, to be afterwards combined and connected to form the whole system. Already it has run many branch lines from Winnipeg—westward and northward and southward—into the great grain-growing districts, and in 1912 it hauled no less than sixty million bushels of wheat.

There are as well a number of smaller railways, and also a number of lines (1,308 miles in length in 1912) in which electricity is the motive power. Many of these are, of course, the street railways of cities and towns.

There is much of human interest connected with a great railway, dissipater of romance, destroyer of the picturesque, as it is generally asserted to be. Consider it from the large point of view of its inception, its planning, its organization; the political fight to gain for it a legalized existence and the support of public funds and grants of land. It may be that Canada has time and again been recklessly generous in the price she has given for her transportation schemes, and that she has paid too highly for the services of the forceful men able to overcome the difficulties of such enterprises—but railways and yet more railways is still her cry; and the Napoleon of finance who can organize thecompany to build them is counted worthy of a reward so rich that he and his associates may be tempted to grasp at more than their share of the good things that their line opens to the world, and to use their power not always for the public good. Canada needs the great organizers of industry and more of them; but she needs, too, statesmen ever watchful of the public interests, who shall know how to economize as well as how to spend, and shall be strong enough to keep control over, and use for the good of all the people, the different human forces which are engaged, blindly or wisely, selfishly or nobly, in making out of several comparatively weak provinces a big nation, which patriots hope and trust may be also a great nation.

From the other point of view, the subject of railways—as it touches the life and well-being of individuals in Canada—is also intensely interesting. Not long ago I talked with a man who had done well in the West, but had gone into a district ahead of the railway, expecting it to be made in a year. With this hope he had settled forty miles from his next neighbour, seventy-five miles from a post office, and fifty miles from the point where he had to market his grain; but instead of one year he had to wait ten for the promised line. No wonder that the dweller in the country places loves to see the train pass by. It meansin illness, possibility of getting skilled help of doctor and nurse, in health, opportunity of intercourse with friends and neighbours; for the young and old, a fuller social life; for the farmer, access to markets and oftentimes prosperity instead of failure. In one word, it means opportunity in a thousand ways.

Of course, the railways employ a great army of men upon their construction on the one hand, and their operation on the other. In 1912 the C.P.R. alone had 85,000 employees on its pay rolls. The numbers finding employment in connection with the transportation systems in this “country of magnificent distances” as it has been called, would be vastly increased if those engaged in the subsidiary trades were taken into account, such as the making of iron rails, the construction of cars and engines, the cutting of railway ties and so forth.

A great change has taken place in Canada recently in the occupations of the people. Sixty years ago there were only twenty-eight or thirty different kinds of manufactures carried on in the country, and of the manufacturing establishments the chief were—shipyards, saw, grist, carding, and woollen mills; distilleries, tanneries, breweries and foundries, several of which are very closely connected with agriculture. The great woollen mills and the tanneries, for instance,are all closely dependent on farm products, as the saw mills are on the natural crop of wood, and all these with distilleries, in addition, were very early established on a small scale in the several districts to supply local demands.

By 1891 there were three hundred different kinds of manufactures, instead of thirty, and the number of workers employed had multiplied five-fold. Since then the capital invested, the value of their output, and the importance of Canada’s manufacturing, has continued to increase, the development during the last decade being the greatest on record. Manufactures of wood and manufactures connected with food are still specially important.

Manufactures have been artificially encouraged by the so-called “National Policy,” or tariff, arranged to protect home industries. One result of this has been the stimulation of the growth of the towns and cities. In Ontario the last census showed a considerable increase in the population as a whole, a greater increase in the urban population and a falling off of over 50,000 in the rural population. No doubt this is due in part to the exodus to the West, but the towns of Ontario can well support more than their old quota of population, and there are excellent markets near at hand for all the fruit, vegetables, and other farm products that can be raised. Thesame story comes from New Brunswick and that peaceful little agricultural community, Prince Edward Island.

The fact that Canada is becoming a manufacturing as well as an agricultural country is, however, in a large degree a natural development. There is no question that its opportunities are not confined to agriculture. It is, indeed, singularly favoured by nature with water powers, from which electricity for light and power can be developed readily and cheaply, and can be conveniently transmitted for hundreds of miles for use by great cities or by single farms.

As England’s great coal fields determined that she should become a great manufacturing nation, Canada’s immense number of cataracts and rapids promise that she, too, shall be great in the same line. Everyone has heard of the “harnessing of Niagara”; but not everyone realizes how much electricity is used in Canada. Many a little town, only a few months old, has stepped at once from the stage of lighting with lamps to that of brilliant electrical illumination. But if facilities for obtaining power are the first necessity for manufacturing, Canada has opportunities also in the variety of her natural products, from field, forest and mine. A third reason, strongest of all, perhaps, is that her people are ambitious, and rightly or wrongly feel that itis necessary to the realization of their nationhood that a proportion of their population should be engaged in manufacturing.

There is at least this strong excuse for such a position, that always there will be people to whom agricultural pursuits will not be congenial, and, if there were no opportunities apart from cultivation of the soil in Canada, many of her young people would continue to go elsewhere. At the present day, there are over a million Canadians in the United States, who have been attracted thither by the opportunities offered by its cities and industries. Some of these are now returning—drawn home to a great extent by the opening of new industries in their native land.

Unquestionably the prosperity of Canada rests mainly upon agriculture; and legislation that has any tendency to foster the growth of the towns at the expense of the country must in the long run prove injurious. Canada is, however, only following the example of older lands, when she rejoices in her big towns, and in the consequent massing of wealth in restricted areas, for the absence of these (at least as society is now constituted) limits the sphere of human activity; and, if Canada desires anything strongly, it is, perhaps, to be an all-round nation, possessing not only these material advantages of which we all hear so much, not only the chances for the honestworker, but also opportunities at least for the cultivation of science and art, literature and music. Now the cultivation of these is not easy in little frontier towns and hamlets and solitary farms deep in the country. But the manufacturing industries build up the towns, and the towns make possible a kind of co-operation in the things of the mind, that has been almost unheard of in the country.

Hasty visitors sometimes sweepingly and condescendingly accuse Canada of being “crude” and utilitarian, and of being in earnest chiefly about the pursuit of the “Almighty Dollar,” and assert as a matter of course that the finer side of life is neglected, but often these critics would discover, if they stayed in the land a little longer, that much patient cultivation of the higher interests of humanity is going on beneath the surface, as it were. Moreover, if much and rich flowering has not occurred, the field—of human beings—is at present extremely small. The newcomer often expects at once much too much and too little, and makes his comparisons, forgetful of the fact that outstandingly great poets or painters, altruists and heroes are rare everywhere, and that they cannot be expected to be numerous in half a century of time, amongst a population of three or four or even seven millions. At Confederation, less than fifty years ago, Canadahad only three and a quarter millions of people, and, for several decades after that, the growth was very slow.

Often, I would venture to say, that the “crudeness” complained of is as much in the surroundings as in the people themselves; and the critic from the Old World should not forget that, so far as the environment of the colonists is concerned, they often have nothing about them in the way of the refinements of life which they do not owe to themselves; whereas the beautiful city or house or church with which he contrasts their deficiencies of comfort or beauty was probably largely a heritage from past ages.

But the reverse idea applies to the people themselves. Though they are dwellers in a new country, many overseas Britons are extraordinarily conscious of their own and their national past. They are more keenly conscious of what it stands for than many of the stay-at-home folk, who have some dim feeling that “colonists” (though their own sons and daughters) are people without a history and without a link to the great days and great deeds of their ancestors. His past is the cherished possession of many a Scot and many an Englishman, who has done brave work in building up the new country, and it seems rather like giving him “the cold shoulder” when a new arrival, flitting rapidly through the country,or even intending to cast in his lot with it, talks always of everything British as “ours,” and of everything “colonial,” as “yours.” As Kipling suggests, the overseas Briton looks back to “the abbey” and much else that in the old land “makes us we,” with no less love and veneration than the Englishman at home.

1. CONSTRUCTION TRAIN ON THE GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC RAILWAY.2. CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY IRRIGATION DAM AT BASSANO.

THE OLD SMELTER MINE, NELSON.

VITHE OLD PROVINCE OF NOVA SCOTIA

INOW propose to give some account of the nine provinces in succession, with regard to their extent, physical features, climate, natural resources, and the conditions and pursuits of the people. I shall also endeavour to give information as to the prospects in each province for immigrants from the British Isles. Of course, in the space at my disposal, I can touch but slightly on any of these points. I will begin with Nova Scotia, the province that lies nearest to England, though curiously enough it is little-known by English people compared to many of the more westerly regions. Except in winter, when the Canadian mail steamers cannot go to Quebec, and so land their mails and their cabin passengers at Halifax, Nova Scotia seems somewhat off the line of tourist and immigrant travel, which passes up the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the north of the little group of Canada’s three “Maritime Provinces.”

It is possible for anyone to live long in another part of Canada without getting much idea of thehistory, resources or characteristics of the “Provinces down by the Sea,” but it adds immensely to one’s interest and pride in the Dominion when one realizes that Quebec and Ontario—wealthy and important as they unquestionably are—are now only a part of Canada, and that for a comprehensive understanding of the country as a whole, there is needed at least some knowledge of the prairie provinces, and British Columbia to the west, and of the little old less restless Lower Provinces to the east.

The story of Nova Scotia is full of interest from the days early in the seventeenth century, when the first little company of French colonizers tried so gallantly to found Port Royal, down to the present time. The long struggle of the French and English for the possession of the land, the frightful deeds of their Indian allies, the coming of the Loyalists and other pioneers, the gallant fight for British liberty and “responsible government,” all furnish incidents not less worthy of the poet’s song than that pitiful deportation of the Acadians, which inspired Longfellow’s pathetic but rather misleading poem of “Evangeline.”

I can spare little space for history, but before I go on to tell what I can of Nova Scotia—and for seven years quaint old Halifax was my home—I should like to say that whatever else this smallest, save one, of the Dominion’s nine provinces fails toproduce, she has been singularly successful in the producing of men. Upon the roll of her “notables” are the names of Haliburton—“the father of American humour”—Inglis, who defended Lucknow; Cunard, founder of the line of great Transatlantic steamships; Sir Provo Wallis, Admiral of the Fleet; Dawson, of geologic and educational fame; whilst other well-known names of men still at work might be added to the list.

The very name—Nova Scotia—forces comparison with old Scotland, but the former is not quite three-quarters the size of the latter, nor has it much more than one-tenth of the population. It is also far south of its namesake; in fact, there is almost eight degrees between the latitudes of the north of Nova Scotia and the south of Scotland, but the Arctic currents in the West Atlantic have their influence on the climate, making the Nova Scotian winter cold, and the spring late, though the extremes of heat and cold are not so severe as farther inland. During a recent year at Halifax, for instance, only once did the mercury fall to “zero,” and only once in the hottest month, July, did it travel up to 98 degrees Fahrenheit.

On the Atlantic coasts there is a good deal of rain, fog and “Scotch mist,” but summer and autumn are often delightful seasons of bright, clear, not too hot, weather. In the inland andwestern parts of the province the climate is drier and not quite so variable.

Like her namesake, Nova Scotia turns towards the ocean a deeply indented, forbidding coast; but the interior lacks “Old Scotia’s” grand mountains, though it has a backbone of sterile hills running through the province, beside the Cobequid Mountains, in Cumberland County, and many a high rugged cliff in Cape Breton Island. This new Scotland has also its stretches of wild moorland and its lakes, set amongst dark spruce firs. But between “the barrens” of the Atlantic Coast, there is here and there a fertile valley; and on the Bay of Fundy side, but sheltered from its cold mists and winds by the long ridge of the North Mountain, stretches the far-famed Annapolis valley, where in spring the whole landscape seems one vast white orchard, save for the pretty little houses, half hidden amongst the bloom.

That side, too, is the region of the salt marshes, formed by the action of those phenomenally high tides of the Bay of Fundy, which were amongst the few remarkable features of Canada thought worthy of mention in the “Geographies” put into the hands of British children a generation ago. In course of ages these mighty tides have left vast level deposits of marine mud—the salt marshes—liable to invasion of the waves at spring tides, but easily turned by a little labour into pastures andhay meadows and grain fields of almost inexhaustible fertility. All that is necessary is to build dykes or embankments of tree trunks and clay to keep back the highest tides; and this work was begun long ago by some of the early French immigrants, who had been accustomed to reclaiming land from the sea in their own country. If, at any time, the fields should show signs of exhaustion, the fertilizing waters may again be let in for a short season; indeed, farmers living near undyked marshes are accustomed to haul loads of the precious sea-mud to their upland fields. Of something the same character as the dyked lands are the “intervales” along the rivers, which are said to be “invariably rich and productive.”

The abundance of pasturage and hay makes good dairying, and Nova Scotia is emphatically a country of mixed farming. Almost all crops suited to a temperate climate can be grown in some part of the province. But, during a recent year, of all agricultural products, hay brought most money into the farmers’ pockets; then came live stock products, potatoes, apples, oats, “garden truck,” and so in a descending scale.

FISH CURING AT GUYSBORO, NOVA SCOTIA. NOTE THE SPLITCOD-FISH DRYING IN THE FOREGROUND.

Not only the farming can be described as “mixed” in Nova Scotia. The occupations of her people (in number somewhat under half a million) are also mixed; and though agriculture takes first place, fishing, lumbering, mining andmanufacturing are of importance, all the great industries setting “new records” last year.

In fishing, Nova Scotia was long the leading province of the Dominion, but in 1912, British Columbia, with her immense catch of salmon, stepped before her. In the Atlantic province, though the lobster fishery is valuable and is to the dwellers on the sterile southern coast the chief source of ready money, the cod fishery is worth most of all, a fact quaintly recognized by the habit of the shore people of referring to a cod as “a fish,” and to all others of the finny tribe by their specific names of haddock, halibut and so forth.

The fishing hamlets consist of little whitewashed cottages dotted at random about the weather-beaten rocks, beside the fine natural harbours or little coves where the boats run in for shelter, alongside ramshackle stages where the cod are dried in the open air, and by fish-houses, often emitting the peculiarly horrible odour of over-kept “bait.”

Despite all drawbacks, there is a fascination in the jumble of boats and nets and lobster traps, whilst the fisherfolk themselves, fresh-complexioned, clear-eyed, sturdy-limbed, simple, kindly and straightforward, are a good stock one would fancy to set against the threatening degeneration of the race by the unwholesome crowding into towns. Some 30,000 men find employment, on seaand shore, in connection with the fisheries. The fishermen are generally rather poor, but the more enterprizing members of the fraternity often pass from the sailing of a fishing boat to that of a coasting vessel.

In the coast villages tiny stores, with stock small in quantity, great in variety, are plentiful, and some of the fishermen attempt to add to their incomes by farming, often in a rather haphazard, amateurish fashion. Along the shore east of Halifax horses are scarce, and in the little hay-fields even a one-horse mowing machine is an unusual sight, and it is quite common to see two men, or it may be a man and a girl, carrying the cured hay to the barn on two stout poles. In those parts the fisherfolk take little pains even to improve their own fare by growing vegetables, but the soil is discouraging. In fact, one resident of a coast village near Halifax complained, “There ain’t no soil. There’s nothing but grits!”

Some of the fishermen prosecute their craft only “inshore,” using small boats, remaining out but a few hours and fishing with hand lines as well as with trawls from the dories. These men are very dependent on the weather; but gasoline motor boats are coming into use, enabling them to go out when it would be impossible with sailing boats. The “bank fisheries,” chiefly of cod, are carried on by schooners of about 100 tons, manned bytwelve to twenty men, who go out, two by two, in dories, using trawls upon which are thousands of hooks. In the rivers, smelts, salmon, trout and eels are taken; and there are natural oyster beds, now yielding a few hundred barrels of oysters annually, which it is said, with improved management, may yield thousands. In fact, better methods may do much to make all the fisheries of Nova Scotia much more productive.

Of the forests of the province, something under one and a half million acres remain ungranted, and four or five times as much is owned by farmers and held or leased by lumber and pulp companies. As everywhere in the Dominion there has been untold loss from fires and wasteful methods, but the idea of “conservation” promises better things in future. Pine, of which there used to be large quantities, has become scarce; but spruce (of more recently discovered value) and birch, a good furniture wood, are extremely plentiful. The saw mills are generally situated on the rivers, near tide water; thus their product can be loaded directly into vessels, which carry it far and wide.

In several counties, a quantity of timber is used in the building of schooners and fishing boats, but the palmy days of shipbuilding in the province have passed. It may be, however, that there will be a revival, and that Nova Scotia will soon be sending forth iron (instead of wooden) ships toplough all seas, for she is richly endowed with mineral wealth. In fact, like Massachusetts, she seems to have every gift of nature—coal, iron, magnificent harbours, and not a little water power, all awaiting development—to make a great manufacturing region. Through her northern counties and Cape Breton Island stretches a rich and enormous coal field, and iron ores (scarcely touched as yet) are found in every county save one.

Nova Scotia ranks third of the provinces in manufactures, following the larger and much more populous provinces of Ontario and Quebec, but the value of her manufactured products (which include foods, textiles, chemicals, paper, vehicles, vessels and a variety of manufactures of iron and steel) has more than doubled in a single decade. Nova Scotia is said to have the “largest individual self-contained steel-making plant in the world,” but the growth of the iron and steel industry is due not only to natural advantages and to the genius of different “captains of industry,” but to the bounties and protective duties granted in its interests by successive governments of the Dominion.

Amongst the valuable minerals of the province are limestone, granite, gypsum and gold. The mining of the last-named metal has been carried on by rather primitive methods for nearly half a century. The yield for the record year wasworth about $600,000 (£120,000), and at present three hundred men are employed at twenty-five different mines. There is one of these small mines in Guysborough County, on the edge of a vast stretch of “barrens”; but, despite its sounding name, “Goldenville” is a sorry little hamlet, of dingy, unpainted buildings, that seem to mock at the “prospector’s dazzling dreams.” But one does not usually go to an industrial place, large or small, in search of the picturesque. One may chance upon it there, however, as when at night the outpouring of molten slag from Sydney’s black giants of blast furnaces suddenly lights up the wide beautiful harbour with a ruddy glow.

Halifax, the capital, containing nearly a tenth of the population of the province, is undeniably picturesque, with its old Citadel and churches, its wharves and its vessels, its odd outdoor market, its “redcoats” (now Canadians) and its coloured folk. Though on the eve of a great development of its port, which will doubtless revolutionize its business life, till very recently it has been a quiet old-fashioned place, its dinginess relieved by lovely water-views from many a point of vantage, and its dignity secured by such fine old stone buildings as the abode of the British admiral, Government House and the Province Building, where still, as in one other case, an Upper as wellas a Lower House deliberates on the affairs of the province.

The Assembly of Nova Scotia, by the way, is the oldest representative body in the Dominion, having been convened for the first time in 1758. There was a long fight for the boon of responsible government, won in 1848; and the name of Joseph Howe, the Reform leader, son of a Loyalist, is renowned throughout the Dominion. During the last half-dozen years several imposing new buildings, including the Anglican cathedral and the Memorial Tower (commemorating the calling together of the first Assembly) have been erected in Halifax. The city is the terminus of the Intercolonial and two provincial railways, and has a variety of manufactures.

I cannot give space, as I should like, to descriptions of any of the smaller towns; but, though someone described Nova Scotia as “the province that was passed by,” it is as truly a land of opportunity as any of the regions further west. The opportunity does not come in the shape of “free grants” of land, but a farmer who knows his business and has two or three hundred pounds of capital can soon own a good farm. There are farms of from fifty to three hundred acres of which the price is from $1,000 (£200) up. Some of these have been thrown on the market by the death or infirmity of their owners, some throughthe desire of a younger owner to go to the west or to take up work in a town. Amongst them are “run-down” farms, which can be obtained for little more than the cost of the buildings upon them, and a thoroughly capable farmer may sometimes find it pay to buy such a farm cheap and bring it back to good condition.

Within the broad realm of agriculture, to say nothing further of the other possible avenues to success in woods and mines and city and sea, there is variety of opportunity. Let a man decide to go into dairying, market-gardening, the raising of sheep, hogs or poultry, the culture of apples, or the growing of small fruits, and there is some part of Nova Scotia in which each one of these pursuits may be followed with special hope of success; moreover, the provincial government (which is frankly desirous of good immigrants of the right stamp) has made arrangements to help the new arrivals to find what they want. (For names of officials who will give information, see Appendix, Note A, page295.)

With regard to the very profitable business of apple-growing, it is stated that not one-tenth of the land in the Annapolis valley and elsewhere suitable for orchards, has yet been planted.

As to the question of markets—the home market alone is an excellent one for practically all food supplies, for the constant influx ofimmigrants and the armies of non-producers engaged in mining and other industries create a demand in many lines of foodstuffs not easy for the farmer to overtake. Nova Scotia imports much that she might just as well grow. But aside from the home market, she has easy access to those of the other provinces, and to those of the United States and of Great Britain, for every one of her counties touches on the sea, which is the best possible highroad for freight. As to her internal means of communication, roads are improving and new railways are being added to the old.

With few exceptions, Nova Scotian farmers own the land they till, and to assist still more to do so, including newcomers, the provincial government makes arrangements with loan companies to lend as much as 80 per cent. of the appraised value of farm property on mortgage. The government is also authorized to buy “real estate in farming districts, subdivide this into suitable-sized farms or lots, erect buildings and fences thereon, prepare the land for crops and sell this improved real estate to newcomers on satisfactory terms.” This opportunity to obtain ready-made farms will no doubt prove attractive to many newcomers.

In the fruit districts of Nova Scotia, owing to the smaller holdings, people are settled comparativelynear together, and this is a great advantage so far as church and social life and the education of the children is concerned.

The elementary and high schools, supported by government grants and local rates, are free. In isolated communities it is sometimes difficult to obtain teachers; but a hopeful movement is the introduction of “consolidated schools,” each of which, having several teachers, replaces the little “one-teacher schools” of a considerable district. There are now over twenty of these, to which the children are taken in vans.

Nova Scotia has several universities, supported by different religious bodies, in addition to the non-sectarian Dalhousie University at Halifax. The oldest of these institutions is King’s College, at Windsor, which dates from 1790. A comparatively new institution is the Agricultural College at Truro. Here instruction is given free of cost to farmers, farmers’ sons and new settlers intending to farm. Besides the full two years’ course, there are short practical courses of two weeks, including one for women on dairying and poultry keeping. In connection with the college is a fine Model Farm, where excellent stock is kept. The government also maintains experts to give instruction in various branches of agriculture, and endeavours in a variety of other ways to improve the methods and conditions of farming in Nova Scotia.

There is a demand always for good farm workers and capable domestic servants. Even inexperienced young people have little difficulty in getting work, if they are strong and willing to learn, but they must not expect high wages till they are competent. For competent farm men the wages offered are usually from $20 (£4) to $30 (£6) the month, with board and lodging for a single man, and with a rent-free house and certain allowances of milk and vegetables for a married man. In the latter case, the wife, if willing to assist the farmer’s wife, can often make a considerable addition to the family income. For day labour in the country a man might expect from $1 (4s.) to $1.50 (6s.), with board.

In the towns wages are higher, even for unskilled labour, but in Halifax at least rents are very high, and a man who is looking forward to getting a little land of his own would usually be wiser to settle from the first in a country district where living is cheap, and where the experience gained would be of definite value in farming operations. Moreover, if he is able to keep a few fowls, and a pig, and have a garden of his own, it very much lessens the cost of living. There are many prosperous farmers in Nova Scotia who landed a few years ago with scarcely a shilling in their pockets, but these have been hard workers.

The population of Nova Scotia is chiefly ofBritish descent, though not a few of the early settlers came by way of New England in Loyalist and pre-Loyalist days. Scottish names are common in many parts of the province, especially in Cape Breton Island. The ancient Acadians are represented by something like fifty thousand French people, and the Nova Scotians of German descent are not much fewer.

Of religious bodies, the Roman Catholics are the strongest, but the Presbyterians make a good second, then come in order the Baptists, the Anglicans and the Methodists. In the country places there are a few union churches, but there is a good deal of “over-lapping,” which aggravates the difficulty of ministering adequately to communities so scattered, as they are, for instance, on the south coast.

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