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.
"Thinksdon't pass currency as coin.Go to work, and pass up facts," says Canada.
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.
"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.
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 theDominion.
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'sBlack Rock, pirated from his own publisher, sale half a million; Kirby'sChien d'Or, sale one million.
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 theMontreal WitnessandToronto Globefrom 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.
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 theGlobewas 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.
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 theToronto 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.
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 theGlobenor 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 fromsixteentosixty-fourin 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 underPresident Wilson have justified Canada's rejection of reciprocity.Canadian farm products have gained freer access to the American marketwithout 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.
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.
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—"Whoare you?" or "Whathave 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.
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.
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.
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 officialTrade 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.