been of a high class. But the total number of Indians in the United
States is so small that their future is probably that of being absorbed
in the White race through miscegenation, unless it be for a few tribes
cultivating a racial purity of their own and, with favorable economic
conditions, perpetuating themselves for a long time to come.
The Mexican population is found mainly in the Southwestern States,
but has also assumed relatively large proportions in such States as
Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, and Michigan. The character of this
immigration has been described elsewhere in these pages. It has given
the United States an alien element with a high birthrate and very low
standards of living, with which white laborers cannot and will not
compete.
The census of 1930 found nearly a million and a half Mexicans in the
United States. It was generally supposed that the number who had
entered the country illegally was greater than those who came through
the recognized routes. To prevent such a nullification of immigration
regulations, mere registration of aliens is not sufficient, for
that is likely to affect only those who have entered legally. Our
entire population should be registered. The advantages of a universal
system of proving identity are many, and extension of the system of
registering births, on the one hand, and of registering voters, on
the other, would take care of this without setting up much new and
expensive machinery.
The menace of Chinese and Japanese immigration has for the present
been stopped by immigration laws which exclude any one not eligible to
citizenship. A proper application of this rule as established by the
Supreme Court might shut off much of the immigration of Indians from
Mexico.
Since the end of the World War the immigration of Filipino young men
has become a disturbing problem on the Pacific Coast. The number of
arrivals up to 1930 amounts to nearly 50,000. These, like the Greeks
and some other European immigrant groups, bring but few women with
them and therefore form a socially undesirable and racially threatening
element wherever they are located.
Unlike the Puerto Ricans and Hawaiians, the Filipinos are not citizens
of the United States, with rights of entry that cannot be abrogated.
They are citizens of the Philippine Islands, and permitted to enter
the United States only by courtesy. Congress, therefore, has full
right to adopt legislation which will exclude them, and it should make
immediate use of its power to protect white America from this reservoir
of 10,000,000 Malays and Mongoloids now under the American flag and at
present potential immigrants. If this cannot be done effectively, the
United States will have no alternative but to admit that its adoption
of the islands and its attempt to salvage them after Spanish misrule
was a mistake. As a safeguard to its own racial welfare, it may become
necessary to give the Filipino his independence, commend him to the
benevolence of Providence and the League of Nations, and have nothing
more to do with him.
In the same way there should be no thought of further acquisition of
territory in the West Indies or in Central America. It is conceivable
that the Central American countries might in a not too remote future be
able to form a stable confederation and stand on their own feet more
successfully than they have done during the last generation. If such
a federation could include the West Indian Islands, the United States
might well donate its possessions there.
Hindu immigration has so far been nothing more than a threat. The
present immigration restrictions will prevent the immigration of these
people, except for travel and study. Experience in many parts of the
world has shown the folly of allowing white countries to be overrun by
Hindus, and Americans should sympathize with the British possessions
that are trying to maintain white supremacy in their own borders in
this respect.
In Hawaii the United States has another possible source of undesirable
immigration. The dominant element among its third of a million
inhabitants is the Japanese, who have held themselves aloof from
the other residents and shown little tendency to intermarry. Every
Japanese child born in the islands is an American citizen, with the
full right of entry to the mainland. The greater part of the rest
of the population is a mongrel crowd. Chinese and native Hawaiians,
until quite recently, have shown a marked tendency to intermarry.
Every effort should be made to find some constitutional way by which
Hawaii can be prevented from becoming a continuous source of supply of
undesirable citizens of the United States.
While the list of unassimilable elements in the United States is a long
one, it must be borne in mind that most of them are still small. A wise
population policy promptly adopted and maintained henceforth will give
the republic an opportunity to grow along sound and fruitful lines.
XVI
OUR NEIGHBORS ON THE NORTH
Before dealing with the countries to the north of us, it may be well
to call attention to the fact that there are three major divisions of
Canada. First, the Maritime Provinces, which were acquired by Great
Britain at a later date than the other Atlantic Colonies, as they were
originally claimed by the French. In this division Newfoundland should
be considered. These territories lying east of the United States were
settled directly from England or at the time of the Revolution by
Loyalist refugees from New England. There is a large Scotch element in
the population, which was lacking in New England. On the whole, the
area is thoroughly Nordic, except on the shores of the Gulf of Saint
Lawrence and the Bay of Chaleurs, where the Alpine French Habitants
have infiltrated.
The second division of the Dominion is French-speaking, Roman Catholic
Quebec, with a fecund population of low cultural status. The French
distrust of the New England Protestants, with whom they had been at war
for one hundred and fifty years, was the predominant cause of their
failure to join with the revolting American Colonies in 1776. Quebec
was known as Lower Canada.
Like the territories of the United States, the Dominion of Canada of
today represents a part of the Nordic conquest of North America, the
sole exception being the French population of Quebec Province.
The country to the west of the Ottawa River constitutes the third
major division and was, after the Revolution, known as Upper Canada.
Its original population was composed chiefly of American Loyalists who
fled there in numbers after the Revolution. The immigration into Upper
Canada from Britain was later very largely Scotch, Scotch Irish, and
North of England. This is true more or less of all English-speaking
Canada, except possibly British Columbia.
In a measure the Dominion is an offshoot of the United States, and
its development proceeded along lines parallel to those of the States
to the south of the boundary. The character of the population west of
Quebec Province is much the same as that of the United States, lacking,
fortunately for Canada, some of our immigrant elements. The country was
settled without the terrible Indian wars that afflicted our frontier
and without the lawless element so conspicuous in the history of our
Far West.
The French settlement of Quebec was contemporaneous with the first
English settlement in North America at Jamestown. A majority of the
emigrants were from northern France. So far as one can judge at the
present time by the descendants of this population, the pure Nordic
stock must have been rare among them. They are today in general a
stocky, short-necked people, rather of the Alpine build, with eyes
often rather dark. The blond hair and tall stature of the Nordic
are so rare as to attract attention at once. The type suggests the
Pre-Norman population of northwestern France, rather than its Nordic
conquerors. Some of the seigneurs, the explorers, and the adventurers
of the early period apparently were of Nordic stock, but they were
probably always in a great minority and have left few descendants.
Very little satisfactory research has been done as to the origin of the
Habitants. A recent study of a typical group has given some indication
of the general conditions in Quebec. In this group stature was found to
be five feet and five inches, which is about the general average of the
French. The cephalic index was over 83.0, which is about the mean for
Brittany and is higher than that of Normandy. The hair was rather dark
brown and straight, this straightness is slightly suggestive of Indian
admixture. The eye color was more often brown than mixed blue and
brown. Pure blue eyes were present only in 15 per cent. The tall burly
build of the Norman peasant was very rare.
The language spoken in Quebec is an archaic Norman patois of the time
of Louis XIV. This fact has given rise to the general belief that the
Habitants came from Normandy, but the more probable reason is that the
Normans were the earliest immigrants and established their patois,
which was accepted by later arrivals. The Normans appeared to have been
far short of a majority of the total number of immigrants and Brittany
supplied still fewer. The balance was divided among the provinces of
the northern half of France.
The physical type of the Habitants of today suggestive as it is of the
peasants of the interior of Brittany finds confirmative evidence in
their subserviency to the church.
Throughout the French period the population consisted to a marked
extent of soldiers, traders, administrators, priests, and others
who did not bring their families with them. Efforts of the French
Government to encourage family life were not always either well
directed or successful. Colbert hoped for a large French population in
Canada by intermarriage with the Indians. Administrative regulations
penalized bachelors, who, for instance, were refused licenses to enter
the fur trade, which was the main source of wealth in the country at
that time.
Many of these restrictions were directed by the priests, doubtless
not so much for eugenic reasons as with the motive of protecting the
morals of the young men by giving them wives. At an early date the
colony fell under the domination of the Jesuits, and maintained for a
long time a religious tone that in its own way was much more stern and
uncompromising than that of the Puritan settlements in New England.
Much of the wealth and effort that might have gone to strengthen the
colony was sunk in sterile monastic foundations. Even today stone
churches are a conspicuous feature of the landscape in the midst of
poverty-stricken villages.
At one time there was for some years a directed migration of young
women from France, sent out to become the wives of the colonists and
early in the history of the country a policy of bonuses for marriage,
and for large families, which has been repeated at intervals ever
since, was introduced. None the less, the colony grew but slowly and to
the failure to establish it on a sound biological foundation is due the
collapse of French rule.
In 1665 the first census showed a population of 3215. In the next
hundred years this had increased to somewhat more than 70,000, with
an additional 20,000 in what are now the Maritime Provinces. That the
French could maintain the contest for so long against British neighbors
who outnumbered them twenty to one is to their credit, but their lack
of recognition that their settlement could not be permanent unless
based on a real migration of families ultimately cost them the country.
One of the chief causes of the failure of French Canada to expand
beyond the narrow limits of the banks of the Saint Lawrence River,
during its first century of existence, was an obscure skirmish which
occurred on the west side of Lake Champlain in 1609. Champlain was
advancing toward the South in company with Canadian Algonquins, when he
encountered a war party of the Mohawks. In the fighting that followed,
some Mohawks were killed and captured. At that time and in that place
began the bitter enmity of the Iroquois Five Nations and the Canadian
French. It was a feud that was never allowed to rest and yearly war
parties of Mohawks went north along Lake Champlain and the Richelieu
River and devastated the lower portion of Quebec Province. At the
same time war parties of the Senecas descended the Saint Lawrence and
attacked the French from the West. As long as the power of the Iroquois
lasted, which was all through the seventeenth century, they devastated
a large part of New France.
[Illustration: DOMINION OF CANADA & NEWFOUNDLAND]
In the meantime, the Dutch and English were growing up in security to
the South and East. Thus Champlain's skirmish with the Iroquois was
the factor that delayed the expansion of France into the region of the
Great Lakes and down the Mississippi Valley until relatively late in
the eighteenth century.
The French population still centers in Quebec Province, long known as
Lower Canada, but it has spread to other parts of the continent both
south and west of the Quebec boundary. Their expansion in Canada has
been into the neighboring provinces. Emigration to New England began in
the eighteenth century but was not considerable until the nineteenth
century.
While this French-Canadian population has remained so fecund as to
furnish a stock example for every writer, it, too, has felt the trend
of the times. For a long time the government of Quebec offered a grant
of one hundred acres of land to every man who was the father of twelve
living children by one wife. In less than a single year over 3000 heads
of families availed themselves of this privilege and in 1907 there
was published a list of 7000 families having at least twelve living
children.
In spite of this fecundity, the birthrate has been declining for almost
the whole of the historical period. Two hundred and fifty years ago the
average for all women of child-bearing age in Quebec Province was one
child every two and one-half years. By 1850 this ratio had decreased to
one in five years. At present it is one in seven and one-half years.
Under this method of measurement, the rate of natural increase per head
is only one-third of what it was in colonial times. Even the Roman
Catholic "Habitant," therefore, has felt the effect of the general
decline of birthrate throughout the western world in the period since
the beginning of the industrial revolution.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a small but
steady immigration from the British Isles into Upper Canada, though
interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars. After the close of that conflict a
larger movement of population took place, which brought in an extensive
English population. Theretofore most of the arrivals had been Scotch or
Americans, so that a visitor in 1810 commented on the fact that he met
"scarcely any English and few Irish."
In 1815 the government began to assist immigrants by giving free
passage and a grant of one hundred acres of land after arrival with
a promise of free rations for the first six or eight months and a
like amount of land to each male child on his reaching the age of
twenty-one. A wise restriction required a deposit of a little less
than one hundred dollars by the immigrant, to be returned to him after
two years if he had complied with the terms of the contract on his
behalf. These provisions were availed of mainly by Scotchmen going to
Ontario. The scheme, however, had the advantage for our present purpose
of establishing for the first time records of immigration, which
thenceforth can be traced in detail.
In 1819 the emigration from British ports to Canada was in excess of
20,000, and continued for years at about this rate in spite of the
booms which Australia and New Zealand were enjoying at the same time.
There was a substantial movement of emigration toward Canada in the
years 1830-34. In the nine years preceding 1837, more than a quarter of
a million emigrants from the British Isles arrived at Quebec on their
way westward, more than 50,000 of them in a single year.
Primogeniture in England has been a powerful factor in building up the
British Commonwealth. The oldest son of a landed family inherited the
estate and the titles, if any, and stayed at home. The younger sons,
left to shift for themselves, were ready to emigrate. The colonies have
thus received a great many more settlers of first-class ability than
would otherwise have been the case. At the same time, the perpetuation
of family continuity, through the preservation of the ancestral home
intact, has been a strong psychological factor in maintaining a
vigorous family life in the upper classes of Great Britain.
By 1840 the population of Canada was approximately a million and a
half. During the next generation nearly a million more immigrants
arrived from British ports--the great Irish migration changing the
racial character of this movement markedly from about 1845. Prior to
that time the newcomers were pre-dominantly English, with Wiltshire and
Yorkshire largely represented. When the potato famine caused the Irish
to seek refuge elsewhere, they naturally turned their steps to England,
as the most easily and cheaply accessible of havens. Great Britain
could absorb only a limited part of these and began to direct them to
Canada, which, indeed, they preferred to the United States because the
Catholic Church was strong there.
The emigrants were weak and in 1849 one-sixth of those who started
are said to have died on the voyage. The number of Irish who left the
United Kingdom in that year was 215,000, of whom nearly half were bound
for Quebec. Canada became alarmed at being made the dumping ground of
an enfeebled and destitute population so much in excess of its capacity
to absorb, and, by increased taxes and other means, slowed down this
immigration, which then headed toward the United States. Thereafter
many of the Irish who had already gone to Canada moved on down into the
Union, so that in the end Canada received a smaller part of the Irish
Catholic migration than might be thought.
The census of 1871 furnishes a convenient point at which to take
a review of the population. It then totalled 3,485,761 in the four
original provinces (Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia).
British and French together, in the ratio of two to one, made up 92 per
cent. The only foreign element which contributed as much as 1 per cent
of the whole was the German, numbering more than 200,000 people, or 5.8
per cent.
The French Habitants have always formed a somewhat indigestible mass,
but half a century of struggle had resulted in a workable system of
government and compromise in the administrative life of the country.
The dominant element was the British, and save for the great mass of
French there was no large foreign block to menace the country's unity.
In sharp contrast to the settlement of the West of the United States,
the occupation of the prairie and mountain provinces of Canada has
been marked by law and order. In our West, especially in the mining
districts, law was largely disregarded and its place taken by private
justice, administered by individuals.
In Canada the Mounted Police have played a most efficient rôle in
controlling both the settlers and the Indians. At the time of the
Klondike rush in 1898, when hordes of gold seekers scrambled over the
passes to the head waters of the Yukon, a handful of Mounted Police
maintained a discipline for which the Americans themselves were very
grateful. In the same way the administration of the mining laws of the
Klondike, which is in Canadian territory, was admired and envied by the
Americans there.
The Canadian treatment of the Indians in the western provinces was
also marked by an absence of the bloody wars which characterized our
westward advance. The only uprising against the Whites was the Riel
Rebellion in Manitoba, in 1869, which was by the half-breeds rather
than by the Indians and which had special underlying causes. All this
has been accomplished without the Whites in any way fraternizing with
the Indians.
During the French period, the Canadian Indians always sided with the
French against the English, because under the influence of the Catholic
priests, the French Indian half-breed was regarded as a Frenchman and,
as a result, influenced his mother's people in favor of the ruling race.
There were plenty of offspring of white frontiersmen and Indian squaws
all along our frontier, but these half breeds were everywhere kicked
out and despised as Indians. This attitude toward the lower race has
always characterized our American frontier and while very unpopular
with the natives, has served to keep the White race unmixed, in sharp
contrast to the French and Spanish colonies.
Canada still has more than 100,000 Indians, four times as many in
proportion to the whole population, as in the United States.
* * * * *
Newfoundland, for geographical reasons, even though it has politically
no relation to Canada, is the most convenient starting point in
reviewing in more detail the subdivisions of the country.
Larger than Ireland, the island claims to be the "senior colony" of
the British Commonwealth. John Cabot, a Genoese, sailing from Bristol,
discovered it in 1497, according to the traditional account, and
took possession of it in the name of Henry VII. Within a few years
fishermen, not merely English but French, Spanish, Portuguese, and
Basque, were landing there to dry and cure the enormous quantities of
cod caught on the Great Banks, which still form the principal wealth of
the colony. In fact, some writers believe that the island may have been
discovered long before the time of Columbus, by fishermen. At any rate,
the effective occupation, though scarcely the continuous settlement of
Newfoundland, long antedated the colonization of Virginia and many of
the original English residents came from Devonshire.
The aboriginal inhabitants, the Beothics, disappeared half a century
ago. They were probably Eskimos, or closely related to them, and are
sometimes spoken of as "Red" Indians, in contrast to the "Black"
Indians, the Micmacs, who have recently immigrated in small numbers
from New Brunswick.
Newfoundland has nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants, but its
backward stage of development still makes it little known to the
outside world.
On the mainland a long strip of the Atlantic Coast and a large triangle
of land behind it are attached to Newfoundland administratively, under
the name of Labrador. Because of its scanty population it may well be
disregarded in the present discussion.
* * * * *
Nova Scotia during Colonial days was almost a New England colony. It
was known to the French as "Acadie" and was ceded to England in 1713.
Interposed between New England and French Canada, Acadia suffered
heavily from the warfare that went on between the two regions.
The existence of a large French population was always a source of
irritation, and of danger, to the English. Finally in 1758 the French
were cleared out, about 6000 of them being distributed throughout the
English colonies, and the remainder escaping to Canada. Those who came
to the thirteen colonies suffered hardships, but on the whole were more
humanely treated than were those who fled to their co-religionists in
Quebec Province. The place of the exiled Acadians[15] was largely taken
by New England emigrants.
The American population of Nova Scotia was further greatly augmented
at the time of the Revolution by an influx of Loyalists. These came
in such numbers as to disturb the colony seriously, but formed an
invaluable addition of the best sort of British stock. This general
trend has continued so that, even in 1921, of the foreign-born
population of Nova Scotia, that which originated in the United States
was twice as large as all the rest of the foreign-born population put
together.