HOMES AND CAREERS
IN CANADA
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
_After the sheets of this book were printed off, it was found that the
title chosen_, Making Good in Canada, _had been used for
another book that just secured priority of publication. It was necessary
to change the title, but the original title had to remain at the heads
of the pages._
[Illustration: PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS AT OTTAWA.]
HOMES AND CAREERS
IN CANADA
BY
H. JEFFS
_WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS_
LONDON
JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14 FLEET STREET
1914
THE AUTHOR’S THANKS
TO
THE HON. DR. W. J. ROCHE
DOMINION MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR
FOR KINDNESS SHOWN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD vii
I. WHY PEOPLE GO TO CANADA 9
II. THE HOME OF A NATION 25
III. THE MAKING OF MODERN CANADA 31
IV. THE ROMANCE OF RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION 50
V. SETTLING ON THE LAND 70
VI. CANADIAN INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 104
VII. “REAL ESTATE” 146
VIII. THE HOMES OF CANADA 164
IX. LEAVING THE OLD COUNTRY 183
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS AT OTTAWA _Frontispiece_
THE “EMPRESS OF BRITAIN” WITH EMIGRANTS AT RIMOUSKI 18
SIX MONTHS OUT FROM HOME 24
QUEBEC FROM THE RIVER 34
COUNTRY SCENE IN OTTAWA 44
THE POWER PLOUGH IN SASKATCHEWAN 62
EVANGELINE’S WELL, ANNAPOLIS VALLEY, NOVA SCOTIA 70
STEAM PLOUGH IN ALBERTA 84
TORONTO, YONGE STREET 104
GALA DAY AT WINNIPEG 116
REGINA 126
CALGARY 137
PLOUGHING AND HARVESTING 164
STRATHCONA MONUMENT AT MONTREAL 171
A SASKATOON SCHOOL 182
EMIGRANTS LANDED AT QUEBEC 188
FOREWORD
This book is the fruits of a visit to Canada in which the author crossed
the country from Montreal to Vancouver, and returned from Halifax, Nova
Scotia. As a journalist and National President of the Brotherhood
Movement, which advises Brotherhood emigrants going out, and arranges
for their welcome by Canadian Brotherhood men, he found all doors open
to him. He had countless talks with men of all classes, native Canadians
and British settlers who had been in the country from two or three to
forty years. Ministers of the Dominion and Provincial Governments freely
answered his numerous questions as to the wisest course to be adopted by
various classes of emigrants, and Dominion and Provincial State
officials gave him all possible information in frank talk and by placing
at his disposal valuable State publications. Ministers of religion,
prominent business and professional men, journalists, “real estate” men,
hosts and hostesses in whose homes he was graciously received, heads of
Emigration Departments, leading officials of the great transcontinental
railways, all contributed to his accumulating stock of information; and,
needless to say, he lost no opportunity of seeing things for himself and
forming his own judgments. In his railway journeys, amounting to 10,000
miles, he fraternised with the commercial travellers on the trains, and
from them, and their discussions and comparison of notes among
themselves, he picked up a vast amount of invaluable information as to
the development, the trading methods, and the prospects of the country.
It has been a long business digesting and reducing the material to
order, but the author hopes that the book will prove helpful to those
seeking a career in a land of illimitable possibilities, and to the
increasing number of people at home who are tempted to invest money in
Canadian undertakings. He is specially concerned to help those who
decide on making Canada their homeland.
MAKING GOOD IN
CANADA
CHAPTER I
WHY PEOPLE GO TO CANADA
Between 350,000 and 400,000 people every year enter Canada with the
intention of making Canada their home: 60,000 of these cross the border
from the United States. Probably 50,000 to 70,000 are emigrants from the
various non-British countries. The remainder are from the British Isles,
and chiefly from England, Scotland, and Wales. The Irish prefer to go to
the United States, where some twelve millions of people of Irish blood
are already settled, and nearly every Irish family in the homeland has
some representative in the States who will lend a helping hand. During
the emigration season—from March to the middle of November—from 10,000
to 15,000 a week leave Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, and Southampton by
the various lines for Canada. The steerage of an emigrant ship, viewed
from one standpoint, is a melancholy spectacle. There would be from 700
to 1,500 people, men and women mostly under the age of twenty-five, and
even whole families, leaving the Old Country behind them in order to
make themselves citizens of a new country 3,000 miles across the
Atlantic. In Parliament, and out of Parliament, there is dismal talk
about “draining the country of its best blood,” and of “sending the
cream of the working manhood and womanhood of our nation to become rival
producers with our British farmers and workers in factories that will
compete with ourselves.” Such talk is natural enough, but who can blame
these people for leaving a land where they have seemed to be hopelessly
pressed down by force of circumstances, with no prospect of ever rising,
to a land that offers all sorts of opportunities to the man or woman
with capacity, good character and grit? The way to quench the desire for
emigration is to open wider the doors of opportunity at home, but that
opening of the doors seems to baffle the wisest and most progressive and
the most humanitarian of our statesmen. We live in a state of society
that is the resultant of fifteen hundred years of social evolution, and
evolution that has not always proceeded on right lines. We are a small
country with a very great population, and the land for the most part is
held up by a handful of owners, few of whom have had the vision to see
that the real wealth of Great Britain lies not in its property but in
its people. We have given rights to property and denied rights to
people. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, deer, and pheasants must be taken
great care of, for they have a saleable value, or they provide pleasure
for the rich in their happy hunting grounds; but in our villages,
country towns, and great cities hundreds of thousands of men and women
with capable hands and willing hearts are either denied the right to
earn a living wage or are compelled to work under such conditions as rob
life of its joy and buoyancy. What wonder if the townsman whose wages
are at starvation level, and whose employment is most precarious, who
may be thrown out of work at any moment, who is dependent for his daily
bread on the power or the will of an employer to provide him with a few
miserable shillings a week in return for his labour, gets tired of it,
and when he hears that in Canada there is work for all, and well-paid
work, with opportunities to rise out of the ruck of the wage-earners
into the proud position of landownership, should decide to try his luck
and should find himself soon afterwards in the steerage of one of the
great Atlantic liners with hundreds of like-minded companions? If we
would stop emigration from the towns we must tackle the employment
question, we must make employment secure, we must raise wages to a level
that will make it worth a man’s while to stay in the homeland amid
familiar surroundings. We must tackle the slums question. We create
slums by our conditions of industry and employment. The unemployed
rapidly degenerate physically, mentally and morally, and drift into the
slums, consorting there with other hopeless and helpless ones who have
been cast on to the social scrap-heap. London is the great
wealth-producing, wealth-distributing and wealth-exchanging centre of
the world. The Chancellor of the Exchequer recently said in the City of
London that values to the extent of seventeen thousand millions passed
through the Bank Clearing House of London in 1912, and yet there are
districts in North, East and South London where in street after street
whole families are herded in single rooms, sarcastically called “homes,”
in house after house, living under conditions of misery which would be
unendurable were it not that the misery is so continuous that the sense
of pain has been dulled almost out of existence.
In our villages, which, it is complained, are being depopulated by the
increasing emigration of the labourers to Canada, what has been done to
induce the young countryman to remain at home? There are few
characteristic agricultural villages in which the worker on the land
receives as much as 15_s._ a week, and he is taught to regard himself as
a very happy man if anybody is good enough to employ him at all. The
housing and the sanitary conditions in many of these villages are still
of the most repulsive character. The land often belongs to one or two
owners who decline either to part with plots of it for building cottages
or to build themselves. Young men wishing to marry are prevented from
realising the desire because there is no cottage vacant in which they
can start housekeeping. I was told that from one village of little more
than a thousand population half-a-dozen young men migrated in little
more than a year because they wanted to get married and would have to
wait until somebody died and vacated a cottage. The land question will
have to be settled in a revolutionary way, a way that will make it
possible for a labourer to become a small-holder in his own country, and
to occupy a decent house which shall either be his own freehold or shall
be let to him at a reasonable rent, if the emigration from the villages
to Canada and the increasing emigration to Australia is to be checked.
Why should a young fellow who has been educated at the expense of the
State, who reads his halfpenny paper and perhaps frequents the village
reading-room and has learned to think for himself, remain in the
village, submitting to the humiliating conditions which would be imposed
upon him, and to the closing of the door of hope to his legitimate
aspiration to better himself? Young fellows of the middle class and the
upper class naturally look to the prospect of bettering themselves. They
are educated with that object in view, and in every possible way are
encouraged to make the most of their natural capacity and their
education; but to the village labourer, as to the average wage-earner in
the city, education in the vast majority of cases only sharpens the
sting of misery and deepens the sense of humiliation. We must take human
nature as it is. We must accept the logic of our social system. If we
are not prepared at whatever cost to make Great Britain worth remaining
in to the more intelligent and aspiring of our young men and young women
we have no right to complain if they leave Great Britain, and if, by
leaving the homeland, the country is drained of its best blood.
But, after all, ought we to take so tragic a view of the situation? We
are coming to understand that the world to-day is not divided into so
many water-tight compartments. The old idea of a country and a nation as
an isolated entity, enjoying its own advantages and regarding other
countries as rivals, whose gains were its loss, has gone by the board.
The world has been wonderfully opened up in these later years. The seas
are ploughed by countless ships, carrying from country to country the
products of their agriculture and their manufacturing industries. Wealth
is made all round by the mutual exchange of those products. If France
prospers, or Germany, or Russia, England gains, for those countries have
the more to spend on the things that England manufactures. Still more is
this the case with the British dominions beyond the seas. South Africa,
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are countries of our kinsmen. Blood
is thicker than water. Those people look naturally to the home country
as the country that offers them the most valuable market and as the
country from which they shall obtain what they themselves desire to buy
and use. Take Canada, for instance. Year by year it is increasing not
only its selling but its buying power; it is becoming a most valuable
customer to the homeland. Those who go out from us become our customers.
The more they prosper the more they purchase from the Old Country. The
farm labourer earning his 15_s._ a week goes to Manitoba, Saskatchewan,
Alberta, or British Columbia and takes a pre-empted homestead of 160
acres. He has served, probably, a year or two on a farm, learning the
methods, studying the situation, developing his manhood. If “the magic
of property turns sand into gold,” what can it not do for 160 acres of
fertile prairie? The labourer “breaks the prairie,” plants his corn,
reaps his harvest, sends it to the elevator, fills his pocket with the
price, and is so satisfied with himself that he wants to increase his
holding. He does increase it. He spends money on stock, machinery, all
the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life, and much of the money
that he spends comes to the Old Country to stimulate our manufactures
and our commerce. A young fellow who has left a Warwickshire or
Berkshire or Leicestershire village returns to his village five years
afterwards on a winter holiday after he has disposed of his crops. He
spends his money freely. He is as independent as the biggest farmer in
the district. The other young fellows of the village talk with him and
hear his story. “Why don’t you fellows go out?” he says to them. “Why do
you stop here? You will never be any better off here. Do as I did—go to
Canada. There are farmers there almost fighting each other for every
good man going out who can do anything on the land. You will find a job
at once with good wages, and there is no reason why in four or five
years you should not be doing as well as I am.” The village lads listen
with both ears and with eyes and mouths open. Their latent discontent
with the conditions under which they work and live is roused to
activity. Whenever two labourers meet together in the field or on the
road, in the barber’s shop, in the public-house, the talk is of “how
well Tom Jenkins or Sam Brown has done” in Saskatchewan or Alberta. He
is besieged with inquirers who bombard him with questions about the
country, the climate, the prospects, and what steps they should take to
get out and what they ought to do when they arrive. There are old
schoolmates whom he encourages and tells them that if they will only
come out to his district he will see to it that they get a job
immediately on their arrival—very likely he will be able to give them a
job himself. One such labourer’s return—and there are few villages in
the country in which you do not hear of such returns—sets up a stream
of emigration to Canada from that village, and the stream, unless a
thorough-going scheme of land reform is carried out, and carried out
soon, is bound to deepen and broaden.
[Illustration: “THE EMPRESS OF BRITAIN,” WITH EMIGRANTS, AT RIMOUSKI,
MOUTH OF THE ST. LAWRENCE.]
Then there are the tenant farmers and their sons. In the Old Country
good land is highly rented and the conditions of tenure often such as to
make farming one of the riskiest of occupations. A man wants security of
tenure if he is to get the best out of his land. The old rough-and-ready
methods of agriculture are little good in these days. Intensive culture
is the means of making money to-day. Brains and capital must be put into
the land if the land is to yield a profit. The farmers who are making
most money in our country are those in districts where it is possible to
secure the freehold of the farms they cultivate. Quite recently I was in
Leicestershire in a district where almost all the farming land is
freehold property. There I found a farming family who were making large
profits out of the intensive culture of open land and out of the growing
of tomatoes, cucumbers, and grapes under glass. A member of the family
told me that this could not or would not have been done on rented land,
for a man will not be fool enough to invest capital in the land, and
people will not lend him the money to invest, unless he can look forward
for several years to getting the return. It is little wonder, therefore,
that the farmer, still young, heavily rented, with one or two
experiences of a bad season, with the fluctuation of prices inevitable
in a country like our own, and always at the mercy of a landlord, should
look longingly across the seas to Canada, when he has heard of the ease
with which there a man may become owner of his farm and may make money
in all sorts of ways if he has the farming instinct properly developed,
is a good business man, is able to adapt himself to the circumstances of
the district in which he settles, and is prepared to put brains and
“elbow grease” into the land.
The Governments of all the Provinces of Canada just now are offering
large inducements to such men to settle in the territories of the
Dominion. Within the last year or two the Legislatures of Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick have passed Acts under which large farms may be
purchased, in a condition ready to yield immediate profits, by loans, 80
per cent. of which will be guaranteed by the Province, to suitable men.
Thousands of small farmers and farmers’ sons are now doing exceedingly
well in the Provinces of Canada who went out with very little capital,
but, being the right sort of men, every opportunity was given them to
show of what metal they were made.
Probably, at this moment, three millions of the seven millions and a
half of the population of Canada were British-born. This means that
hundreds of thousands of families in the Old Country are linked by ties
of tender relationship to the citizenship of Canada. The British-born
Canadians return home to spend their Christmases. The winter is their
holiday season, and they have alike plenty of time and plenty of money
to dispose of. They tell their stories of their success in Canada, they
remove prejudices against the people, the country and the climate, and
they awaken the ambition of young and ambitious members of their
families to “go and do likewise.”
Again, Canada has offered a field for the investment of British surplus
profits second to none in the world. During the last few years our
country has been passing through a period of unprecedented prosperity.
It has been impossible to find employment in the industries of our
country for the annual two hundred millions or so of surplus profits,
and much of that surplus has been pouring in a river of gold into
Canadian channels for the development of the country.
There are tens of thousands of business men and financiers in Great
Britain who are deeply interested in the exploitation of Canadian land,
railways, and manufacturing industries. They pay frequent visits to
Canada to look after their interests there, and Canadian representatives
of those interests are continually coming over to this country to
propose further developments and to open up new channels for investment.
These business firms and financial concerns are the means of increasing
the stream of emigration into Canada. They send their travellers,
clerks, expert engineers, mechanics, and what not to Canada to assist in
the development of their interests. It is said that Canada has taken
almost more British capital during the last ten or fifteen years than it
has been able to absorb and that there may be a temporary set-back. The
set-back could not be more than temporary, for everybody who has
investigated the resources of Canada is convinced that those resources
are rich beyond all calculation and that thousands of millions of
capital can be profitably employed in developing them. I hope that
incidentally this little book may be of some use to those who have
legitimate financial interests in Canada as well as to those who may be
thinking of emigrating and to those who are interested in emigrants.
The Canadian Governments are all very keenly alive to the social and
economic value of every immigrant of the right sort. Every man able and
willing to work and to adapt himself to the conditions means an addition
to the economic development power of the country. He is alike a producer
and a consumer. He makes a home, and that home means increased trade to
the producer and consumer of every necessary of life. This is why not
only the Dominion but all the Provincial Governments are offering
inducements to the right sort of emigrant to make his home in Canada.
There are many emigrants who are not of the right sort. The man who is
shiftless, aimless, addicted to self-indulgent vices at home, who shirks
work, who is always grumbling, is not wanted in Canada. The man who can
work, but whose ideas are limited, who has been employed in some
specialised branch of a specialised industry at home, and who expects to
find employment in that specialised branch of that identical industry in
Canada, and thinks himself deceived and deeply wronged if he cannot find
employment in that specialised branch—he, too, ought not to go to
Canada. The man who succeeds is either the man willing to go on the land
and who is prepared to stand the racket of a little hardship until he
has learnt the ropes, or else the man—clerk, mechanic or what not—who
is willing to take the best job that offers and to work at it until
something more congenial and offering greater opportunity turns up. Men
such as these, granted that they have good health and a reasonable
amount of intelligence, simply cannot fail in Canada.
[Illustration: SIX MONTHS OUT FROM HOME.]
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