COLONIZATION IN CANADA.
I was glad to see, the other day, Mr. Morley’s letter advocating the
propriety of taking up land and settling on it some of the too numerous
class who drift into our great cities, finding no work to do in the
country, there to lead indifferent lives and come to an untimely end.
It is a step I have repeatedly advocated. Land is cheap enough now;
there is no occasion to wait for an Act of Parliament. It is as easy to
buy an estate, and to split it up into small portions, of which each
shareholder will become in time the proprietor, as to form a building
society, and thus enable any man to become his own landlord. But there
are certain drawbacks. There is the parson to be dealt with, who will be
sure to claim his higher tithes; there are burdens on property, of which
the working man, who is told by Mr. Chamberlain that he is more heavily
taxed than any other class of the community (is not the reverse of this
the case?), has no idea; and last, and not least, there is the unfitness
for peasant proprietorship of the average English workman, who has no
idea of living on the scant fare of the peasant proprietor of Belgium or
France, or, I fear, of working as hard. Granting, however, that he does,
the great fact remains, that peasant proprietorship is no remedy for all
the ills of life, and that France has its surplus population quite as
badly off, and a great deal more difficult to deal with than our own.
What is to be done to relieve the distress, the existence of which all
must own and deplore? I answer, Emigrate.
Emigration is the natural means of relieving the poverty of a nation.
Every man is an emigrant. No one lives and dies in the village in which
he was born. He finds his way to the neighbouring town in search of
work; then to the great metropolis; then across the water to one or other
of our colonies.
Greece and Rome realized the fact that under no conditions could a
certain tract of territory maintain more than a certain number of people,
and had their settled plans of emigration. In England, at any rate since
the days of the Pilgrim Fathers, we have too much left the matter to
chance, and an ordinary emigrant, with the ordinary want of backbone, it
seems to me, is just as likely to go to the dogs in New York, or Toronto,
or Melbourne, as in London. What we want is what is now being attempted
by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the leading members of
which have established a Church Colonization Land Society. Its object is
to assist, in a practicable, businesslike manner, on a remunerative
basis, the great and pressing work of emigration to the British colonies
in connection with the Church of England.
This society, I learn from a proof of a circular just placed in my hands,
issued by Canon Prothero, the chairman, will, under proper safeguards,
render temporary pecuniary aid in such cases as approve themselves to the
council, take charge of the emigrants on the journey to the colony,
provide for their settlement on lands selected, from those acquired by
the society, provide temporary dwellings until the emigrants can put
together their own (the materials for which may be bought ready to hand,
or the society itself can erect dwellings for them), will break up the
land if desired, and secure for the emigrant religious services similar
to those enjoyed at home.
The society have secured land in Manitoba, near the railway, which land
has been selected by a practical farmer, a Yorkshireman, who is to act as
local manager. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge have laid
particular stress in looking after the spiritual welfare of emigrants in
all our colonies; and in Liverpool, as some of my readers may be aware,
the society have placed the Rev. J. Bridger, of St. Nicholas Church, as
emigrants’ chaplain; chaplains have also been appointed at several other
ports, such as Plymouth, Glasgow, Cork, and Londonderry; but, as is
manifest, the great centre of emigration is Liverpool, and there Mr.
Bridger finds his hands full.
No pains are spared to show every attention to emigrants going from or
arriving at Liverpool, and occasionally Mr. Bridger sails with the first
party of emigrants to their new homes. It seems to me that the idea of
the Church Colonization Society is the right one; but that it might be
further extended by sending out at the same time the schoolmaster, and
the doctor, and the storekeeper, and the shoemaker, and tailor, and
baker, and butcher, and thus forming a village community.
It is at home impossible to realize the solitariness of the settler’s
life, far away from friends and the civilizing and elevating influences
of home. I met men in the North-West who seemed to have almost lost the
power of speech, so long had they been left on their homesteads alone.
Emigration in communities would do away with this state of things. At
present it is a serious sacrifice for a man with a family to emigrate
into a new country. It is not good for man to be alone. As a rule, he
degenerates on the prairie; civilization is the gift of towns to
humanity. A man does not live on bread alone. He needs that his heart
and head be stimulated by contact with his fellow-men; not, as in the old
country, in consequence of the extensive competition, by rivalry for the
crust of bread, but by mutual aid and companionship in the great work of
subduing the wilderness and making it to rejoice and blossom as the rose.
In a month or two the emigration season will have commenced, and there is
no time to spare. Why cannot other denominations do what the Church of
England is now preparing to do? Canada can feed and fatten millions, who
in England will have to live as a burden on the community. There is many
a man who does ill here who would do well there. We are all more or less
the creatures of circumstances. In England the beershop has degraded the
community, and many a man finds it hard to get away from its foul
companionship: here, he declines into a criminal or a sot; there, not
only will he be neither the one nor the other, but he will develop all
the better tendencies of his character, and become a man. Make him a
peasant-proprietor at home, and the chances are the old Adam in him will
be too strong. Plant him in a colony, he feels in a new world, with a
new aim. Here, he is looked down on: there, he is hailed as a man and a
brother. We who are old must stop at home; but there is no reason why
our sons should do so. Why should a young man be a drudge because his
father was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water, when in a colony
there are many ways of becoming well-off to a man who has good muscles
and brains, has the sense to avail himself of opportunity when it occurs,
and to keep his money in his pocket? I say Canada, because Canada is
easy to get at, and is yet almost in a virgin state. It is only recently
that it has been opened up by the Canadian Government and the Canadian
Pacific Railway. I say Canada, because Canada is English, and I am an
Englishman; because the Canadian Government does all it can to help the
emigrant; and because the Canadians are mostly healthy, honest men.
Englishmen thrive there better, at any rate, than they do in the United
States, or in South Africa. Arrangements for a colony can easily be
made. In London, the Canadian Pacific Railway have a fine office in
Cannon Street, where you can see for yourself what are the results of
farming in the North-West, and where you will find its courteous and
intelligent representative, Mr. Alexander Begg, whose only fault is that
he will persist in maintaining that the English climate is killing him,
and that he enjoys much better health in that frosty Canada, the cold of
which is a bugbear that has kept too many away. Go to him, and he will
tell you where to plant your colony. The money which is now squandered
in keeping paupers at home surely might be better spent in forming
village communities in the boundless plains of the North-West. Let
Dissenters imitate the Church. Let them have their communities as the
Church of England seek to have theirs. Some people say the Salvationists
are a nuisance in our crowded cities: let General Booth betake himself to
Manitoba; he will find few people to complain of his processions there.
But this is no subject to trifle about; day by day the poor are becoming
poorer, and the middle-classes and the rich also. The leaders of the
coming democracy seem unwilling to recognise that fact, and are angry
when I tell them it is better to emigrate than to agitate in the old
country for the ruin of the capitalist, the destruction of our trade, the
abolition of the landlord, the advent of the working man’s candidate, and
the rights of man. Are they the friends of the poor who bid him stay
where he is to cheapen the labour market, already overstocked; to crowd
the cities with an unwholesome pauperism; to see his sons ripen into
thieves, and his daughters cast on the streets; and to look forward to
the workhouse as the refuge of his old age? Even if we had a revolution
as complete as that of France, what then? Over-population will breed
sorrow and sickness and want and despair all the same. In Canada, the
man who cares to work is sure of his reward; he has a future before him
and his.
I am glad to find, since the above was written, there has been formed by
the Congregational Union a special emigration scheme, of which the Rev.
Andrew Mearns, of the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, is Secretary, and
that they have already sent out over a hundred qualified emigrants. The
outfit and passage money of each man costs £7, and it is proposed to give
each £2 when he arrives in Canada. The men to be selected are drawn from
the ranks of the unemployed who are brought together at the various
Mission Halls. The case of each applicant is fully examined, and the men
themselves are thoroughly tested as to their honest desire and ability to
work. The men having been approved and their record found satisfactory,
they are sent to the emigration agent of the colony, who also examines
into the cases of the various applicants. This acceptance having been
notified, the next and, perhaps, the greatest difficulty is to provide a
temporary home for them in the colony to which they are to be sent. As
the result of much labour, each man will be sent to the care of some
gentleman in the colony, who will see that he is properly provided for,
and started in a fair way to obtain work. They are thus going to various
towns in the Dominion, such as Kingston, Ontario, Ottawa, Hamilton,
London, Toronto, St. Thomas’s, Bellville, and Guelph. Among those to
whom introduction has been given are directors of railways, officers of
Christian Associations, gardeners, farmers, merchants, and various
ministers of influence. It is almost unnecessary to add that the
spiritual needs of the men have not been forgotten, and in the kit of
each one have been packed a Bible, supplied by the kindness of the Bible
Society—who have intimated their willingness to make a similar
presentation to every man the Union sends out—and an assortment of
suitable and practical religious literature.
Thus far have I told the story of my Canadian experiences. Those who
wish to fully pursue the subject will do well to get ‘Picturesque
Canada,’ now being published by Messrs. Cassell and Co.
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THE END.
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BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, SURREY.