THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW
TIMERS OF WINNIPEG
Winnipeg introduces the West. 'If you like Winnipeg,' I had been
told before I got there, 'you will like the West.' I had been
somewhat disheartened by this information. I had pictured Winnipeg
as a smoke-laden city of mean and narrow streets, set off with board
walks and wooden shacks of various sizes. I knew that I should not
like Winnipeg if it were like that. Well, it is not like that. Main
Street, which follows exactly the lines of the old Hudson Bay
Company's trail, is a hundred and thirty-two feet wide, and the other
streets are in proportion. Above is the immensely clear and lofty
Canadian sky. The wooden shacks are not there, and you will have to
go far to find the board walks. True, the buildings are, on the
whole, less impressive than the streets, but there are some
magnificent blocks rising several stories; and if you take an {116}
observation-car to go and see the sights of Winnipeg, you will find
yourself brought to spots where further fine blocks are rising; and
with the eye of the imagination you will behold Winnipeg as
splendidly lofty as New York. I am not sure that for a place as warm
as Winnipeg in summer and as cold in winter (I have heard the very
truest Canadians say that they have been nearly frozen there in
winter) the laying out of the town in so spacious a style is ideal.
Streets narrower and more easily screened from the sun and wind would
have seemed more comfortable to begin with. But then Winnipeg is
growing, growing, growing; and it may be that some day even Main
Street will seem shut in when it has its skyscrapers.
Certainly it is a mistake to have preconceptions of Canada. I found
Winnipeg spacious instead of mean. I next found that instead of
consisting of elevators and all the apparatus connected with the
storage of wheat, it was all banks and cinematograph parlours. There
were, it is true, shops and such things sandwiched in between. I
recall a jeweller's shop containing the suitable and attractive
placard in its window--'Marriage Licences for Sale Here.' It is
true, too, that banks and cinematograph {117} shows are not
unconnected with wheat. In the banks you store the dollars you have
made out of wheat; at the cinematograph shows you circulate them.
But really there was an almost incredible number of these
institutions.
Of the two kinds of business I felt that personally I would rather
own a moving picture show. Winnipegers are, I feel sure, easy to
amuse. And they look exceedingly prosperous. The air of prosperity
struck me as more obvious in Winnipeg than in any other part of
Canada. This may have been due in part to the ladies' hats. I saw
some wonderful hats in Winnipeg. Of course there are some women who
seem born to wear wonderful hats. Whatever they put on seems
wonderful. But in Winnipeg this art of wearing wonders seemed almost
universal. Ladies who might otherwise have passed for school
teachers--so serene and even precise was their general bearing--were
to be seen in hats that would be astounding either on Hampstead Heath
or in Covent Garden opera. I was told the hats come direct either
from London or Paris, and form an important part of the Steamship
Companies' freights, since they are charged for not by weight but by
their superficial area. I thought to myself, {118} after I had seen
a few samples of them, what sleepless nights the creators of these
marvels must pass in the fear that they can never again rival, much
less surpass, the last consignment to the Wheat City.
The men too have a prosperous appearance--always new hats, new coats,
new cigars; and I was so much impressed by it that I began to study
their faces to see if some new type--with the Croesus gift--had been
developed in this western place. If they had all looked alike, or
had not all looked prosperous, it would have been simpler. But they
all looked different--more different than Londoners--as they
would--for here all the nations of the earth are gathered, and over a
score of languages are taught in the schools (just think of it!); and
among these different faces one saw the old familiar aspects--the
shrewd and the foolish, the strong-mouthed and the weak, the
bluffer's and that of the man who counts. Clearly, they were not all
amazing organisers, or men with the grit and the brains that must
take them to the top. Not any more were so, I mean, than you would
see in any big place. No, it was the economic conditions, not the
men, which were changed.
Yet there is one thing noticeable in most of {119} the faces one sees
here. It is a general air of buoyancy--of greater expectation and,
therewith, of greater self-satisfaction--in a good sense--than one
sees at home. Just as the London clerk's face might be made to
read!--'I am merely a city clerk on £50 a year--I shall never rise
much higher, and I hope I may keep my place,' so the Winnipeg clerk's
face might be taken to announce--'At present I'm helping along the
Dominion Elevator Company. Luckily for them they're a go-ahead lot.
I guess, though, they'll have to raise my salary soon, pretty good
though it is now. If they don't, they'll have to look for another
man. There are plenty of jobs waiting for me.'
If it is the truth, what could be better?
That there are more jobs than men in the West seems undeniable,
though most of them of course are on the land. I had the pleasure of
a talk with Mr. Bruce Walker, through whose hands all the immigrants
to the West pass. Mr. Bruce Walker's office is in the station, which
is one of the sights of the West, when an immigrant train arrives.
For Winnipeg is their distributing centre, and in the station, when
the train comes in, you may see more types of men and women than a
year's travel in Europe would give you, and you may hear {120} more
different languages being spoken than went to the unmaking of the
tower of Babel. To place all these people, men, women and children,
in positions suited to their capacities, before the small sums of
money with which they have arrived in the New World have given out,
would seem to be a task which Napoleon might have shrunk from. But
Mr. Bruce Walker appeared quite undismayed. Although in the first
six months of 1910 the immigration from Great Britain alone had
increased 98 per cent. over any other corresponding period, he had
found no difficulty in dealing with it. He admitted that it meant
increase of work for himself and his staff, but that was nothing, he
said, so long as there were more jobs than men. 'And there are more
jobs,' he said. 'It's amazing. But the extent to which Canada can
absorb men seems endless.' He told me many excellent and amusing
stories of the difficulties that arise in connection with the
new-comers, but I have no space for them here.
The chief criticism to be directed against the Canadian Government's
methods in dealing with immigrants is, I think, that it encourages on
to the land men who are in some cases wasted there. It is natural
that it should {121} place immigrants on the land as far as possible.
The land is there, apparently endlessly absorbent. It offers,
superficially, work that any strong and able-bodied man should be
capable of doing. Again, that Canadian theory that a man should be
ready to turn his hand to anything, encourages the Canadian
Government to believe that it is justified in turning the hands of
immigrants to the work that most obviously wants doing. On the other
side, it has to be remembered that while a man may be capable of
turning his hand to anything, he is probably much more capable of
turning his hand to the work he has been trained to; and not only
that, but he is wasted to a large extent if he is not doing it. I am
thinking particularly of the skilled workmen who emigrate to Canada
from England. Turn them on to land and they may do fairly well; but
turn them on to the work they are used to, and they will do much
better. I do not say that the Canadian Government is bound to find
for such men the work for which they are fitted; but in so far as
they undertake to find work for immigrants, they should as far as
possible find the right work. That jealousy which causes the United
States to put obstacles in the way of the skilled immigrant who {122}
comes into the country, should not be encouraged in Canada. It is
absurd to suppose that Canada is already stocked with skilled
workmen, and I repeat it is waste to use men, who are skilled, in
work to which they are wholly unaccustomed. Moreover, though these
skilled artisans may in many cases only spend a certain time on the
land (after which they find the job which they want and are
accustomed to), yet in many other cases they may be so sickened by
their time on the land, doing unaccustomed work badly, that they
either become wastrels, or leave Canada altogether, believing it to
be no country for workers like themselves, and saying so with all the
bitterness of men who were capable of succeeding but did actually
fail. Another point to which the immigration department might give
all the attention it can spare, is that of making it as simple as
possible for decent immigrants to be joined at the earliest
opportunity by their wives and families. The lack of women in Canada
is a curse which there is no disguising. For one thing, to have a
country full only of able-bodied men without wives or families is to
give it an air of prosperity which is unreal. For another, it is to
leave it without any of the ambitions which cause the majority of men
{123} to save the money they make, and lay the foundations of a
civilised nation. The other objections are obvious. A wise
Government policy might go far towards making the period of
separation between an immigrant and his wife shorter.
Later on, to get a contrast with Winnipeg, I went out to see Kildonan
with a friend. It is the village where the Old-timers--the crofters
from the highlands, whom Lord Selkirk brought out in 1812 to colonise
the land--finally settled down. They had hard years enough; trouble
with the Indians, great trouble with the rival fur company. The
fur-traders could see in the farmers only men who would reduce the
wild and spoil their own industry. Only after years were their
disputes settled. Kildonan is three miles out from Winnipeg by
electric-car--along a dusty road fenced with wire from the fat black
land. The crofters must have rejoiced to see that loam. Nowadays it
has mostly been turned to market-gardening for the supplying of
Winnipeg, and the farmers have shifted further West. We turned down
a country lane, shaded with maple woods and golden birches, and came
presently to the banks of the Red River. Over on the other side,
standing among light trees, stood Kildonan {124} Church, the oldest
church in Western Canada. We crossed by the ferry, and walked up
into the churchyard. It is not large, but it is full, and everywhere
you read the familiar Scottish names--Macleod--Black--Ferguson and
the rest. The death among infants in those days seems to have been
great--naturally enough--for Kildonan then was far from civilisation
and doctor's help; and so, many small, unconscious settlers spent
only a few days or weeks in the new land. But there were others that
lived long. One of the most interesting gravestones commemorated the
death of a settler who had come out from Kildonan, Sutherlandshire,
at the age of nine. This in the year 1815--the year of Waterloo. He
had lived to be past ninety. For his epitaph some one had chosen
those noble words from the Epistle to the Hebrews: 'He looked for a
city which hath foundations--whose maker and builder is God.'
I think it cannot matter now that the old man died before the great
Canadian boom came, before Winnipeg had become the biggest
wheat-centre of the world, before he could realise, who looked for a
city which hath foundations, that even in his life he had attained to
'God's own country.'
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