IN CALGARY
Alberta is at present the _débutante_ of the Dominion.
Countries, like cities, used to grow up and, if we stick to our
metaphor, 'come out' anyhow. It is true there were people called
statesmen who had at times bright ideas concerning the commonweal
which they tried to put into practice, and sometimes succeeded in
putting into practice, with not unsatisfactory results. But the
commonweal they had in mind was a limited one. It was not truly
'common,' either in respect of the people whose weal was considered,
or in respect of the weal it was desired to affect. Statesmen, in
fact, thought usually only of a particular section or part of the
population of their country and also thought only of a particular
aspect of that section's welfare--usually either its soul or its
prestige; very rarely its material prosperity.
Things have not altogether changed. Things {139} don't. Statesmen
still consider particular classes rather than the nation as a whole,
and their notions of what weal means are still limited notions. But
there is this difference. That aspect of the commonweal which can be
referred to somewhat vaguely as material prosperity now bulks very
large in their minds, and, as a result of it, the idea is beginning
to prevail that not only can cities be planned before they are built,
but that whole provinces can and should be encouraged to grow in
certain thought-out directions.
In the old world the new idea is likely to work slowly and somewhat
obscurely. Cities and countries have already grown up there in the
old-and-anyhow style; and grown-up things, like grown-up people, are
not easily changed. In England, for example, we may think that large
properties are a mistake; but they will not, with anything that can
be called celerity, be turned into small holdings. So with our
cities. There they are--fully grown and fully stocked with vested
interests. The possessors of those interests cannot see in any
proposed change the vast improvement that the non-possessors see in
it. The most that can be expected in England in the immediate future
is that, slowly and imperceptibly, certain {140} outrageous mistakes
of the past will be remedied, and that where new developments are
essential, they shall be the result of ideas, rather than of
confusions. The Town-Planning Bill is, I imagine, a case in point.
The most conservative people are beginning to see that in itself an
idea is not a vicious thing and may even produce a good result.
In the new world (and perhaps in the German Empire too) the notion of
planning the future of town or country instead of leaving it to luck
is having much swifter and more demonstrable effects. On the
Canadian plains, as I have pointed out, towns are being laid out
largely with an eye to their future. The same thing is being done
for the countryside. It, too, is being planned with an eye to its
future. It is not growing up just anyhow; it is being made to grow
in particular directions.
How much this is the idea of statesmen, of the public officials, that
is to say, of the Dominion; and how much it is due to the managers of
private companies and enterprises, historians will some day be able
to decide. I incline to the view that at present the big railway
companies represent far the most influential force in Canada, and
that they, without any of the outward paraphernalia of office, {141}
are deciding what Canada is to be for a good many years to come.
Naturally they work from what may be called the railway point of
view. Their notion of a Canadian commonweal takes the form,
therefore, of a country in which a settled and prosperous population
lives along the lines of the railroads, and is so distributed that
there shall be no uninhabited spaces through which the running of
trains will cease to be a paying proposition. There are bound, of
course, to be some intervals of the kind. The highlands of Ontario
form such a gap in the system of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That
gap is not easy to fill: Alberta is.
A few years ago Alberta was far from being a profitable country
through which to run trains. Cattle-ranching maintained the thinnest
of populations, and the leagues of sunburnt plains east of Calgary
seemed to offer few chances to a more numerous class of settler. Any
one who had prophesied then that they would shortly be crowded with
wheat-farmers would have been laughed at. But they are being
crowded, comparatively crowded, now. And the credit for this must be
given those who started the Bow River irrigation works. No doubt
there are other reasons for the rise of Alberta. The {142}
discoverers of new wheats have helped it; so have the American
farmers who, by spoiling the land across the line, created a demand
for new land. But the irrigation works are the main factor, and when
the Octopus, as the Canadian Pacific Railway is not uncommonly
called, is had up for judgment, these and many other of their
achievements will help them to make a stout defence. True, it is
their own land they are irrigating; it is passengers and freight for
themselves that they want to secure; but, whatever the motive, they
are advertising and causing to be populated and cultivated hundreds
of square miles on either side of their own particular land which
might otherwise have lain waste for many years.
It may be said--Where is the plan in this? Where is it any different
from the schemes of any railway country in the old world. The
difference is that in the old world as a rule the railway company
follows trade, and runs only through populous parts where that trade
is to be got; whereas in Canada, railway companies lay their lines
through the desert, so to speak, and then start to fill it in an
orderly and profitable manner. Alberta at present is being planned
into existence. It is not booming simply on its own merits, great
though these {143} may be. It lay fallow for many years. For all
one knows, other parts of Canada may have more of a future. But they
are not being boomed as Alberta is, because the time has not yet come
when they must, in the opinion of the railway companies, be filled in.
The need for the filling in of Alberta is one of the reasons why
Calgary has sprung up so quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no
future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-aged, can remember camping
in Calgary in tents. There was only one place to dance in, and
ranchers used to take turns at entering it. Now Calgary is a
stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid
importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important
than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important.
There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are
singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for
their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit
Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a
different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not
succeed. I suppose that prosperity has overtaken it at such a pace
that it has not had time as yet to consider its responsibilities.
{144} A town which permits one of its best hotels to place three
double beds in one bedroom--and perhaps as many as nine guests in the
three double beds--may already be great, but it has not realised its
greatness.
Calgary differs from the prairie towns which lie between it and
Winnipeg, in that it is not really a prairie town, but a town on the
edge of the prairie. It looks at the mountains; and it is built of
the grey stone that is found near by; the Chinook winds that sweep it
and make its climate comparatively mild, are mountain winds; and it
stands on the Bow River, which is a mountain river, swift and clear,
and blue with the blue that is melted from snowfields. This is none
of your turbid streams like the Assiniboine or the Red River. All
rivers must run to the plains at last, but the Bow River does not
seem to belong to them, though it feeds them more than most. In the
old days Calgary, such as it was, owed everything to the hills. The
cattle-ranchers settled round there because the Chinook winds,
scatterers of the snow, made outdoor grazing possible for their
cattle during months when Manitoba and Saskatchewan were deep in
frozen drifts. And since it was just at the foot of the mountains,
the miners in the mountains {145} used it as a supply centre. It is
still a centre for ranchers and miners; but its real importance is
that it has become the headquarters of that prairie which produced
once, perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now yields the
finest wheat in the world. If any statues are to be put up in the
town--and it would be as well to wait for a native sculptor of
talent--they should be the statues of the men who constructed the
irrigation works.
Later on, but this is a smaller matter perhaps, I should like to see
a statue put up to the man who will make it possible for the bars of
Calgary to be allowed to remain open between the hours of 7 P.M. on
Saturday, and 7 A.M. on Monday. At present they are shut during
those hours, which means, I take it, that Calgarians, if admitted,
would drink more than was good for them. The person therefore, to
whom the suggested statue should be raised, would be the man who made
the Calgarian attitude towards the drink question more civilised. I
know that the problem is not peculiar to Calgary or to Canada. It
may even be that Canada for a new country does more to solve it than
most. I recollect than when I got back to England, one of the first
things that caught my eye was an {146} interview given to a local
paper by a leading Hertfordshire man, who had also just returned from
travelling through Canada. He assured the interviewer that, having
been from end to end of Canada, he had never once seen a man the
worse for liquor. It must have been a delightful, but perhaps unique
experience. I had not his good fortune, and having talked with many
decent Canadians, seldom fanatics, and rarely indeed total
abstainers, who nevertheless deplored the prevalence of the drink
evil in the West, I cannot think that that Hertfordshire traveller's
happy blindness is a thing to be imitated. Drink takes another
form--perhaps a less vicious one--in a new country; but it ruins more
good men than it does in an old one.
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