THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION
There is vague talk at times about the Americanisation of Canada.
Very dismal people talk about its Americanisation by force of arms.
Minor pessimists think the change will come about peaceably. How can
the Canadians--they ask--continue to assert themselves for ever
against the constant influx from the other side?
Monsieur André Siegfried, in that most lucid and excellent book, _Les
Deux Races en Canada_, considers this question a little, but the very
fact that he has called the book _Les Deux Races en Canada_, shows
that he considers the question premature. The two races he treats of
are not the Canadians and the Americans, but the French Canadians and
the Canadians who are not French. Certainly these two peoples are at
present, and must for a considerable time to come, be considered the
two main races of the Dominion. They {148} are still for all
practical purposes separate without being hostile; and it is quite
possible that one of these may Canadianise the other before any real
Americanisation makes itself felt. Should the French Canadians get
the upper hand, it is pretty certain that American influence would
get a set-back of perhaps centuries. Yet English writers as a rule
never seem to consider this contingency. Perhaps if they did, they
would begin to think that they would rather see Canada Americanised
than Gallicised.
Still the Americanisation may happen, and it is at least an
interesting possibility. Let us consider the task that lies before
the Americans. They will have to absorb--
(1) The French Canadians.
(2) The Canadian born, who are not French.
(3) The English who have immigrated.
(4) Foreign immigrants; _e.g._ Scandinavians, Galicians, Italians,
Doukhobors--all that strange assortment of people who have flowed in
from the poorer countries of Europe.
The Americans themselves represent at present only a small fifth in
this conglomeration of nations. Still, they have this in their
favour, that they start in while Canada is still an unfixed nation.
French Canadians--a small {149} third--only number about three
millions. Non-French Canadians about the same. The whole population
is under ten millions. It may in fifty years be ten times that
number. So that anything may happen.
Meanwhile, many effective American influences are at work. Their
order of effectiveness is not easy to define, but when one considers
their representatives of business enterprise, capital, journalism and
farming at work in the country, one can see that the Americans are
likely to go far.
What is their present value to the Dominion? Take American farmers.
They are an undoubted gain to Canada in so far as they possess
energy, capital, a knowledge of the local conditions, versatility and
adaptability. I hardly know if it is an example of their versatility
or their adaptability, but as soon as they cross over the line,
American farmers who were Tariff Reformers instantly become Free
Traders. It is not, of course, that they have adopted nobler
principles in their new country. It is merely that, having become
Canadians, they have now to support Canadian manufactures, and pay
more for their farming machines and shoddy clothes. Naturally they
think tariffs a mistake.
{150}
Setting aside for a moment this political elasticity as of doubtful
value, Canadians may still wonder if the American farmer is all gain
to them. Is it an objection, for example, that the American
introduces the purely commercial spirit into farming? Not entirely.
Not certainly so far as love of gain induces promptness and
enterprise. It is, however, an objection if it destroys that love of
the land which causes the English farmer to stick by his farm,
generation after generation. Perhaps American farmers have not that
land love in any case. If they had, they would not have crossed the
line. In most cases, they have crossed it to make money--more money.
It may be argued that the English farmers come further for the same
purpose, but that is not really the case. English farmers who come
are mostly men who were tenants, and find themselves either not
making money or expecting to have their rents raised if they do. Or
they are the sons of farmers who have not the capital to start
farming in the old country, or cannot get the land. The American
farmer is usually quite ready to admit that he is in Canada to make
money, and his enemies will admit for him that though this ideal may
lead him to adopt new methods {151} of farming which are good, it
also induces him to adopt that very old method of farming which
consists of getting all you can out of the land, putting nothing into
it, selling it to a fool and moving on to fresh land--which is a bad
method. Any one who is acquainted with the States at all, knows how
at present people there are awakening to the viciousness of this
practice. All their papers and speakers are full of the wastefulness
which Americans practised in the last century thinking it to be
smartness. Fine land, they say, was spoilt by it; forests were
annihilated; water supplies were overdrawn; people were made
restless. It was getting rich quick at the expense of posterity, and
it bred in Americans a nomadic spirit, and an imprudence in
considering the future, which has become a menace.
Canadians cannot altogether condemn the American farmer, for just
these methods spoilt so much of the land in Ontario; and only now are
their farmers beginning to improve on them. Still, they would do
well to indicate to American farmers that they are welcome only as
improvers and not as wasters of the new country. The trouble is to
give an effective indication of that kind. Settlement of the land is
still reckoned, especially by the {152} railway companies, as the
first of virtues, covering a multitude of sins; though even they, I
think, are recognising a little that the English farmer, whose aim is
not an immediate fortune, but a home which he can retain for his life
and hand over to his children after him, is not to be scorned as he
was a few years ago. The ready-made farms, made possible by the
irrigation work of the Canadian Pacific Railway, are the chief
example of the attempts made to draw the Englishman. 'We hope,' said
one of the Canadian Pacific Railway officials, speaking a few months
ago before the London Chamber of Commerce, 'that the Englishmen on
these farms will leaven the lot.' A few years ago, compliments of
that sort were not being offered to the English farmer in Canada.
Probably he was not so good a type as comes in now. But it is to be
remembered that the English immigrant has always had more adaptations
to make than the American. To the American from the northern States,
Canada is the country he is used to--only a little more north. The
Englishman finds a new soil, new climate, new manners, and new
methods. I should say that man for man, the English farmer knows at
least as much as the American about farming, and {153} a great deal
more than the average Canadian. But when he goes out to Canada he
has to put this knowledge behind him and learn afresh--a difficult
thing for a conservative race. The American can hold on to what he
knows and simply go ahead. The accident of birth has given him a
fine start over the Englishman.
The same advantage belongs to other Americans in Canada. Business
men, capitalists, journalists have only had to cross a non-existent
line, instead of an undeniable ocean. When Canadians complain that
Englishmen take no interest even in those Canadian schemes for which
they have found the money, they forget that capitalists cannot always
be close to their investments. I repeat, the Atlantic is not a thing
to be denied, nor is it fair to call the English mere moneylenders
because they have not always personally accompanied their loans. At
least they have shown themselves trustful of the men on the spot.
Nevertheless, I think that Canada has every reason to be grateful for
the able business men whom the States have sent her. That negro
porter at the Niagara Hotel who said that Canadians were a stupid
people, and would have done nothing without the {154} Americans, was
taking rather a spread-eagle view of the facts. Still there is no
doubt that American brains have been--and still are--of great service
to Canada; nor can I see that they can be charged with Americanising
tendencies. Business men are nearly always cosmopolitan in their
achievements, whatever their motives may be.
It is rather different with American journalists. They can hardly as
yet be charged with being citizens of the world, and where their
influence penetrates, an American trend is noticeable. They are
beginning to leave their mark in Canada. Canadian papers are
numerous and creditable, but an American atmosphere broods over them.
The most trivial incident is magnified by headlines, which repeat
three times over in large type and increasingly pompous language all
and more than all that follows in the news space. I am not talking
of the best Canadian newspapers but of the average ones. If their
methods are American, so very largely are the matters they deal with.
In some small up-country Canadian journal one will find the leading
columns occupied with the account of some dinner given, say, by Mrs.
Van So-and-So of New York, wife of the Coffin King, {155} with full
accounts of the costumes, menu, etc.,--wearisome and vulgar matter,
staringly of no interest whatever to the bucolic readers of the
journal in question. But it was all very cheaply wired from the
States: whereas news from England would be costly in the extreme.
The result is that Canadians--in spite of their local sagacity--are
at least as ignorant of the things that happen in Great Britain and
Europe as we are of what is happening in Canada. Often I have felt
while the Canadian-born were talking to me of the 'Old Country,'
talking of it too, not only in a loyal, but a fond and even wistful
manner--that they had in their minds a picture of it that would
probably have fitted England better in the fourteenth century than it
does now. A poor, worn-out, tottering old country is what they are
thinking of; and nothing would amaze some of them more than to see
modern England as it is.
Why should they have got this idea into their heads? Largely, I
suppose, because the new with them is necessarily best. The old
things were put up anyhow by men in a hurry and they are always
superseded by better things. The very epithet 'old' connotes badness
to a Canadian. Then, again, it is a {156} country of young men, and
young men are apt to favour youth, which they hardly associate with
England. No country--not even Spain--can be as antique and
ramshackle as many of them undoubtedly believe England to be.
Birmingham and Manchester are on paper such very ancient cities
compared with Regina and Moosejaw that the untravelled Canadian
thinks pityingly of the former; whereas he considers the latter
infinitely up-to-date and important, and would be hurt to know that
we have in England hundreds of little prosperous country towns very
like them, of which the ordinary Englishman hardly knows the names
and, if he did, would think no more of than he would think of Regina
and Moosejaw.
I would not seek to minimise that Canadian pride and optimism which
finds such satisfaction in everything that they build. Pride and
optimism are valuable assets to any country. All I would suggest is
that they should realise that the English habit of grumbling and
self-depreciation does not indicate that all Englishmen live in a
tottering old realm, doing nothing but decay and grumble.
Here we come back to newspapers. Most people derive their facts from
newspapers nowadays, and if Canadians find that everything {157} of
importance happens in the new world, whereas in the old world nothing
happens except an occasional sensational murder or the deposition of
a third-class king, they cannot infer that Europe is still an
important continent, and that perhaps the most important country in
it is England. What is to enlighten them? I suppose the receipt of
more news from Europe.
Probably the All Red Cable would do much in this direction. News has
to be cheap or it is not news (the converse proposition that news if
it is cheap must be news, is not true). Much also might be done by
private enterprise. English publishers could do more to push their
wares. So could English magazine proprietors. Most of the books and
magazines one can get in a hurry in Canada are American. English
Cabinet Ministers might now and again make a tour in the Dominion and
explain to Canadians some of those political principles in which at
home they have such fervid belief. It may be that the Americanising
tendency is too strong for any of these suggestions to be of much
avail in combating it. Reciprocity treaties between the States and
Canada may inevitably result in closer union, though I never could
feel that it was a marked human characteristic to pine for
fellow-citizenship with the man whom {158} one supplies with bread in
return for a reaping-machine. Trade relations may result in that
mystic fraternal sentiment by which nations come together, though
hitherto in the world's history men have never shown any very frantic
desire for a heart-to-heart intimacy with their tradespeople.
'Utility, Reciprocity, Fraternity' sounds rather a cold cry by which
to rally two great people together.[1]
[1] This chapter was written before the Reciprocity business flamed
forth. I return to the subject later.
When all is said and done, and there are a hundred other pros and
cons which might be considered, the chief obstacle to the
Americanisation of Canada is climate. Canada is north and America is
south; and those two show less inclination to rush together than even
east and west. Of course it is not extremes of north and south that
are represented in the two countries;--along the boundary the
climates are not dissimilar. Yet it seems to me that while Canada is
bound to be mainly a country of northern peoples, Americans are fast
becoming more and more southernised, I do not mean in the old sense
of becoming languid and effeminate and semi-tropical, but
southernised in just the same way as the French from being Norsemen
have become southernised. Have {159} you seen prints of old Paris
when it was a Gothic city? If you have, you will realise the
completeness of the change that has come over it. It spreads itself
to the sun now, faces to the Midi, and some such change might easily
come over New York, Chicago, and the rest of those at present
northern cities. Already the typical American is far from being the
son of a grim and dour Pilgrim Father. Rather he is lively and
energetic--with a temperament always on tiptoe--logical and apt to be
materialistic, yet sentimental and passionate too. You find such a
temperament among the French and Italians of northern Italy. It is
the sun working on them. Even the stolid German and the moody
Scandinavian feels it when he gets to the States, and thaws--into an
American.
It is not so in Canada. The northern immigrants there remain silent
and frosty, though the touch of fortune makes them perhaps more
genial. Canada will never become a southern country, even though its
northern parts are rendered temperate by the cutting down of timber
and constant ploughing. No, I think Canadians will remain a hardy
and somewhat dour race, slow-moving on the whole, but industrious and
virtuous, suspicious of talkers and hustlers; so suspicious, too, of
free {160} thought and new morals as to lay themselves open maybe to
the charge of hypocrisy; given at times to self-distrust and
self-depreciation, but for the most part steadfast, and holding in
their hearts the belief that there is no place like Canada and no men
like the inhabitants thereof.
In short, they are as likely as not to end by becoming Anglicised.
{161}