A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY
A diminutive Japanese who picked up my fairly heavy trunk, slung it
over his shoulder and walked down the platform with it as though it
were nothing but a shawl, was the first person I met in Vancouver,
reminding me that that land-locked sea below was the Pacific, which
white men do not own but only share with the brown and yellow
Orientals. I wonder--will the day come when the latter want an ocean
all to themselves? And are there, in view of this contingency, plans
of this intricate coast among the Japanese naval archives? They knew
the other side pretty well before the war began with Russia, and they
are not a people to leave things to chance. The yellow men have
known the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver as long as
the white men, and put in a great deal of work there and eaten much
humble pie, and also realised by the constant {259} rise in their
wages--ten times anything their own country offers--that the white
man is strangely lost without them. They had no flair for colonising
half a century ago, when the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but
they have it now.
Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The ground sloping to the
shut sea, girt with those huge, straight trees that give a sense of
luxuriance to this northern Pacific coast which no tropic country can
excel, is a perfect situation for a big city. Vancouver is a big
city. It is so big that many people are afraid for its immediate
future. They say that it is already far bigger than it has any right
to be, and that by the dubiously beneficent aid of innumerable real
estate men, it is increasing at a pace that is bound to end in
disaster. The slump had been expected in 1909, it was expected last
year, it is expected this year. Some year it will come; and if I
were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant of Vancouver, I should
then head a deputation which had for its purpose the dumping in the
sea of a large number of the real estate agents who swarm hungrily in
the place. There is a big street entirely filled with their offices,
and the mark of them is {260} everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that
encyclopædic work _Canada in the Twentieth Century_, jeers at the
English for their distrust of the real estate man, who, he thinks,
serves a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to the real estate
man, says Mr. Bradley, if you want to buy land, than to the bar
loafer. There is a great deal in that. In individual cases they are
excellent men. But, collected together in vast numbers, as in
Vancouver, they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer never can,
and that is by so magnifying the importance of the buying and selling
of land, that people take to it in exchange for work, and falsely
imagine that enormous prosperity is coming to a place which is in
reality doing nothing but changing its land at fancy and speculative
prices, expecting the prosperity somehow and some day to follow of
itself.
I suppose Seattle, with less justification, is in very much the same
case. Both, besides being ports with great expectations, happen to
be the last place, so to speak, in their respective countries; and
there is something magnetic in the attraction of a last place.
Thither drifts that very considerable population which, by getting on
geographically, almost persuades itself that it is getting on
materially. Having {261} attained the limit, it stays there and does
as little as it can. Such people give a city a false air of
greatness, and are, in fact, a surplus population with nothing to do
but bid up land against one another.
Of course there are plenty of genuine citizens in Vancouver, with all
the enterprise and intelligence that help to make cities great.
Practically, too, the greatness of Vancouver is in the end assured.
It is already a magnificent port, having a big trade with the East,
but nothing to what it will have. The Panama Canal will make it the
centre, by sea, of the world. Again, it is the terminus of the
Canadian Pacific Railway, and is destined, every one says, to become
the terminus of the Grand Trunk, and any other railroad that wants to
outlet on the Pacific. Wheat has begun to come through it from the
prairie that used to go west to Montreal. The new reciprocity treaty
will divert some of this freight to the south, no doubt, but that
remains to be seen. In any case, besides being a port, Vancouver
will remain the business capital of a province endlessly rich in
minerals and timber, and increasingly rich in fruit- and farm-land.
Some day, therefore, Vancouver will extend to those remote spots
{262} where already town lots are being disposed of. Some day.
Only, a big city should not live upon its future; and the sale of
such lots miles off in the backwoods to people who, having bought
them, cannot pay for them or cannot put up houses on them, or cannot
afford to live in those houses even if they put them up, because
there is nothing for them to do there and their money has run
out--this sort of sale, while it enriches the real estate man, does
not enrich anybody else. Moreover, it creates a restless spirit
among those genuine farmers out in the country who would honestly be
farming their land, if real estate agents would leave them alone, and
not persuade them that it is just as profitable a game to hang about
waiting for opportunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course
they, like most other people who get as far as Vancouver, are not
mere innocents. Sellers and buyers are probably equally aware of the
risks they run; but where a tide of speculation sets in, the
shrewdest people seem ready to take the most absurd risks. And the
slump has taken so long in coming, and the possibilities of Vancouver
seem so immense, that speculation in land has become a perfect
fascination.
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'What will it be worth next year?'
That is the formula you constantly see at the end of an advertisement
of some town lot--five miles, perhaps, from anywhere. The correct
answer varies. If the slump does not come off next year, the lot may
be worth double what is being asked for it now. If the slump does
come off it will be worth a twentieth, perhaps, of what was given for
it. Slump or no slump, this method of building up a city is
unsatisfactory. Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg--these have become great
as the centres of comparatively populous provinces, in which wealth
has been gradually and carefully created by agricultural and
industrial enterprises established on a firm basis. The jobs have
been waiting for the men. In Vancouver alone, of all big Canadian
cities, the men are waiting for the jobs, or, what is worse, waiting
in the belief that money comes anyhow, and that jobs are not the
prerequisite of money-making. I do not wish to give the impression
that Vancouver is full of unemployed people, still less of
unemployable ones; merely that many of the people there employed are
not engaged in the undertakings that ensure the continuity of a
city's prosperity.
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Certainly any picture of Vancouver that made it out gloomy would be a
mistake. Nothing could be livelier than its streets and its people;
and if the slump does not come, and the Jeremiahs are wrong,
Vancouver citizens will be justified of any amount of exultation.
Already they have most of the things that make citizens pleased and
proud--a beautiful site, fine streets, the most splendid of public
parks, water-ways innumerable in front, and, behind, a country good
to look at and rich in potentialities. Vancouver's industries, even
if they do not justify the size of the place, are important and
prosperous; and its propinquity to the salmon fisheries and vast
timber tracts of British Columbia is something which alone would make
a great town. In tone it is new world compared with Victoria, but
old world compared with Seattle. There are many English people
there. Living is high. No coin under five cents is, of course, in
use, and when you start the day by paying that sum for a newspaper
marked one cent, you find it difficult to beat down prices during the
rest of the day. Apropos of newspapers, I was told of a very
successful strike among the paper-boys of Vancouver some little time
ago. Many people must have heard {265} of it, but it is worth
retelling. The strike was headed by a youthful organiser, popularly
known as Reddy, from the colour of his hair. Reddy was alleged to be
thirteen years of age at the time, but Pitt was not so much older
when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Holding the firm
conviction that he and his fellow-workers were entitled to at least
two cents out of the five for every paper sold (I am not sure of my
figures), Reddy proclaimed a strike, and conducted it so successfully
that the newspaper proprietors of Vancouver were compelled to wait
upon him humbly, and yield in every particular to his demands. Among
historic strikes this seems worthy of a place.
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