THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH
For a hundred years England's colonies have been distinctively
dependencies--self-governing dependencies, if you will, in the case of
Canada and Australia--but distinctively dependent on the Mother Country
for protection from attack by land and sea. Has the day come when
these colonies, are to be, not lesser, but greater nations--offshoots
of the parent stock but transcending in power and wealth the parent
stock--a United Kingdom of the Outer Meres, becoming to America and
Australasia what Great Britain has been to Europe?
Ten years ago this question would have been considered the bumptious
presumption of flamboyant fancy. It isn't so considered to-day.
Rather than a flight of fancy, the question is forced on thinking minds
by the hard facts of the multiplication table. Between 1897 and 1911
there came to Canada 723,424 British colonists; and since 1911 there
have come half a million more. At the outbreak of the war settlers of
purely British birth were pouring into Canada at the rate of two
hundred thousand a year. A continuation of this immigration means that
in half a century, not counting natural increase, there will be as many
colonists of purely British birth in Canada as there are Americans west
of the Mississippi, or as there were Englishmen in England in the days
of Queen Elizabeth. It means more--one-fourth of the United Kingdom
will have been transplanted overseas. If there be any doubt as to
whether the transplanting be permanent, it should be settled by
homestead entries. In one era of something less than three years out
of 351,530 men, women and children who came, sixty thousand entered for
homesteads. In other words, if each householder were married and had a
family of four, almost the entire immigration of 351,530 was absorbed
in permanent tenure by the land. The drifters, the floaters, the
disinherited of their share of earth became landowners, proprietors of
Canada to the extent of one hundred and sixty acres. From 1897 to 1911
the Canadian government spent $2,419,957 advertising Canada in England
and paying a bonus of one pound per capita to steamship agents for each
immigrant; so that each colonist cost the Dominion something over three
dollars. I have heard immigration officials figure how each colonist
was worth to the country as a producer fifteen hundred dollars a year.
This is an excessive estimate, but the bargain was a good one for
Canada. In 1901, when Canada's population was five millions, there
were seven hundred thousand people of British birth in the Dominion; so
that of Canada's present population of 7,800,000, there are in the
Dominion a million and a half people of British birth.[1] Averaging
winter with summer for ten years, colonists of British birth have been
landing on Canada's shores at the rate of three hundred a day.
Canada's natural increase is under one hundred thousand a year.
British colonists are to-day yearly outnumbering Canada's natural
increase.
Only two other such migrations of Saxon blood have taken place in
history: when the Angles and Jutes and Saxons came in plunder raids to
English shores at the dawn of the Christian Era; when in the
seventeenth century Englishmen came to America; and both these tides of
migration were as a drop in an ocean wave compared to the numbers of
English born now flooding to the shores of Canada.
Knowing the Viking spirit that rode out to conquer the very elements in
the teeth of death, it is easy to look back and realize that these
Angles and Jutes and Saxons were bound to found a great sea empire.
So, too, of the New England Puritans! Men who sacrificed their all for
a political and religious belief were bound to build of such belief
foundation for a sturdy nation of the future. It is easy to look back
and realize. It is hard to look forward with eyes that see; but one
must be a very opaque thinker, indeed, not to wonder what this latest
vast migration of Saxon blood portends for future empire. The Jutes
and Angles and Saxons poured into ancient Albion for just one
reason--to acquire each for his own freehold of land. Look at the
ancient words! Freehold of land! For what else have a million and a
half British born come to the free homesteads of Canada? For freehold
of land--land unoppressed by taxes for war lords; land unoppressed by
tithes for landlord; land absolutely free to the worker. That such a
migration should break in waves over Canadian life and leave it
untouched, uninfluenced, unswerved, is as inconceivable as that the
Jutes and Angles and Saxons could have settled in ancient Albion and
not made it their own.
II
For years Canada was regarded chiefly in England as a dumping ground
for slums. "You have broken your mother's heart," thundered an English
magistrate to a young culprit. "You have sent your father in sorrow to
the grave. Why--I ask you--do you not go to Canada?" That such
material did not offer the best fiber for the making of a nation in
Canada did not dawn on this insular magisterial dignitary; and the
sentiments uttered were reflected in the activities of countless
philanthropies that seemed to think the porcine could be transmogrified
into the human by a simple transfer from the pig-sty of their own vices
and failure to the free untrammeled life of a colony. Fortunately
Canada has a climate that kills men who won't work. Men must stand on
their own feet in Canada, and keep those feet hustling in winter--or
die. It is not a land for people who think; the world owes them a
living. They have to earn the living and earn it hard, and if they
don't earn it, there are neither free soup kitchens nor maudlin
charities to fill idle stomachs with some other man's earnings.
"Why do you think so many young Englishmen fail to make good in
Canada?" I asked a young Yorkshire mill hand who had come to Canada
with his five brothers and homesteaded nearly a thousand acres on the
north bank of the Saskatchewan. The house was built of logs and clay.
There was not a piece of store furniture in it except the stove. The
beds were berths extemporized ship-fashion, with cowhides and
bear-skins for covering. The seats were benches. The table was a
rough-hewn plank. These young factory hands had things reduced to the
simplicity of a Robinson Crusoe. They had come out each with less than
one hundred dollars, but they had their nine hundred and sixty acres
proved up and wintered some ten horses and thirty head of cattle in a
sod and log stable. They had acquired what small ready cash they could
by selling oats and hay to newcomers. The hay they sold at four
dollars a ton, the oats at thirty cents a bushel. The boy I questioned
had all the characteristics of the overworked factory hand--abnormally
large forehead, cramped chest, half-developed limbs. Yet the health of
outdoor life glowed from his face, and he looked as if his muscles had
become knotted whipcords.
"Why do I think so many young Englishmen fail to make good settlers?"
he repeated, changing my question a little. "Because, up to a few
years ago, the wrong kind of people came. The only young Englishmen
who came up to a few years ago were no-goods, who had failed at home.
They were the kind of city scrubs who give up a job when it is hard and
then run for free meals at the soup kitchen. There aren't any soup
kitchens out here, and when they found they had to work before they
could eat, they cleared out and gave the country the blame. Men who
are out of work half the time at home get into the habit of depending
on charity keeping them. When you are a hundred miles from a railroad
town, there isn't any charity to keep you out here; you have to hustle
for yourself. But there is a different class of Englishmen coming now.
The men coming now have worked and want to work."
And yet--at another point a hundred miles from settlement I came on a
woman who belonged to that very type that ought never to emigrate. She
was a woman picked out of the slums by a charity organization. She had
presumably been scrubbed and curried and taught household duties before
being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces
in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but
she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the
slum marks--bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining
eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous
phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she had lived in her
shanty three years and it was still bare of comfort as a biscuit box,
to explain why the Dominion regards this type as unsuitable for
pioneering. The American or Canadian wife of a frontiersman would have
had skin robes for rugs, biscuit boxes painted for bureaus, and chairs
hand-hewn out of rough timber upholstered in cheap prints. But the
really amazing thing was the condition of her children. They were fat,
rosy, exuberant in health and energy. They were Canadians. In a
decade they would begin to fill their place as nation makers. Back in
England they would have gone to the human scrap heap in hunger and
rags. Ten years of slums would have made them into what their mother
was--an unfit; but ten years of Canada was making them into robust
humans capable of battling with life and mastering it.
The line is a fine one and needs to be drawn with distinction. Canada
does not begrudge the down-and-outs, the failures, the disinherited,
the dispossessed, a chance to begin over again. She realizes that she
has room, boundless room, for such as they are to succeed--and many
more; but what she can not and will not do is assume the burden of
these people when they come to Canada and will not try and fail. What
she can not and will not do is permit Europe to clean her pig-sties of
vice and send the human offal to Canadian shores. Children, strays,
waifs, reforms--who have been taken and tested and tried and taught to
support themselves--she welcomes by the thousands. In fact, she has
welcomed 12,260 of them in ten years, and the cases of lapses back to
failure have been so small a proportion as to be inconsiderable.
In the early days, "the remittance man"--or young Englishman living
round saloons in idleness on a small monthly allowance from home--fell
into bad repute in Canada; and it didn't help his repute in the least
to have a title appended to his remittance. Unless he were efficient,
the title stood in his way when he applied for a job, whether as horse
jockey or bank clerk. Canadians do not ask--"_Who_ are you?" or
"_What_ have you?" but "_What can you do?_" "What can you do to add to
the nation's yearly output of things done--of a solid plus on the right
side of the yearly balance?" It is a brutal way of putting things. It
does not make for poetry and art. It may be sordid. I believe as a
people we Canadians, perhaps, do err on the sordid side of the
practical, but it also makes for solidity and national strength.
Ten years have witnessed a complete change in the class of Englishmen
coming to Canada. The drifter, the floater, the make-shift, rarely
comes. The men now coming are the land-seekers--of the blood and type
that settled England and New England and Virginia--of the blood and
type, in a word, that make nations. Hard on the heels of the
land-seekers have come yet another type--the type that binds country to
country in bonds tighter than any international treaty--the investors
of surplus capital.
III
It is possible to keep a record of American investments in Canada;
because possessions are registered more or less approximately at ports
of entry and in bills of incorporation; but the English investor has
acted through agents, through trust and loan companies, through banks.
He is the buyer of Canada's railway stocks, of her municipal, street
railway, irrigation and public works bonds. Of Canadian railroad bonds
and stocks, there are $395,000,000 definitely known to be held in
England. Municipal and civic bonds must represent many times that
total, and the private investments in land have been simply
incalculable. The Lloyd George system of taxation was at once followed
by enormous investments by the English aristocracy in Canada. These
investments included large holdings of city property in Montreal and
Winnipeg and Vancouver, of ranch lands in Alberta, town sites along the
new railroads, timber limits in British Columbia and copper and coal
mines in both Alberta and British Columbia. The Portland, Essex,
Sutherland and Beresford families have been among the investors. It
does not precisely mean the coming of an English aristocracy to Canada,
but it does mean the implanting of an enormous total of the British
aristocracy's capital in Canada for long-time investment.
It would be untrue to say that these investments have all been wisely
made. One wonders, indeed, at what the purchasing agents were aiming
in some cases. I know of small blocks in insignificant railroad towns
bought for sixty thousand dollars, for no other reason, apparently,
than that they cost ten thousand dollars and had been sold for twenty
thousand dollars. The block, which would yield twenty per cent. on ten
thousand dollars, yields only three per cent. on sixty thousand
dollars. Held long enough, doubtless, it will repay the investor; or
if the investor is satisfied with three per cent., where Canadians earn
twenty per cent.--it may be all right; but Canadians expect their
investments to repay capital cost in ten years, and they do not buy for
profits to posterity but for profits in a lifetime.
Similarly of many of the r_an_ches bought at five dollars an acre by
Americans and resold as r_awn_ches at twenty-five dollars to forty
dollars to Englishmen. If the Englishmen will be satisfied with two
and three per cent., where the American demands and makes twelve to
twenty per cent.--the investment may make satisfactory returns; but it
is hard to conceive of enormous tracts two and three hundred miles from
a railroad bought for fruit lands at twenty-five dollars an acre.
Fruit without a market is worse than waste. It is loss. When
questioned, these English investors explain how raw fruit lands that
sold at twenty-five dollars an acre a few years ago in the United
States to-day sell for five hundred dollars and one thousand dollars an
acre. The point they miss is--that these top values are the result of
exceptional conditions; of millionaires turning a region into a
playground as in the walnut and citrus groves of California; or of
nearness to market and water transportation; or of peculiarly finely
organized marketing unions. If the rich estates of England like to
take these risks, it is their affair; but they must not blame Canada if
their investment does not give them the same returns as more careful
buying gives the Canadian and American.
Not all investments are of this extravagant character. Hundreds of
thousands of acres and city properties untold have been bought by
English investors who will multiply their capital a hundredfold in ten
years. I know properties bought along the lines of the new railroads
for a few hundred dollars that have resold at twenty thousand and
thirty thousand and fifty thousand. It is such profits as these that
lure to wrong investment.
Horse and cattle ranching has appealed to the Englishman from the
first, and as great fortunes have been realized from it in Canada as in
Argentina. However, the day of unfenced pasture ground is past; and in
reselling ranches for farms, many English investors have multiplied
their fortunes. In the outdoor life and freedom from conventional
cares--there has been a peculiar charm in ranch life. In no life are
the grit and efficiency of the well-bred in such marked contrast with
the puling whine and shiftlessness of the settler from the cesspool of
the city slums. I have gone into a prairie shanty where an
Englishwoman sat in filth and rags and idleness, cursing the country to
which she had come and bewailing in cockney English that she had come
to this; and I have gone on to an English ranch where there presided
some young Englishman's sister, who had literally never done a stroke
in her life till she came to Canada, when in emergency of prairie fire,
or blizzard, or absent ranch hands, she has saddled her horse and
rounded to shelter herds of cattle and droves of ponies. She didn't
boast about it. She probably didn't mention it, and when winter came,
she would go off for her holiday to England or California. Having come
of blood that had proved itself fit in England, she proved the same
strain of blood in Canada; and to this class of English Canada gives
more than a welcome. She confers charter rights.
Lack of domestic help will long be the great drawback for English
people on the prairie. You may bring your help with you if you like.
If they are single, they will marry. If they are married, they will
take up land of their own and begin farming for themselves. It is this
which forces efficiency or exterminates--on the prairie. Let no woman
come to the prairie with dolce far niente dreams of opalescent peaks,
of fenceless fields and rides to a horizon that forever recedes, with a
wind that sings a jubilate of freedom. All these she will have; but
they are not ends in themselves; they are incidental. Days there will
be when the fat squaw who is doing the washing will put all the laundry
in soap suds, then roll down her sleeves and demand double pay before
she goes on. Prairie fires will come when men are absent, and women
must know how to set a back fire; and whether the ranch hands are near
or far, stock must never be allowed to drive before a blizzard. The
woman with iron in her blood will meet all fate's challenges halfway
and master every emergency. The kind that has a rabbit heart and sits
down to weep and wail should not essay adventures in the Canadian West.
IV
I said that England's colonies depended on the Mother Country for
protection from attack by land and sea. Of the vessels calling at
Canadian ports, three-fifths are British, one-fifth foreign, and
one-fifth Canadian. Whore England is the great sea carrier for Europe,
Canada has not wakened up to establish enough sea carriers for her own
needs.
Canada's exports to the whole British Empire are almost two hundred
millions a year.[2] Her aggregate trade with the British Empire has
increased three hundred per cent. since confederation, or from one
hundred and seven to three hundred and sixteen millions. With the
United States, her aggregate trade has increased from eighty-nine to
six hundred and eight millions. For one dollar's worth she buys in
England, she buys four dollars' worth in the United States. Here trade
is not following the flag, and the flag is not following trade. Trade
is following its own channels independent of the flag.
V
What is the future portent of the great migration of Englishmen of the
best blood and traditions to Canada? There can be only one portent--a
Greater Britain Overseas, and Canada herself has not in the slightest
degree wakened to what this implies. She knows that her railroads are
a safe and shorter path to the Orient than by Suez; and in a cursory
way she may also know that the nations of the world are maneuvering for
place and power on the Pacific; but that she may be drawn into the
contest and have to fight for her life in it--she hardly grasps. If
you told Canada that within the life of men and women now living her
Pacific Coast may bristle with as many forts and ports as the North
Sea--you would be greeted with an amused smile. Yet all this may be
part of the destiny of a Greater Britain Overseas.
With men such as Sir John Macdonald and Laurier and Borden on the
roster roll of Canada's great, one dislikes to charge that Canadian
statesmen have not grown big enough for their job. The Aztec Indians
used to cement their tribal houses with human blood. Canada's part in
the Great War may be the blood-sign above the lintel of her new
nationality.
[1] I have variously referred to Canada's population as five million,
seven million, and over seven million. Five million was Canada's
population before the great influx of colonists began. The census
figures of 1911 give Canada's population as 7,204,838. Add to this the
immigration for 1912, and you get the Department of Labor
figures--7,758,000. If you add the immigration for 1913 the total must
be close on 8,000,000.
[2] The figures are from the official _Trade and Commerce Report_, Part
I, 1914: They tabulate the trade of 1913 thus: Imports from United
Kingdom, $138,741,736; imports from United States, $435,770,081.
Average duty imports United Kingdom, 25.1. Average duty imports United
States, 24.1. Per cent. of goods from U. K., 20.1; per cent. of goods
from U. S., 65.1.
Exports to United Kingdom, $177,982,002; exports to United States,
$150,961,675. Percentage goods exported U. K., 47.1; percentage goods
exported U. S., 40.1.