THE COMING OF THE FOREIGNER
So far scarcely a cloud appears on the horizon of Canada's national
destiny. Like a ship launched roughly from her stays to tempests in
shallow water, she seems to have left tempests and shallow water behind
and to have sailed proudly out to the great deeps. In '37 she settled
whether she would be ruled by special interests, by a plutocracy, by an
oligarchy. In '67 she settled forever what in the United States would
be called "states' rights." That is--she gathered the scattered
members of her fold into one confederation and bound them together not
only with the constitution of the British North America Act, but with
bands of iron and steel in railways that linked Nova Scotia with
British Columbia. By '77 she had met the menace of the American high
tariff, which barred her from markets, and entered on a fiscal system
of her own. By '87 her system of transportation east and west was in
working order and she had begun the subsidizing of steamships and the
search for world markets which have since resulted in a total foreign
trade equal to one-fourth that of the United States. By '97 she was
almost ready for the preferential tariff reduction of from twenty-five
to thirty-three per cent. on British goods which the Laurier government
later introduced, and she had established her right to negotiate
commercial treaties with foreign powers independent of the Mother
Country. By 1907 she was in the very maelstrom of the maddest real
estate boom and immigration flood tide that a sane country could
weather.
In a word, Canada's greatest dangers and difficulties seem to have been
passed. The sea seems calm and the sky fair. In reality, she is close
to the greatest dangers that can threaten a nation--dangers within, not
without; dangers, not physical, but psychological, which are harder to
overcome; dangers of dilution and contamination of national blood,
national grit, national government, national ideals.
These are strong statements! Let us see if facts substantiate them!
Canada's natural increase of population is only one-fourth her incoming
tide of colonists. In a word, put her natural increase at eighty to
one hundred thousand a year, and it is nearer eighty than one hundred
thousand. Her immigration exceeds four hundred thousand. If that
immigration were all British and all American there would be no
problem; for though there are differences in government, both people
have the same national ideal--utter freedom of opportunity for each man
to work out the best in him. It is an even wager that the average
Canadian coming to the United States is unaware of any difference in
his freedom, and the average American coming to Canada is unaware of
any difference in his freedom. Both people have fought and bled for
freedom and treasure it as the most sacred thing in life.
But this is not so of thirty-three per cent. of Canada's immigrants who
do not speak English, much less understand the institutions of freedom
to which they have come. If they had been worthy of freedom, or
capable of making right use of it, they would have fought for it in the
land from which they came, or died fighting for it--as Scotchmen and
Irishmen and Englishmen and Americans have fought and bled for freedom
wherever they have lived. A people unused to freedom suddenly plunged
in freedom need not surprise us if they run amuck.
II
"This is mos' won'erful country," writes Tony to his brother in Italy.
"They let us vote and they pay us two dollars to do it."
"Yah, yah," answered a foreign mother in North Winnipeg to a
school-teacher, trying to recall why her young hopeful had played
truant. "Dat vas eelection--my boy, he not go--because Jacob--my
man--he vote seven time and make seven dollar." (The whole family had
been on a glorious seven-dollar drunk.)
"Does this man understand for what he is voting?" demanded the election
clerk of a Galician interpreter who had brought in a naturalized
foreigner to vote.
"Oh, yaas; I eexplain heem."
"Can he write?"
An indeterminate nod of the head; so the voter marks his ballot, and
his vote counts for as much as that of the premier or president of a
railroad.
For years Canadians have pointed the finger of scorn at the notorious
misgovernment of American cities, at the manner in which foreigners
were herded to the polls by party bosses to vote as they were paid.
The cases of a Louisiana judge impeached for issuing bogus certificates
of citizenship to four hundred aliens and of New York courts that have
naturalized ignorant foreigners in batches of twenty-five thousand in a
few months have all pointed a moral or adorned a tale in Canada.
Yet what is happening in Canada since the coming of hordes of ignorant
immigrants? I quote what I have stated elsewhere, an episode typical
of similar episodes, wherever the foreign vote herds in colonies. An
election was coming on in one of the western provinces, where reside
twenty thousand foreigners almost en bloc. The contest was going to be
very close. Offices were opened in a certain block. Legally it
requires three years to transform a foreigner into a voting Canadian
subject. He must have resided in Canada three years before he can take
out his papers. The process is simple to a fault. The newcomer goes
before a county judge with proof of residence and two Canadian
witnesses. He must not be a criminal, and he must be of age. That is
all that is required to change a Pole or a Sicilian or a Slav into a
free and independent Canadian fully competent to apprehend that voting
implies duties and fitness as well as rights. The contest was going to
be very close. A few of the party leaders could not bear to have those
newcomers wait a long three years for naturalization. They got
together and they forged in the same hand, the same manipulation, the
signatures of three hundred foreigners, who did not know in the least
what they were doing, to applications for naturalization
papers--foreigners who had not been three months in Canada. If forgery
did not matter, why should perjury? The perpetrators of this fraud
happened to be provincial and of a stripe different politically from
the federal government then in power at Ottawa. The other party had
not been asleep while this little game was going on. The party heeler
neither slumbers nor sleeps. The papers with those three hundred
forged signatures--names in the writing of foreigners, who could
neither read, write, nor speak a word of English--were sent down to the
Department of Justice in Ottawa; and everybody waited for the
explosion. The explosion did not come. Those perjuries and forgeries
slumber yet, secure in the Department of Justice. For when the
provincial politicians heard what had been done to trap them, they sent
down a little message to the heelers of the party in power: If you go
after us for _this_, we'll go after you for _that_; and perhaps the pot
had better not call the kettle black. The chiefs of each party were
powerless to act because the heelers of both parties had been alike
guilty.
It may be said that the fault here was not in the poor ignorant
foreigner but in the corrupt Canadian politicians. That is true of
Canada, as it is of similar practices in the United States; but the
presence of the ignorant, irresponsible foreigner in hordes made the
corruption possible, where it is neither possible nor safe with men of
Saxon blood, with German, Scandinavian or Danish immigrants, for
instance.
III
It is futile to talk of the poor and ignorant foreigner as a Goth or a
Vandal--to talk of excluding the ignorant and the lowly. The floating
"he-camps"--as these floating immigrants are called in labor
circles--are to-day doing much of the manual work of the world.
Canadian railways could not be built without them. Canadian industrial
and farm life could not go on without them. They are needed from
Halifax to Vancouver, and their labor is one of the wealth producers
for the nation.
And do not think for a moment that the wealth they produce is for
capital--for the lords of finance and not for themselves. When
Montenegrins, who earn thirty cents a day in their own land, earn
eleven dollars a day on dynamite work constructing Canadian railroads,
it is not surprising that they retire rich, and that the railroad for
which they worked would have gone bankrupt if the Dominion had not come
to its aid with a loan of millions. Likewise of Poles and Galicians in
the coal mines. When Charles Gordon--Ralph Connor--was sent to
investigate the strike in these mines he found foreigners earning
seventeen dollars a day on piecework who had never earned fifty cents a
day in their own land. I have in mind one Galician settler who has
accumulated a fortune of $150,000 in perfectly legitimate ways in ten
years. Even the Doukhobors--the eccentric Russian religious
sect--hooted for their oddities of manner and frenzies of religion--are
accumulating wealth in the Elbow of the Saskatchewan, where they are
settled.
From the national point of view Canada needs these foreign settlers.
She needs their labor. Every man to her is worth fifteen hundred
dollars in productive work. The higher wages he earns on piecework the
more Canada is pleased; for the more work he has done. But at the
present rate of peopling Canada these foreign born will in twenty years
outnumber the native born. What will become of Canada's national
ideals then? In one foreign section of the Northwest I once traveled a
hundred miles through new settlements without hearing one word of
English spoken; and these Doukhobors and Galicians and Roumanians and
Slavs were making good. They were prospering exceedingly. Men who had
come with less than one hundred dollars each and lived for the first
years in crowded tenements of Winnipeg or under thatch-roof huts on the
prairie now had good frame houses, stables, stock, modern implements.
The story is told of one poor Russian who, when informed of the fact
that the land would be his very own, fell to the earth and kissed the
soil and wept. Such settlers make good on soil, whatever ill they work
in a polling booth. Except for his religious vagaries, the Doukhobor
Russian is law abiding. The same can not be said of the other Slav
immigrants. Crime in the Northwest, according to the report of the
Mounted Police, has increased appallingly. The crimes are against life
rather than against property--the crimes of a people formerly kept in
order by the constant presence of a soldier's bayonet run amuck in
Canada with too much freedom. And the votes of these people will in
twenty years out-vote the Canadian. These poverty-stricken Jews and
Polacks and Galicians will be the wealth and power of Canada to-morrow.
If you doubt what will happen, stroll down Fifth Avenue, New York, and
note the nationality of the names. A Chicago professor carefully noted
the nationality of all the names submitted in Chicago's elections for a
term of years. Three-quarters of the names were of nationalities only
one generation away from the Ghetto.
Man to man on the prairie farm, in the lumber woods, your Canadian can
out-do the Russian or Galician or Hebrew. The Canadian uses more
brains and his aggregate returns are bigger; but boned down to a basis
of _who_ can save the most and become rich fastest, your foreigner has
the native-born Canadian beaten at the start. Where the Canadian earns
ten dollars and spends eighty per cent. of it, your foreigner earns
five dollars, and saves almost all of it. How does he do this? He
spends next to nothing. Let me be perfectly specific on how he does
it: I have known Russian, Hebrew, Italian families in the Northwest who
sewed their children into their clothes for the winter and never
permitted a change till spring. Your Canadian would buy half a dozen
suits for his children in the interval. Your foreigner buys of
furniture and furnishings and comforts practically nothing for the
first few years. He sleeps on the floor, with straw for a bed, and he
occupies houses twenty-four to a room--which is the actual report in
foreign quarters in the north end of Winnipeg. Your Canadian requires
a house of six rooms for a family of six. When your foreigner has
accumulated a little capital he buys land or a city tenement. Your
Canadian educates his children, clothes them a little better, moves
into a better house. When the foreigner buys a block, he moves his
whole family into one room in the basement and does the janitor and
scrubbing and heating work himself or forces his women to do it for
him. When the Canadian buys a block, he hires a janitor, an engineer,
a scrub woman, and if he moves into the block, he takes one of the best
apartments. It does not take any guessing to know which of these two
will buy a second block first--especially if the foreigner lives on
peanuts and beer, and the Canadian on beefsteak and fresh fruit. Nor
does it take any guessing to know which type stands for the higher
citizenship--which will make toward the better nation.
IV
The question is--will Canada remain Canada when these new races come up
to power? And Canada need not hoot that question; or gather her skirts
self-righteously and exclusively about her and pass by on the other
side. The United States did that, and to-day certain sections of the
foreign vote are powerful enough to dictate to the President.
Take a little closer look at facts!
Foreigners have never been rushed into Canada as cheap labor to
displace the native born, so they have not, as in great American
industrial centers, lowered the standard of living for Canadians. They
have come attracted by two magnets that give them great power: (1)
wages so high they can save; (2) land absolutely free but for the
ten-dollar preemption fee.
In 1881 there were six hundred and sixty-seven Jews in Canada.
In 1901 there were sixteen thousand. To-day it is estimated there are
twenty thousand each in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg. These Jews have
not gone out to the land. They have crowded into the industrial
centers reproducing the housing evils from which they fled the European
Ghetto. There are sections of Winnipeg and Montreal and Toronto where
the very streets reek of Bowery smells. When they go to the woods or
the land, these people have not the stamina to stand up to hard work.
Yet in the cities, by hook or crook, by push-cart and trade, they
acquire wealth. On the charity organization of the cities they impose
terrible burdens during Canada's long cold winter.
In one section of the western prairie are 150,000 Galicians. Of
Austrians and Germans--the Germans chiefly from Austria and
Russia--there are 800,000 in Canada, or a population equal to the city
of Montreal. Of Italians at last report there were fully 60,000 in
Canada. In one era of seven years there took up permanent abode in
Canada 121,000 Austrians, 50,000 Jews, 60,000 Italians, 60,000 Poles
and Russians, 40,000 Scandinavians. When you consider that by actual
count in the United States in 1900, 1,000 foreign-born immigrants had
612 children, compared to 1,000 Americans having 296 children, it is
simply inconceivable but that this vast influx of alien life should not
work tremendous and portentous changes in Canada's life, as a similar
influx has completely changed the face of some American institutions in
twenty years. Immigration to Canada has jumped from 54,000 in
1851-1861 to 142,000 in 1881-1891, and to 2,000,000 in 1901-1911. It
has not come in feeble rivulets that lost their identity in the main
current--as in the United States up to 1840. It has come to Canada in
inundating floods.
Chief mention has been made of the races from the south of Europe
because the races from the north of Europe assimilate so quickly that
their identity is lost. Of Scandinavians there are in Canada some
fifty thousand; of Icelanders, easily twenty thousand; and so quickly
do they merge with Canadian life that you forget they are foreigners.
I was a child in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and their
rise has been a national epic. I do not believe the first few hundreds
had fifty dollars among them. They slept under high board sidewalks
for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties on vacant lots the
next day. In these they housed the first winter. Though we
Winnipeggers did not realize it, it must have been a dreadful winter to
them. Their clothing was of the scantest. Many were without
underwear. They lived ten and twenty to a house. The men sawed wood
at a dollar and a half a day. The women worked out at one dollar a
day. In a few weeks each family had bought a cow and rudiments of
winter clothes. By spring they had money to go out on their
homesteads. During winter some of the grown men attended school to
learn English. Teachers declared they never witnessed such swift
mastery of learning. To-day the Icelanders are the most prosperous
settlers in Manitoba. The same story could be told of German
Mennonites driven from Russia by religious persecution and of
Scandinavians driven abroad by poverty. Of course, the weak went to
the wall and died, and didn't whine about the dying, though some
mother's heart must have broken in silence. I recall one splendid
young fellow who walked through every grade the public schools
afforded, and then through the high school, and was on the point of
graduating in medicine when he died from sheer mental and physical
exhaustion. This type of settler will build up Canada's national
ideals. It is the other type that gives one pause.
V
Well--what is Canada going to do about it? Bar them out! Never! She
needs these raw brawny Vandals and Goths of alien lands as much as they
need Canada. She needs their hardy virility. They are the crude
material of which she must manufacture a manhood that is not sissified,
and one must never forget that some of the most honored names in the
United States are from these very races. One of the greatest
mathematicians in the United States, the greatest copper miners, the
richest store keepers, one of the most powerful manufacturers--these
sprang from the very races that give Canada pause to-day.
It is on the school rather than on the church that Canada must depend
for the nationalizing of these alien races. Nearly all the colonists
from the south of Europe have brought their church with them. In one
foreign church of North Winnipeg is a congregation of four thousand,
and certainly, in the case of the Doukhobors, the influence of the
foreign priest has not been for the good of Canada. But none of these
races has brought with them a school system, and that throws on the
public school system of Canada the burden of preserving national ideals
for the future. Will the schools prove equal to it? I wish I could
answer unequivocally "yes"; for I recall some beautiful episodes of
boys and girls--too immature to realize the importance of their
work--"baching" it in prairie shanties, teaching at forty dollars a
month; amid the isolation of Doukhobor and Galician and Ruthenian
settlement preserving Canada's national ideals for the future; little
classes of foreigners in the schools of North Winnipeg reading lessons
in perfect English with flower gardens below the window kept by
themselves--the little girls learning sewing and housekeeping in upper
rooms, the boys learning technical trades in the basement. All this is
good and well; but how about the recognition Canada gives these
teachers who manufacture men and women out of mud, who do more in a day
for the ideals of the nation than all the eloquence that has been
spouted in Houses of Parliament? In Germany, they say--once an army
man always an army man; for though the pay is ridiculously small,
social prestige and recognition are so great that the army is the most
desirable vocation. Canada's teachers in the schools among foreigners
are doing for the Dominion what the German army has aimed to do for the
empire. Do the Canadian teachers receive the same recognition? The
question needs no answer. They receive so little recognition that the
majority throw aside the work at their twenty-first year and crowd into
other over-crowded professions. Meanwhile time moves on, and in twenty
years the foreign vote will outnumber that of the native born.