SOME INDUSTRIAL PROBLEMS
I
The contest between capital and labor in Canada has never become that
armed camp divided by a chasm of hatred known in other lands. This for
two reasons: First, the labor of yesterday is the capital of to-day,
and the labor of to-day is the capital of to-morrow. Second, from the
very nature of Canada's greatest wealth--agricultural lands--the
substantial proportion of the population consists of land owners,
vested righters, respecters of property interests because they
themselves are property holders. The city dweller in Canada has been
from the very nature of things the anachronism, the anomaly, the
parasite, the extraneous outgrowth on the main body of production.
To take the first reason why capital and labor has not been divided in
hostile camps in Canada, because the labor of yesterday is the capital
of to-day--I am not dealing with speculative arguments and opinions. I
am trying to set down facts. The owner of the largest fortune west of
the Rocky Mountains in Canada began life with a pick and shovel. The
owner of the richest timber limits in British Columbia began at a
dollar and twenty-five cents a day piling slabs. The wealthiest meat
packer east of the Rocky Mountains was "bucking" and "breaking"
bronchoes thirty years ago at twenty-five dollars a month. The packer
who comes next to him in wealth began life in Pt. Douglas, Winnipeg,
loading frozen hogs. The richest newspaper man in Canada began life so
poor that he and his father hauled the first editions of their paper to
customers on a hand sled. The four men who are to-day the greatest
powers in the railroad world of the Dominion began life, one as a stone
mason, another as a lumber-jack, a third as a store keeper, a fourth as
a telegraph operator. I do not think I am wrong in saying that the
richest wholesaler in Canada reached the scene of his present
activities with his entire earthly possessions in a pocket handkerchief
and a tin lunch pail. Of two of the most powerful men who ever came
out of the maritime provinces, one swept a village store for his living
at a dollar and fifty cents a week; another reached St. John, New
Brunswick, from his home in the backwoods, dressed in a home-made suit,
which his mother had spun and carded from their own wool. The fact
that the door of opportunity is open to the talented tends to prevent
the opening of a chasm of hatred between capital and labor, though it
must be admitted that the warfare of capital and labor in the States
was developing in the era when Rockefeller and Carnegie were lifting
themselves from penury to the heights of financial power.
Infinitely more important is the second reason. For a long time at
least the stanchest, strongest and stablest part of Canada's people
must be rooted to the soil. Up to the present half her population has
been rural, and less than three per cent. absorbed by the factory, the
railway, the labor union. Of her population of 7,800,000, only 176,000
workers belong to labor organizations, and ninety per cent. of these
have never been on strike. These figures alone explain why class
hatred has never widened into a chasm dividing society in Canada.
Why Big Business has never dominated government in Canada will be dealt
with in a later chapter, but if Big Business can not violate law with
impunity at one end of the social scale, it may be safely said that
anarchy will never violate law at the other end of the scale.
At the same time there are symptoms appearing in the industrial
conditions of Canada as gravely dangerous as anything in her
immigration problems. These need only be stated to be apparent. Where
wages have increased only ten per cent. in a decade, the cost of living
has increased fifty-one per cent.--according to an official commission
appointed by the Ottawa government to report. Though Canada is an
agricultural country, in food products alone, she pays ten million
dollars duty yearly. In one farming province ten million dollars'
worth of food is yearly imported. Why is this? Why is Canada not
producing all the food she consumes? Because in certain sections only
one settler goes out to the farm for four that live in the town.
In the West, if you add up the population of all the cities, you will
find that one-fourth as many people live in the cities as in the
country. In one province you will find that out of half a million
population, three hundred thousand are living in cities and towns.
This is the province that imports such quantities of food. It is also
the province that has more labor trouble than all the other sections of
the Dominion put together. Demagogues harangue the city squares for
"the right to work," "the right to live;" and mill owners, farmers,
ranchers, railway builders go bankrupt for lack of men to work. It is
the province where the highest wages in the world are paid for every
form of labor. It is also the province where the greatest number of
people are idle, and neither you nor I nor anybody else, can convince
the idle stone mason who demands eight dollars a day that he keeps
himself idle by not accepting half that figure. He is not dealing with
"the robber baron" capitalistic class. He is dealing with the humble
householder who wants to build but can not afford workmen at eight
dollars to five dollars a day, when he could afford workmen at four
dollars to a dollar and fifty cents a day.
In 1800 only four per cent. of the United States population was urban,
and ninety-six per cent. was rural. By 1910 only fifty-three per cent.
of the population was rural. Similarly of France and Great Britain.
Sixty-five per cent. of France's population is rural, and France is
prosperous, and her people are the thriftiest and most saving in the
world. They with their tiny savings are the world's bankers. In the
United Kingdom, the rural population has decreased from twenty-eight
per cent. to twenty-three per cent. of the total population. How about
Canada? In 1891 thirty-two per cent. of Canada's people lived in towns
and cities. By 1901 thirty-eight per cent. were town dwellers. By
1914 the proportion in towns and cities is almost fifty per cent.
The entire movement of population from country to city is reflected in
the astounding growth of the cities. In 1800 Montreal had a population
of seven thousand; in 1850, sixty thousand; by 1914, almost half a
million. Similarly of Toronto, of Winnipeg, of Vancouver. From
nothing in 1800, these cities have grown to metropolitan centers of
three hundred thousand, and their growth is the subject of fevered
civic pride. It ought to be cause of gravest alarm. In the history of
the world, when men began to hive in a crowded cave life, those nations
began to decline. The results are always the same--an extortionate
rise in the cost of food, the long bread line, charity where there
ought to be labor and thrift, food riots, terrible tragic contrasts of
the very rich and the very poor, all the vices that go with crowded
housing. When charity workers investigated in Toronto and Montreal and
Winnipeg, they found foreigners living forty-three in five rooms,
twenty-four and fifteen and ten in one. Wherever such proportions
exist as to rural and urban population, ground rentals and values
ascend in price like overheated mercury. Men begin to build
perpendicularly instead of latitudinally. The cave life of the
skyscraper takes the place of the trim home garden, and so greed of
gain--interest on extortionate real estate values--takes its toll of
human life and virtue, clean living and clean thinking. In one section
of Canada during ten years, where there had been an increase of 574,878
in the country population, there was an increase of 1,258,645 in the
city population. Between 1901 and 1911, where 39,951 newcomers settled
in the country districts of Quebec, 313,863 settled in the cities. For
one who chose life in the open, eight chose the tenement and the
sweatshop. In 1901 Canada had 3,349,516 people living in the country,
and 2,021,799 living in the cities. By 1911 there were 3,924,394
living in the country, and 3,280,440 living in the cities.
All this signifies but one thing to Canada--a swift transition from
agricultural status to industrial life; and whether such an artificial
transition bodes good or ill for a land whose greatest wealth lies in
forest and mine and farm remains to be seen. For the time it has
resulted in a cost of living almost prohibitive to the very poor. The
sweatshop, the tenement, the Ghetto, the cave life hovel of Europe have
been reproduced in the crowded foreign quarters of Canadian cities. It
means more than physical deterioration and moral contamination and
degeneration of national stamina. It means if Canada is to become a
great manufacturing country, feeding the human into the hopper of the
machine that dividends may pour out, then she, the youngest of the
nations, must compete against the oldest and the strongest--Germany,
England, France, the United States; but if she is to be a great
agricultural country, then she has few peers in the whole world.
Neither need she have any fear. The nations of the world must come to
her, as they went down to Egypt, for bread. The man on his own land,
be his work good or ill owns his own labor and takes profit or loss
from it and can blame no one but himself for that profit or loss. With
the renting out of a man's labor to some other man for that other man's
profit or loss come all the discontent and class strife of industrial
warfare. Of industrial strife, of labor riots, of syndicalism, of
social revolution, of the few plundering the many, and the many
threatening reprisal in the form of legislation for the many to plunder
the few--of this dog-eat-dog, internecine industrial strife--Canada has
hitherto known next to nothing; but she is at the parting of the ways.
The day that a preponderance of her population becomes urban instead of
rural, that day a preponderance of her population must ask leave to
live from some other man--must ask leave to work for some other man,
must ask leave to put the collar of the industrial serf on the neck as
the sign of labor owned by some other man. That day the preponderance
of Canada's population will cease owning their own vested rights and
will begin attacking the vested rights of other men. That day
plutocracy will begin plundering democracy, and the unfit will begin
plundering the fit, and the many will demand the same rewards as the
few, not by winning those rewards and rising to the plane of the few,
but by expropriating those rewards and pulling the few down to the
level of the many. To me it means the sickling over a robust
nationhood with the yellowing hue of a dollar democracy, the yellowing
hue of gnashing social jealousy, the yellowing hue of moral putridity
and decadence and rot. Hitherto every man has stood on his own legs in
Canada. There has been no weak-kneed, puling greedy mob bellowing for
pap from the breasts of a state treasury--demanding the rewards of
industry and thrift which they have been too weak and shiftless and
useless to earn. But Canada is at the parting of the ways. The day
more men live in the cities demanding food than live on the soil
producing it--which God forfend--that day Canada goes down in the
welter of industrial war and social upheaval.
Hitherto no statesman has arisen in Canada who remotely sensed the
impending evil, much less made an effort to avert the doom that has
come like a cloud above the well-being of every modern country. The
man who makes it a national policy in Canada to attract the settler to
the soil rather than to the city hovel will in the future annals of
this great nation be rated above a Napoleon or a Bismarck.[1] This to
me is the crux of the very greatest and most acute problem confronting
the Dominion's future destiny.
II
In a country where organized labor numbers only 176,000 out of
7,800,000, labor problems can hardly be set down as acute. They do not
split society asunder as they do elsewhere. I am glad of it. I am
glad that in Canada up to the present labor is only capital in the
inchoate. I should be sorry if the day ever came when labor was the
serf, and capital the robber baron, as--let us frankly acknowledge--it
is elsewhere.
In this connection three points should be emphasized. Whether they
should be praised or blamed I do not know; but the points are these:
The Senate in Canada being appointed for life has acted as a breakwater
of adamant and reinforced concrete against all labor or capital
legislation that has arisen from the passions of the moment. More than
once when labor or capital, holding the whip handle in the Commons,
would have forced through hasty legislation as to compensation, as to
liability, as to non-liability--the leaders in the Commons have said
frankly in caucus to the Senate: We are dependent on the vote for our
places here. You are not. We are letting this fool bill through, but
we are letting it through because we know you will kill it. Kill it!
In the next place, "the twilight zone" between federal and provincial
power in matters of labor has proved an unmitigated curse. When the
syndicalists of Europe, known in America as the Industrial Workers of
the World, succeeded in tying up railroad construction and almost
ruining the contractors of two transcontinental systems in British
Columbia a few years ago, endless delay in terminating an impossible
situation occurred through the province trying to throw the burden of
dealing with the matter on the Dominion, and the Dominion trying to
throw the burden on the province. Both province and Dominion were
afraid of the labor vote. The losses caused during that three months'
strike in the construction camps indirectly afterward fell on the
Canadian people; for the embarrassed transcontinentals had to come to
the Dominion government for aid; and the Dominion government is, after
all, the people.
"I pray God," said a Cabinet Minister in Ottawa to me at the time,
"that Imperial Federation may never come; if it adds to our woes
another 'twilight zone' as to Dominion and Imperial powers."
III
It seems almost ungracious in this connection to say that Canada's
far-famed Arbitration Act has been overrated. That it has accomplished
some good and settled many controversies no reasonable person will
deny, but it is not a panacea for all ills.
Here is the difficulty as to arbitration. It is not unlike the
situation of Belgium regarding Germany in the great war. Arbitration
depends on "a scrap of paper." What if some one tears up "the scrap of
paper"? What if one side says there is nothing to arbitrate? Twenty
years ago--yes--wages, hours, conditions of labor--could have been
arbitrated; but to-day the contest in the industrial world is often not
for wages and hours of labor.
"Demand three dollars a day for an eight-hour day, to-day," I heard an
Industrial Worker of the World shout in a Vancouver strike. "Demand
four dollars a day to-morrow, till you secure four dollars a day for a
four-hour day--till your ascending wages expropriate capital--take over
capital and all industry to be operated for labor."
In the great struggle between the railroads and the I. W. W.'s in
British Columbia, Canada's Arbitration Act fell down hopelessly simply
because there was nothing to arbitrate. Labor said: We shall paralyze
all industry, or operate all industry for labor's profit solely.
Capital said--you shall not. There the two tied in deadlock for
months, and there all arbitration acts must often tie in deadlock in
industrial warfare. That is why I hope industrial warfare will never
become a part of Canada's national life. That is why I hope and pray
every Canadian settler will become a vested righter by owning and
operating his own acres till Death lays him in God's Acre.
IV
In a country where the public debt is only $350,000,000 or forty-five
dollars per head, and the national income is $1,500,000,000 from farm,
factory, forest and mine--or two hundred dollars per head and that
fairly well distributed--for the present there is little to fear of
social revolution. It is not the social revolution that I fear for
Canada. It is the canker of social hate and jealousy preceding
revolution. If fifty per cent. of the population can be kept owning
and operating their own land, that social canker will never infect
Canada's national life as a whole.
[1] Thomas Jefferson desired such a rural future for the United States
and deplored the day of cities and industrialism. It came,
nevertheless.--THE EDITOR.