THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE
I
Some one has said that the life of a nation is but the shadow of the
units composing it; or the life of a nation is but the replica of the
life of the individuals in it. Massed figures on gross exports are but
the total thrift of a multitude of toiling men. Wheat production to
feed a hungry empire is but one farmer's tireless vigilance multiplied
by hundreds of thousands of other farmers. What manner of man is the
Canadian behind all these figures attesting material prosperity? What
manner of being is the Canadian woman, his partner? Is the Canadian a
Socialist, or an Individualist? Does he believe that each man should
stand upon his own feet or lean upon a state crutch? There is no state
church in Canada. Then, what part does religion play? Is it a shadow,
or a substance? Is it a refuge for the unfit and the weak to shift the
responsibility for their own failure to the fatalism of the will of
God; or is religion a terrible and dynamic force that compels right for
right's sake independent of compromise? How does the Canadian live in
his home? Is he beer-drinking, lethargic, dreamy and flabby in will
power; or is he whisky-drinking, fiery, practical and pugnacious? Why
hasn't he a distinctive literature, a distinctive art? Nature never
was more lavish to any people in beautiful landscape from the quiet
rural scenery of the maritime provinces, Quebec and Ontario, to the
far-flung epic of the fenceless prairies and the Homeric grandeur of
the mountains. Why are quiet rural beauty and illimitable freedom and
lofty splendor not reflected in poem and novel and ballad and picture?
The Canadian may answer--We go in more for athletics than aesthetics:
we are living literature, not writing it. In our snow-covered prairies
edged by the violet mist, lined in silver and pricked at night by the
diamond light of a million stars, we are living art, not painting it.
That our mountains are dumb and inarticulate, that our forests chant
the litany of the pines untranslated to the winds of heaven, and that
our cataracts thunder their diapasons inimitable to art--is no proof
that though we are dumb and inarticulate, we are not lifted and
transported and inspired by the wondrous beauties of the heritage God
has given us. The Canadian may say this theoretically, but is he
strengthened in body and made greater in soul by the mystic splendors
of his country? In a word, has the Canadian found himself? He is not
self-conscious, if that be what is meant by finding self; and that may
be a good thing; for self-consciousness is of one of two things--the
vanity of femininity in its adolescence, or the picayune pecking
introspection of natures thrown in on self instead of exuberantly
spending energy in effort outside of self. Self-consciousness is too
much ego, whether it be old or young; and the devil must be cast out
into the swine over the cliff into the sea, before there can enter into
men, or nations, that Spirit of God which makes for great service in
Destiny.
Has Canada found herself?
II
Without any brief for or against Socialism as a system, it may be said
that for many years Socialism will play little part in Canadian
affairs. In areas like Germany, where the population is three hundred
and ten per square mile; or France, where the population is one hundred
and eighty-nine per square mile; or England, where the population is
over five hundred per square mile; or Saxony, where the population is
eight hundred and thirty per square mile--one can understand the claim
of the most rabid and extreme Socialist that the great proportion of
the people can never by any chance own their own freehold; that the
great proportion of the toilers are not having a fair chance in an open
field; but in Canada where there are millions of acres untaken, where
the population is not quite two to the square mile, it is impossible to
raise the cry that every man, and any man, can not have all the
freehold he is manly enough to go out and take. The grievance becomes
preposterous and a joke. There is more land uninhabited and open to
preemption in Canada than is owned in freehold. There are more forests
standing in Canada than have been cut. There are more mines than there
are workmen, and only the edge of Canada's mineral lands have been
explored. There are more fish uncaught than have ever been hooked. I
have heard soap-box orators in Canada rant about the plutocrats
gobbling the resources of the country; and I have gone to their offices
and shown them on the map that any man could become a plutocrat by
going out and gobbling some more, provided he had brains and brawn and
gobbled hard enough instead of gabbled; and I have been answered these
very words: "But we don't want that. We want to inflame the masses
with hatred for the classes so that the laborer will take over all
industry." When I have pointed out that there are "no masses" nor
"classes" in Canada--that all are laborers, I have been met with a
blank stare.
The case is a standing joke in one province of a man who as an agitator
used to rave at "the British flag as a bloody rag." The police were
never quite sure whether to arrest him for treason or let him blow off
steam and exhaust. They wisely chose the latter course. Prosperity
came to the town. The man sold his small bit of real estate for
something under a hundred thousand. He didn't stay to divide his
unearned increment among his fellow agitators. He hied him to retire
to the land where "the flag was a bloody rag." This, of course, proves
nothing for or against Socialism as a system. There was a Judas among
the apostles; but it illustrates the point that Canada is still at the
stage where every man may become a capitalist, a vested righter, the
owner of his own freehold. When every man may have a vested property
right in a country--not as a gift but as the reward of his own effort
in a fair field with no favors--it is a fairly safe prophecy that the
vested rights earned and held by the fit and the strong will never be
handed over as a gift to the unfit and the weak and the don't-trys.
The savings of the man who has not squandered his earnings on saloons
and reckless living will never be taxed to support in idleness--even an
idle old age--the feckless who have spent on stomach and lust what
other men save. Sounds hard; doesn't it, in the face of almost
universal nostrums for the salvation and propagation of the useless?
But it is like Canada's climate. Perhaps the climate has a good deal
to do with it. Hard it may be; but the issue is clean-cut and crystal
clear--work, or starve; be fit, or die; make good, or drop out; here is
a fair field and no favors! Gird yourself as a man to it, and no
puling puny whining for pity!
Can Canada keep a fair field and no favors? Her destiny as a power
depends on the answer to that question. In every city in Canada to-day
are growing up crowded foreign quarters peopled by men and women who
have never had a fair field--with class hate in their hearts for
inherited social wrongs; derelicts, no-goods, unfits, born unfit
through no fault of their own. Have they no claim? Can Canada as a
foster mother redeem such as these? Her destiny as a power depends on
the answer to this question, too. These people are coming to her. In
every city are tens of thousands of them. She needs these people.
They need her. Will it be a leveling down process for Canada or a
leveling up process for them? Before the nineties the average number
of inhabitants per house in urban Canada was three. By 1901 the
average was up to four. By 1911 it was up to five. In the crowded
centers as many as twenty a room have been found. If this sort of
thing continue and increase, Socialism will become a factor in Canada.
It will become a factor because every man or woman who has not had a
fair chance has a right to demand a change to a system that will give a
fair chance. Canada's economic stability and freedom from social
unrest will depend on getting her foreign denizens out to the land.
Unfortunately high tariff fosters factory; and factory fosters cheap
foreign labor; and cheap foreign labor as inevitably leads to social
ferment as heat sours milk.
III
What part does religion play in Canada? In marked distinction to the
United Kingdom and the United States, Canada is a church-going nation.
You hear a great deal of the orthodoxy of the Britisher; but if you go
to England and go to his church, even to a festal service such as
Christmas, you will find that he leaves the orthodoxy mostly to the
clergy and the women. I have again and again seen the pews of the most
famous churches in England with barely a scattering of auditors in
them. Of churches where the hard-working manual toiler may be found
side by side with the cultured and the idle and the leisured--there is
none. You also hear a great deal about the heterodoxy of the American;
but if you go to his church--with the exception of the Catholic--you
find that he, too, is leaving his heterodoxy to the clergy and the
women. A few years ago it was almost impossible to gain entrance to a
metropolitan church in the United States, where the preacher happened
to be a man of ability or fame. Try it to-day! Though church music
has been improved almost to the excellence of oratorios or grand opera,
unless it be a festal service like Easter or Christmas, the pews are
only sparsely filled. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say this
is as true of the country districts as of the city. All through New
England are countless country churches that have had to be permanently
closed for lack of attendance. But between the churches of the United
Kingdom and the United States is a marked difference--it is the air of
the preacher. The Englishman is positively sublime in his
unconsciousness of the fact that he had lost a grip of his people. The
American knows and does not blink the fact and is frantically
endeavoring by social service, by popular lectures, by music, by
current topics, by vehement eloquence to regain the grip of his people;
and it must cut a live manly man to the quick to know that his best
efforts on salvation are too often expended on dear old saintly ladies,
who could not be damned if they tried.
Now the curious thing about Canada, which I don't attempt in the least
to explain, is this: whether the preacher pules, or whines, or moons,
or shouts to the rafters, or is gifted with the eloquence to touch "the
quick and the dead"; whether the music be a symphony or a dolorous
horror of discords; whether there be social service or old-fashioned
theology; whether, in fact, the preacher be some raw ignorant stripling
from the theological seminary, or a man of divine inspiration and
power--whatever is or is not, if the church is a church, from Halifax
to Vancouver, you find it full. I have no explanation of this fact. I
set it down. Canadians are a vigorously virile people in their
church-going. They do it with all their might. I sometimes think that
the church does for Canada what music does for continental nations,
what dollar-chasing and amusement do for the American nation--opens
that great emotional outlet for the play of spiritual powers and
idealization, which we must all have if we would rise above the
gin-horse haltered to the wheel of toil. "The Happy Warrior" in Watts'
picture dreamed of the spirit face above him in his sleep. So may
Canada dream in her tireless urgent business of nation-making; and
religion may visualize that dream through the church.
Understand--the Canadian is no more religious than the American or the
Britisher. He drinks as much whisky as they do light wines and beer.
He "cusses" in the same unholy vernacular, only more vigorously. He
strikes back as quickly. He hits as hard. He gives his enemy one
cheek and then the other, and then both feet and fists; but the
Canadian goes to church. One of the most amazing sights of the new
frontier cities is to see a church debouching of a Sunday night. The
people come out in black floods. In one foreign church in Winnipeg is
a membership of four thousand. I think of a little industrial city of
Ontario where there is a church--one of three--with a larger membership
than any single church in the city of New York.
Canadians not only go to church but they dig down in their pockets for
the church. In little frontier cities of the West more is being spent
on magnificent temples of worship than has been spent on some European
cathedrals. Granted the effects are sometimes garish and squarish and
dollar-loud. This is not an age when artisans spend a lifetime carving
a single door or a single facade; but when a little place--of say
seventeen thousand people--spends one hundred thousand dollars on a
church, somebody has laid down the cash; and the Canadian is not a man
who spends his cash for no worth. That cash represents something for
which he cares almightily in Canadian life. What is it? Frankly I do
not know, but I think it is that the church visualizes Canada's ideal
in a vision. We love and lose and reach forward to the last. Where?
We toil and strive and attain. To what end? Our successes fail, and
our failures succeed. Why? And love lights the daily path. But where
to? Religion helps to visualize the answers to those questions for
Canada.
Another characteristic about religion in Canada, which is very
remarkable in an era of decadence in belief, is that the church is a
man's job. Unless in some of the little semi-deserted hamlets in the
far East, you will find in Canada churches as many men as women. In
the West you will find more men than women. The church is not
relegated to "the dear sisters." Shoulder to shoulder men and women
carry the burden joyfully together, which, perhaps, accounts for the
support the church receives from young men. An episode concerning "the
dear sisters" will long be remembered of one synod in Montreal. A poor
little English curate had come out as a missionary to the Indians of
the Northwest. Such misfits are pitiable, as well as laughable. When
you consider that in some of these northern parishes a man can reach
his different missions only by canoe or dog-train, that the missions
are forty miles apart, that the canoe must run rapids and the dog-train
dare blizzards--an effeminate type of man is more of a tragedy than a
comedy. I think of one mission where the circuit is four hundred miles
and the distance to railroad, doctor, post-office, fifty-five miles.
This little curate had had a hard time, though his mission was an easy
one. When his turn came to report, his face resembled the reflection
on an inverted teaspoon. Hardship had taken all the bounce and laugh
and joy and rebound out of him. The other frontier missionaries grew
restless as he spoke. One magnificent specimen, who had been a gambler
in his unregenerate days, began to shuffle uneasily. When the little
curate whined about the vices of the Indians, this big frontier
missionary pulled off his coat. (He explained to me that it was "a hot
night"; besides it "made him mad to hear the poor Indians damned for
their vices, when white men, who passed as gentlemen, had more.")
Finally, when the little curate appealed to "the dear sisters to raise
money to build a fence," the big man could stand it no longer. He
ripped his collar loose and sprang to his feet. "Man," he thundered,
"pull off your coat and build your own fence and don't trouble the Lord
about such trifles. I'm rich on thirty dollars a year. When I need
more, I sell a steer. Don't let us bother God-Almighty with such
unmanly puling and whining," and much more, he said--which I have told
elsewhere--which brought that audience to life with the shocks of a
galvanic battery. One of the most successful Indian missionaries in
Canada is a full blood Cree. It does not detract from his services in
the least that if in the middle of his prayers he hears the wild geese
coming in spring, he bangs the Holy Book shut and shouts for the
congregation to grab their guns and get a shot.
The virile note in religious life is one of the chief reasons for its
support in Canada; and I have been amused to watch English and American
friends who have gone to Canada first indifferent to the church-going
habit, then touched and finally caught in the current. Does the habit
react on public life? Undoubtedly and most strongly! Catholic Quebec
and Protestant Ontario for years literally dictated provincial and
federal policies; but, with the shift of the balance of power from East
to West, that shuffling of Catholic against Protestant and vice versa
has ceased in Canadian politics; and those newspapers that gained their
support playing on religious prejudice have had to sell and begin with
a new sheet. At the same time no policy could be put forward in
Canada, no man could stay in public life against the voice of the
different churches. If it were not invidious, examples could be given
of public men relegated to private life because they violated the
principles for which the church stands. The church in Canada is not a
dead issue. It is not the city of refuge for the failures and the
misfits. It voices the ideals of Canadian men and women busy
nation-building. It has been cynically said that the church in
England, as far as public men are concerned, lays all its emphasis on
the Eighth Commandment, and none at all on the Seventh; and that the
church in the United States lays all its emphasis on the Seventh
Commandment and none at all on the Eighth. I do not think a politician
could be a special acrobat with either of these Commandments and stay
in public life in Canada. The clergy would "peel off" those coats and
roll up their sleeves and get into the fight. There would be a lot of
mud-slinging; but the culprit would go--as not a few have gone in
recent years.
IV
Deeply grounded, then, so deeply that the Canadian is unconscious of
it, put the belief in the economic principle of vested rights! Still
more deeply grounded, put a belief in religious ideals as a working
hypothesis! Does any other factor enter deeply in Canadians' every-day
living? Yes--next to economic beliefs and religious beliefs, I should
put love of outdoor sport as a prime factor in determining Canadian
character.
Professional sport has comparatively little place in Canada, though
professional baseball has gained a firm foothold in the Northwest,
where the American influence is strong, while the International League
reaches over the boundary in the East. But it is the amateur who
enjoys most favor. If a picked team of bank clerks and office hands
and young mechanics in Winnipeg practises up in hockey and comes down
from Winnipeg and licks the life out of a team in Montreal or Ottawa,
or gets licked, the whole population goes hockey mad. This churchly
nation will gamble itself blue in the face with bets and run up gate
receipts to send a professional home sick to bed, and I have known of
employers forgiving youngsters who bet and lost six months' salary in
advance. Montreal will cheer Winnipeg just as wildly when Winnipeg
wins in Montreal, as Winnipeg will cheer Montreal when Montreal wins in
Winnipeg. It is not the winning. It is the playing of clean good
sport that elicits the applause. The same of curling, of football, of
cricket, of rowing, of canoeing, of snowshoeing, of yachting, of
skeeing, of running. When an Indian won the Marathon, he was lionized
almost to his undoing. When hardest frost used to come, I knew a dear
old university professor, who would have considered it sin to touch the
ace of spades, who used to hie him down to the rink with "bessom" and
"stane" and there curl on the ice till his toes almost froze on his
feet; and one Episcopal clergyman used to have hard work holding back
hot words of youthful habit on the golf links; and his people loved him
both because he golfed and because he almost said things, when he
golfed. They would rather have a clergyman who golfed and knew "a cuss
word" when he saw it, than a saint who couldn't wield a club and might
faint at such words as golf elicits.
In one of Canada's best rowing crews, a millionaire merchant was the
acting captain of the crew and among his men were a printer, an
insurance canvasser, a bank clerk, a clerk in a dry goods store. In
one of the most famous hockey teams was a bicycle repairer. Sport in
Canada, as in the United States, is the most absolute democracy. I can
think of no man in Canada who has attained a permanently good place in
social life through catering to women's favor with dandified
mannerisms, though not a few have got a leg up to come most terrible
croppers; but I do think of many men to whom all doors are permanently
open because they are such clean first-rate sportsmen. Until the last
ten years of opulent fevered prosperity came to the Dominion, Canada
might have been described as a nation of athletes. This does not mean
that Canada neglected work for play. It means that she worked so
robustly because she had developed strength on the field of play.
Three truths are almost axiomatic about nations and sport. It is said
that a nation is as it spends its leisure; that nations only win
battles as their boys have played in their youth; that man's work is
only boy's sport full grown. The religious little catechist may win
prizes in the parochial school; but if he doesn't learn to take kicks
and give them good and hard, in play, he will not win life's prizes.
Fair play, nerve, poise, agility, act that jumps with thought, the
robust fronting of life's challenge--these are learned far more on the
toboggan slide where you may break your neck, in a snowshoe scamper,
than poring over books, or in a parlor. I do not know that Canada has
analyzed it out, but she lives it. Young Canada may be bumptious, raw,
crude. Time tones these things down; but she is not tired before she
has begun the race. She is not nerve-collapsed and peeved and
insincere.
V
As to why Canada has no distinctive and great literature--I confess
frankly I do not know. England had only Canada's population when a
Shakespeare and a Milton rose like stars above the world. Scotland and
Ireland both have a smaller population than Canada, and their ballads
are sung all over the world. Canada has had a multitude of sweet
singers pipe the joys of youth, but as life broadened and deepened
their songs did not reach to the deeps and the heights. Something
arrested development. They did not go on. Why? It may be that
literature rises only as high as its fountain springs--the people; and
that the people of Canada have not yet realized themselves clearly
enough to recognize or give articulation to a national literature. It
may be that Canada is living her literature rather than writing it. If
Scott had not found appreciation for his articulation of Scottish life
and history in poems and novels, he would not have gone on. In fact,
when Byron eclipsed Scott in public favor as a poet, Scott stopped
writing poetry. It may be that Canada has not become sufficiently
unified--cemented in blood and suffering--to appreciate a literature
that distinctively interprets her life and history. It may be that she
has been swamped by the alien literature of alien lands, for the
writers of English to-day are legion. Or it may be the deeper cause
beneath the dearth of world literature just now--lack of that peace,
that joyous calm, that repose of soul and freedom from distraction,
that permits a creator to give of his best.
One sometimes hears Canadians--particularly in England--accused of
crudity in speech. I confess I like the crudities, the rawness, the
colloquialisms. They smack of the new life in a new land. I should be
sorry if Canadians ever began to Latinize their sentences, to "can"
their speech and pickle it in the vinegar pedantry of the peeved
study-chair critic. Because it is a land of mountain pines and
cataracts and wild winds, I would have their speech smack always of
their soil; and I would bewail the day that Canadians began to measure
their phrases to suit the yard stick of some starveling pedant in a
writer's attic, who had never been nearer reality than his own
starvation. I can see no superiority in the Englishman's
colloquialisms of "runnin'," "playin'," "goin'," to the Canadian's "cut
it out," "get out," "beat it." One is the slovenliness of languor.
The other is the rawness of vigor.
VI
When one comes to consider woman in a nation's life, it is always a
little provoking to find "woman" and "divorce" coupled together; for
there never was a divorce without a man involved as well as a woman.
The marriage tie is not easily dissolved in Canada. Divorce pleas must
go before a committee of the Federal Senate. Without legal fees, it
costs five hundred dollars to obtain a divorce in Canada; with fees,
one thousand dollars; so that Canada's divorce record is 1,530 for
7,800,000 of population in 1913; or one divorce for every 5,000 people.
This seems a laudably low record, and Canada takes great credit to
herself for it. I am not sure she should, for her system makes divorce
a luxury available only to the rich. Divorce is not a cause. It is a
result. I am not sure that people ill-mated do not do more harm to
their children staying together than separating; and marriage is not
for the man or the woman, but for the race. This opinion, however,
would be considered heresy in Canada, and a great many factors conspire
to help woman's status in the Dominion. To begin with, there are half
a million more men than women. A woman need never give herself so
cheaply as to spend her life paying for her precipitancy. She is not a
superfluous. Another point in which some other countries could emulate
Canada is in the protection of women and children. A woman ill-mated
has the same protection under the law as though she were single.
Infringement of her rights is punishable with penalties varying from
seven years and the lash to death. A man living on a woman's illicit
earnings is not coddled by ward heelers and let off with light bail, as
in certain notorious California cases. He is given the lash and seven
years. Such offenders seldom come up for sentence twice.
On the other hand, compared to punishments for property violations, the
protection of women and children is ridiculously inadequate. A man
abducting a girl is liable to sentence of five years; a man stealing a
cow, to sentence of fourteen years. Counterfeiting coin is punished by
life imprisonment. Misusing a ward or employee is punished by two
years' imprisonment. This remissness is no index to a subordinate
position by women in Canada. It is rather simple testimony to the fact
that before the influx of alien peoples certain types of crime were
unknown.
There is little of sex unrest in Canada. In fact, sex as sex is not in
evidence, which is a symptom of wholesome relationships. Perhaps I
should say there is little of that feminine discontent and revolt so
strident in older lands. This I attribute to two facts: an overplus of
men, and boundless opportunity and freedom for the expenditure of
unused energies. In certain sections of England, women over-balanced
men before the war as ten to one. What the over-balance will be after
the war, one can only guess. When women who want to marry are not
married, or married to types different from themselves--which must
happen when the sexes are in disproportion--unhappiness must result.
Woman is at war, she knows not with what. When women who are full of
energy and ability have nothing to do, there is bound to be
unhappiness. In Canada a woman has perfect freedom to do anything she
chooses. Her opportunity is limited only by her own personality. What
she wills, she may, if she can. If she can't, then her quarrel must be
with self, not with life. Children can not choose their parents; but a
woman can choose the parent of her child; and when her choice is high
and wide and happy, it bodes better for the race than when conditions
have forced her into an alliance that must be more or less of an armed
truce on a low plane.
As an example of the fairness of marriage laws in Canada, if a
fur-trader marry an Indian woman--according to the custom of the tribe,
simply taking her to wife without ceremony, she is his legal heir, and
her children are his legal heirs. This was established in a famous
trial in the courts of Quebec. A trader became contractor and
politician. When prosperity came, he discarded his Indian wife and
married an English girl. On his death the Indian wife and children
sued for his estate. It was awarded to them by the courts and
established a precedent that guaranteed social status to the children
of such unions. This is one of the things that easterners can not
comprehend. I have never heard the opprobrious phrase "squaw man" used
on the Canadian frontier; and descendants of the MacKenzies, the
Isbisters, the Hardistys, the Strathconas, the Macleans, the
MacLeods--blush, not with shame but pride, in acknowledging the Indian
strain of blood.
The fact that some of the western provinces notoriously ignore a
woman's property rights in her husband's estate--is sometimes quoted to
prove the unfairness of Canada's laws to women. I am no defender of
those lax property laws. They ought to, and will soon, be changed; but
let us give even the devil his dues; and the devil in this case was the
mad real estate speculation. When thousands of adventurers poured in
from everywhere and began buying and selling and reselling property, it
impeded quick turn overs to reserve the absent wife's third.
Sometimes, as in the case of a famous actor, the wives numbered four.
Ordinarily in Canada--certainly in eastern provinces--a third is the
wife's reserve unless she sign it away. How four wives could each have
a third was a poser for the speculator and the knot was cut by ignoring
the wife's claims. Now that the fevered mad mania of speculation is
over this remissness of the law in two provinces will doubtless be
remedied.