EMIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT
I
You can ascribe the different characteristics of different nations to
the topography of their native land--up to a certain point only.
Beyond that the difference becomes one of psychology and soul rather
than geography, and that is why nations hold to a large extent their
destiny in their own hands. Undoubtedly the unfenced illimitable
reaches of the prairie have reacted on the human soul, unshackling it
from the discouragements of failure in the past and have given a sense
of freedom that explains the dauntless optimism of the West; but if the
people who went to the West had not had the courage to face the
hardships of the pioneer, their optimism could not have triumphed over
difficulties. The very qualities that sent pioneers forth on the trail
to the setting sun guaranteed their success as empire builders.
Japan was long an island empire, but it was only when the soul of that
empire awakened to the Western Renaissance that Japan became a world
power. The German people existed on the map many centuries before they
came into existence as a nation. It was only when the national idea
came that Germany became a power. Likewise of England as mistress of
the seas--the source of her commerce and wealth. England had been a
seagirt nation from the beginning of time. It was only when by the
defeat of the Armada England learned what mastery of the sea meant that
she shot into front rank as a great world power.
How does all this bear on Canada? It is a puzzling question. Ask the
average Canadian why the development of Canada has been slow; and he
denies that it has been slow; or he proves that it is a good thing it
has been slow; or he compares Canada's progress with that of some other
country which has gone too fast, or too slow. All this is a mere
clever dodging of fact. Blinking one's eyes to a fact doesn't
eliminate the fact.
II
What are the facts?
De Monts' first charter to Arcadia dates 1605. The first charter for
Virginia plantations comes in 1606, and the first New England charter
dates the same year. The United States and Canada are both fertile.
They have almost the same area in square miles. One has a population
of over ninety millions and a foreign commerce of four billions. The
other has a population of about eight millions and a foreign commerce
of one billion. One raises from seven hundred to nine hundred million
bushels of wheat; the other, from two hundred to three hundred
millions. One produces thirty million metric tons of steel a year; the
other, less than a million tons; one is worth a hundred and fifty
billion dollars, the other perhaps ten billions.
It is explained that the northern belt of Canada lying in a semi-arctic
zone should hardly be included in comparisons with the area of the
United States lying altogether in a temperate zone; but if cultivation
is proving one thing more than another, it is that Canada's arctic
region recedes a little every year, and her isothermal lines run a
little farther north every year. To put it differently, it is being
yearly more and more proved that the degree of northern latitude
matters less in vegetable growth than heretofore thought, if the arable
land be there; for the simple reason that twenty hours of sunlight from
May to September force as rapid a growth as twelve to fifteen hours'
sunlight from March to September, and the product grown in the North
may be superior to that grown farther south. Wheat from Manitoba is
better than wheat from Georgia. Apples from Niagara have a quality not
found in apples--say from the Gulf states. All things will not grow in
northern latitudes. You can't raise corn. You can't raise peaches. I
doubt if any apple will ever be found suitable for the northwestern
prairie. At any rate, it has not yet been found.
Half a century ago the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company in
perfectly good faith testified before a committee of the Imperial
Commons that farming could never be carried on in Rupert's Land, or
what are now known as Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. He proved
that grain could not be grown there. I recall the day when the idea of
fall wheat west of Lake Superior elicited a hoot of derision. I have
lived to wander through fields of six hundred acres north of the
Saskatchewan. Thirty years ago any one suggesting settlement on Peace
River, or at Athabasca, would have been regarded as a visionary fool.
Yet wheat is ground into flour on Peace River, and the settler is at
Athabasca; and soft Kansas fall wheat sent to Peace River has by a few
years' transplanting been transformed into Number One Hard spring
wheat. Canada's arctic belt has shrunk a little each year, and her
isothermal lines gone a little farther north. The only limit to growth
in the North Country is the nature of the soil. I am not, of course,
speaking of the Arctic slope, but I am of the great belt of wild land
north of Saskatchewan River. And where the arable land stops, the
great fur farm of the world begins---a fur farm which may change but
can never be exhausted. Of course, Canada has a great northern belt of
land that is not arable, but in that belt are such precious minerals as
were discovered in the Yukon. Land that can't be plowed isn't
necessarily waste land, and Canada's great northern belt is partly
balanced by the desert belt of the Southwest in the United States--the
perpetual Indian land of Uncle Sam.
III
With this argument--you come back just where you began. The two
countries were first settled almost contemporaneously. Their area is
not far different. They are both fertile. Each has great
belts--having spent months in each belt, I hesitate to call them
barren--of land that can not be plowed. Why has one country progressed
with such marvelous rapidity; and the other progressed in fits and
starts and stops? Why did a million and a half Canadians--or
one-fourth the native population--leave Canada for the United States?
The Canadian retort always is--for the same reason that two million
Americans have left the United States for Canada--to better their
position. But the point is--why was it these million and a half
Canadians found better opportunities in the United States than in
Canada? Opportunities knock at every man's door if he has ears to
hear, but they are usually supposed to knock loudest and oftenest in
the new land. It is a truism that there are ten chances on the
frontier for a man to rise compared to one in the city. One can
understand American settlers thronging to Canada. They have used and
made good the opportunities in their own land. Now they are sending
their sons to a land of more opportunities. The Iowa farmer who has
succeeded on his three hundred and twenty acres sends forth his sons
each to succeed on his one hundred and sixty acres in Canada; or he
sells his own land for one hundred dollars an acre and forthwith buys a
thousand acres in Canada. When the farmers of Ontario flocked to
Wisconsin and Michigan and Minnesota and the two Dakotas, their land
was worth thirty per cent. less than when they bought it. To-day that
same land is worth one hundred per cent. more than for what they sold
it.
It is easy to look over another land and diagnose its ills. Any
Canadian will acknowledge that Ireland's population dropped from
8,500,000 in 1850 to 4,400,000 in 1908 solely owing to mismanagement,
if not gross misgovernment; but he will not acknowledge that his own
country lost a million and a half people from the same cause. Ireland
lost her population at the rate of one hundred thousand a year for
forty years, and that lost population helped to build up some of the
greatest cities in the United States. The Irish vote is to-day a
dominant power solely owing to that population lost to Ireland. It is
no exaggeration to say that from 1880 to 1890 Canada lost her
population to the United States at a higher rate than one hundred
thousand a year. Why?
Go back a little in history! The most pugnacious United Empire
Loyalist that ever trekked from the American colonies to Ontario and
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would hardly deny that Canada was grossly
misgoverned under the French régime. Laborers were forced to work
unpaid on fortifications, on roads, on governors' palaces. The farmer
was taxed to death in tithes to the seignior. Shipping was confined to
French vessels owned by royal favorites. Fishing was permitted only
under a license. The fur trade was a corrupt monopoly held by a closed
ring round the Royal Intendant. New France was so mis-governed that
the sons of the best families took to the woods and the _Pays d'en
Haut_--to which fact we owe the exploration of three-quarters of the
continent.
And the most pugnacious Loyalist will hardly deny that under the
British régime from 1759 to Durham's Report in 1840 the mismanagement
was almost as gross as the misgovernment under the French. If any one
entertain doubts on that score, let him look up the record on grants of
thousands of acres to favorites of the Family Compact; on peculations
of public funds in Quebec by irresponsible executives; on mistrials of
disorders in the Fur Country, when North-Wester and Hudson's Bay
traders cut each other's throats; on the constant bicker and bark
between Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec, which kept the country
rent by religious dissensions when men should have been empire-building.
Set down the cause of Canada's slow progress up to 1840 to
misgovernment. Durham's Report remedied all that; and confederation
followed in 1867. Was Canada's progress as swift after 1867 as it
ought to have been? Examine a few figures:
In 1790 the United States population was four millions.
In 1800 the United States population was five millions.
In 1914 the United States population was ninety-eight millions.
In 1891 Canada's population was five millions.
In 1900 Canada's population was five million three hundred thousand.
In 1914 Canada's population was seven million eight hundred thousand.
In point of population Canada is just one hundred years behind the
United States. Why? Granted her foreign trade is one-fourth as great
as that of the United States. How is it that a people with such a
genius for success in foreign trade have been so dilatory in their work
of nation-building? Slow progress can no longer be ascribed to
misgovernment. Her system of justice is one of the most perfect in the
world. Her parliamentary representation could hardly be more complete.
No people has stricter bit and rein on executive ministers. Through an
anguish of travail Canada has worked out an excellent system of
self-government. Why is her progress still slow?
Of course one reason for her slow progress in the past was the
impression that long prevailed regarding Canada's climate and
agricultural possibilities. The officials of the Hudson's Bay Company
contended that the Northwest was unfit for settlement, and it was only
within recent times that the contrary view gained a hearing and proved
to be true. With vast tracts of unoccupied land in the milder climate
of the United States still open to settlement and with Canadians
themselves denying that the great Northwest could be cultivated, it is
not strange that most immigrants passed Canada by. Furthermore in
those days the glamour of democracy fascinated dissatisfied Europeans
who swarmed to the New World. Canada was practically as free as the
United States, but she was a possession of the British Crown, and many
emigrants, especially from the Emerald Isle, preferred to try the
experiment of living in a republic.
But there are other reasons. It was after the Civil War that the
American high tariff struck Canada an unintended but nevertheless
staggering blow. She had no market. She had to build up
transportation system and trade routes, but this was well under way by
1890. Has her progress since 1890 kept pace with the United States?
One has but to compare the population between the Mississippi and
Seattle with the population between Red River and Vancouver to have the
answer to this question.
Is it something in the soul; a habit of discouragement; of marking
time; of fighting shy on the defensive instead of jumping into the
aggressive; of self-derogation; of criticism instead of construction;
of foreshortened vision? A diagnosis can be made from symptoms. I set
down a few of the symptoms. There may be many more, and the thinker
must trace up--a surgeon would "guess"--his own diagnosis.
IV
If it were not such a tiresome task, it could be shown from actual
quotations that there is not a paper published in Canada that at some
time during the year does not deliver itself of sentiments regarding
the United States which may be paraphrased thus: "We thank God we are
not as Thou art!" Now the point may be well taken; and Canada should
be thankful to God (and keep her powder dry) that crimes are punished,
that innocence is protected, that vice is not a factor in civic
government; but it is a dangerous attitude for any people to assume
toward another nation. It does not turn the soul-searchings in on
self. It does not get down beneath the skin of things; down, for
instance, beneath a hide of self-righteousness to meanness or nobility
of motive. A big ship always has barnacles; the United States is a big
ship, and she keeps her engine going and her speed up and in the main
her prow headed to a big destiny. It ill becomes a little ship to bark
out--but let it be left unsaid!
While this curious assumption of superiority exists internationally,
there is the most contradictory depreciation nationally. "We," they
say, "are only a little people." So was Switzerland. So was Greece.
So was Belgium. So, indeed, were the Jews.
You never mention a Jim Hill, a Doctor Osler, a Schurman, a Graham
Bell--or a host of similar famous expatriates--in a Canadian gathering
but some one utters with a pride of gratulation that fairly beams from
the face: "They are Canadians." Canada is proud these famous men are
Canadians. It has always struck me as curious that she wasn't
ashamed--ashamed that she lost their services from her own
nation-building. To my personal knowledge three of these men had to
borrow the money to leave Canada. Their services were worth untold
wealth to other lands. Their services did not give them a living in
Canada.
At time of writing--with only three exceptions--Canada imports the
presidents of her great universities; though she exports some of the
greatest presidents and deans who have ever graced Princeton, Cornell,
Oxford. She thinks she can not afford to keep these men. Is it a
matter of money, at all; or of appreciative intelligence? No matter
what the cost, can Canada afford to lose them from her young nationals?
It is a truism that to my knowledge has not a single exception that
Canada has never given the imprimatur of her approval to a writer, to
an inventor, to a scholar, to an artist, till he has gone abroad and
received the stamp of approval outside his own land. By the time Paul
Peel was acclaimed in Paris and Horatio Walker in New York each was
lost to his own land. It is an even wager nine Canadians out of ten do
not know who these men were or for what they were acclaimed. Try it as
an experiment on your first train acquaintance.
You can not read early records of Congress without the most astounding
realization that Washington, Monroe, Jefferson, Adams, big statesmen
and little politicians, voicing solemn convictions or playing to the
gallery--all were deadly in earnest and serious about the business of
building up a nation. They never lost sight of the idea of conserving,
up-building, protecting, extending their country. The national idea is
in Canada so recent that most men have not grasped it. "Build a navy?"
Canada hooted and made the vote a party football. "Canada should have
her own shipyards?" Men look at you! What for? "Panama will reverse
the world conduits of trade." Bah! Hot-air! I have heard these and
similar comments not once but a thousand times.
Americans say of opportunity--"How much can we make of it?" Canadians
say--"How little can we pay for it?" And each takes out of opportunity
exactly the amount of optimism put into it.
So one could go down the list enumerating symptoms, but beneath them
all, it is plain, lies a cause psychological, not physical. It may be
a psychology of discouragement and disparagement from long years of
hardship, but whatever it is, if Canada is to be as big nationally as
she is latitudinally, as great in soul as in area, she must get rid of
this negative thing in her attitude to herself and life. It makes for
solidity, but it also makes for stolidity. Nations do not grow great
by what they leave undone. Psychologists say all mentality divides
itself into two great classes: those giving off negative response to
stimulus; those giving off positive. One class of people stands for
carping criticism; the other, for constructive attempts. One is safe,
to be sure, and sane; and the other is distinctively rash and
dangerous; but of rashness and danger is valor made. "I know thy
works," said the Voice to the Laodiceans, "that thou art neither hot
nor cold: I would thou wert hot or cold . . . because thou art
lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue thee out of my mouth."
And the Voice is the verdict of destiny to every nation that has taken
its place at the world's council board.