I beg to propose that the Commission should bring the Canadian Labrador
under conservation by protecting bird life on the coast for a term of
five years, as an experimental investigation, and by examining, for one
year, the whole question of the birds and mammals, inland as well as on
the seabord, and in winter as well as summer. The cost of the first
would be $5,000 a year for five years = $25,000. The cost of the second
would be $5,000 for one year only. The total cost would be $30,000.
I would never have ventured to suggest this plan to the Commission if I
had not been encouraged by one of your own most valued members, Dr
Robertson. But as soon as he told me what your powers were I saw clearly
that, in this particular case, the Commission and the Canadian Labrador
were each exactly suited to the other.
Under all these circumstances I have no hesitation in making the
strongest possible appeal for action before it is too late. The time has
come when the seabird life must be either made or marred for ever. And I
would ask you to remember what seabird conservation means down there. It
means fresh food, the only kind the people ever get, apart from fish. It
means new business, if the eiders are once made safe in sanctuaries; for
we now import our eider down from points outside of Canada. And it means
the quickening of every human interest, once you encourage the people to
join you in this excellently practical form of "Neighbourhood
Improvement".
There is another and very important point, which I discussed at
considerable length in my _Address_, but to which I return here, because
it can only be settled by a body of men, who, like this Commission, are
national trustees. This point is that certain parts of Labrador are
bound to become ideal public playgrounds, if their wild life is only
saved in time. The common conception of Labrador as being inaccessibly
remote is entirely wrong. It is accessible all round a coast line of
3000 miles at the proper season and with proper care; and its vast
peninsula lies straight between the British Islands and our own North
West. So there is nothing absurd in expecting people to come to Labrador
to-morrow when they are going to Spitzbergen, far north of the Arctic
Circle to-day. Of course, Spitzbergen enjoys an invincible advantage at
present, as its wild life is being carefully preserved. But once
Labrador is put under conservation the odds will be reversed. And I what
is true of Labrador in general is much truer still of the Canadian
Labrador. Here is a country which is actually south of London, which is
only 2000 miles from England, 1000 from New York, and 500 from Quebec;
which stands beside one of the most frequented of ocean highways; and
which has a labyrinth of islands, a maze of rivers, and an untamed
hinterland, all formed by Nature for wild "zoos", preserves and open
hunting grounds. And here, too, all over the civilized world, are
city-bound men, turning more and more to Nature for health and
recreation, and willing to spend increasingly large sums for what they
seek and find. Surely, it is only the common sense of statesmanship to
bring this country and those men together, in the near future, under
conditions which are best for both, by making the Canadian Labrador an
attractive land of life and not a hopelessly repellant land of death.
One good, long look ahead to-day, and immediate action following, will
bring the No-Man's-Land of the Canadian Labrador into its rightful place
within the fellowship of the Province and Dominion. You will never find
cause for vain regret. There is a sound basis of material value in the
products of the coast already; and material value is always increased by
conservation. But there is more than material value involved. We still
have far too much wanton destruction of wild life in Canada, not only
among those who have ignorantly grown up to it, but among the well-to-do
and presumably well-educated sham sportsmen who go into any unprotected
wilds simply to indulge their lust of slaughter to the full. Both these
classes will be stopped in their abominations and shown a better way;
for whenever man is taught a lesson in conservation he rises to a higher
plane in his attitude towards all his humbler fellow-beings, and
eventually becomes a sportsman-naturalist and true lover of the wilds.
Then, but not till then, he will see such a drama of Creation along the
Canadian Labrador as the whole world can never show elsewhere. On the
one hand lies the illimitable past, a past which actually existed before
the earliest of living creatures: on the other, the promise of a great
human future. The past is in the hills, the true, the only "everlasting
hills of time"; for they are of the old, the immeasurably old, azoic
rock of the Laurentians, which forms the roots of other mountains, and
which here alone appears to-day, on the face of a young Earth, the same
as at the birth of Life itself. The future lies within the ships that
sail the offing of these hills, crowded with those hosts of immigration
who are so eager to become a part of what may be a mighty nation. And
there, between and round the ships and hills, in sea and sky and on the
land, our kindred of the wild are linking these vastly different ages
close together in what should be a present paradise. Shall one, short,
heedless generation break that whole chain of glorious life and make
that paradise a desert?