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.
CHAPTER VIII
THE COMING OF THE ORIENTAL
I
If the coming of the foreigner has been Canada's greatest danger from within, the coming of the Oriental has been one of her most perplexing problems from without. It is not only a perplexity to herself. It is a perplexity in which Canada involves the empire.
Take the three great Oriental peoples! With China, Great Britain is in friendly agreement. With Japan, Great Britain is in closest international pact. To India, Great Britain is a Mother. Yet Canada refuses free admission to peoples from all three countries. Why? For the same reason as do South Africa and Australia. It is only secondarily a question of labor. The thing goes deeper than that.
Consider Japan first: Panama is turning every port facing west into a front door instead of a back door. Within twenty years, the combined populations of American ports on the Pacific have jumped from a few hundreds of thousands at San Francisco and nothing elsewhere to almost two million, with growth continuing at an accelerated rate promising within another quarter of a century as many great harbors of almost as great population on the Pacific as on the Atlantic. The Orient has suddenly awakened. It is importing something besides missionaries. It is buying American and Canadian steel, American and Canadian wool, American and Canadian wheat, American and Canadian machinery, American and Canadian dressed lumber. Ship owners on the Pacific report that the docks of through traffic are literally jammed with goods outward bound—"more goods than we have ships," as the president of one line testified.
When the reason for building Panama has been shorn of highfalutin metaphors, it concentrates down to the simple bald fact that the United States possessions on the Pacific had grown too valuable to be guarded by a navy ten thousand miles away around the Horn. True, Roosevelt sent the fleet around the world to show what it could do, and the country howled its jubilation over the fact. But the Little Brown Brother only smiled; for the fleet hadn't coal to steam five hundred miles without hiring foreign colliers to follow around with supply of fuel. "Fine fleet! To be sure we have the ships," exploded a rear admiral in San Diego Bay a few years ago; "but look here!" He pointed through the port at an insignificant coaling dock such as third-rate barges use. "See any coal?" he asked. "If trouble should come"—it was just after the flight of Diaz—"we haven't coal enough to go half-way up or down the coast."