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.