Canada To-day and To-morrow

by Arthur E. Copping

Newly arrived in Ottawa one afternoon last summer, I was standing amid its noble buildings, chatting with a fat policeman; and the fat policeman, having identified me as a visitor from England, said I must certainly call on his friend J. R. Booth. My comment was directed to the necessity for an introduction and an appointment, whereupon a puzzled face revealed the friendly constable as wondering what I was talking about. Thus this incident epitomised the great difference between two peoples, otherwise identical, who are divided by three thousand miles of ocean.

I am British, and, consequently, a snob; the fat policeman was Canadian, and, therefore, unhampered by any sense of social distinctions. It would never occur to a fat policeman in the Old Country that he was everybody’s equal. If he happened to know a millionaire, he would talk of that person with awe, instead of with affectionate respect, as was the note sounded in my corpulent companion’s references to J. R. Booth. The untravelled English reader may find a difficulty in realising that it is not a natural law, by Providence ordained, which divides humanity into ladies and gentlemen on the one hand, and common people on the other. In this dear old country many excellent folk would be shocked at the idea of dining at the same table, or praying in the same pew, with a man who does useful manual work; but the people of Canada, while very much alive to the power of the dollar, are blind and deaf to the idea that personal wealth has anything to do with personal worth. The fact is that kid gloves and the silk hat are emblematical of a country that has reached a ripe, not to say rotten, stage of development. In a new and progressive country like Canada muscle commands, not emolument alone, but honour.

From the terrace of the Ottawa Parliament House—that majestic Gothic pile which crowns the architectural beauty of the capital—I looked out upon a far sweep of beautiful Canadian scenery. Down below, in the foreground of that living panorama, the eye noted, on the farther shore of the broad stretch of glistening river, a little town of workshops and factories clustering behind the white smudge that marked a waterfall. I was looking at the head-quarters of the industry out of which the city of Ottawa has grown. I was looking at the largest lumber-mill in the world. I was looking at a part of the property created, owned, and controlled by J. R. Booth, the friend of the fat policeman.

During my tour of the Dominion’s great cities—so full of light, racing tramcars, human enthusiasm, and other forms of electricity—Canada became typified in my mind as The Man Without a Waistcoat; for the energetic citizen permits himself that toilet modification during the brilliant summer months. But an abstract personification was destined to be superseded in my thoughts by a definite human example. In J. R. Booth I felt that I had met the spirit and genius of Canada in the flesh.

I went to him under the conditions which had the sanction of national usage—that is to say, I went without introduction or appointment.

An old man, thick-set and of medium height, with white beard and clean-shaven upper lip; an old man in a suit of dark grey homespun, with peaked cap to match; an old man standing by himself, thinking, in the lee of a wooden shed—that was the multi-millionaire as I happened to find him. It is not many persons who have found him thus.

A while ago Sir Robert Perks dropped in from the Old Country to discuss high finance with the Lumber King of Canada. Sir Robert was shown into an office, where he presently was much astonished by the entrance of an elderly individual in overalls, sprinkled with red dust and mortar. The old man on that occasion had been laying bricks. Visitors sometimes find him at the bottom of an excavation showing his men how to lay concrete.

There was someone with me who, when we saw him standing beside the wooden building, said that was J. R. Booth. I should not have known. At a casual glance he might, even in Canada, have been anybody; in England he could easily have been mistaken for nobody. But when I stepped forward and spoke to that upright, impassive old man, when I confronted his calm, strong countenance, with its wise, blue, penetrating eyes, I realised the presence of J. R. Booth. I cannot find the right word to reflect the impression he produces. The strength of simplicity; the oak pillar or marble column unadorned; a man content to lean on mind instead of manner—those are but imperfect suggestions.

I asked if I might go over his works, and he said “Yes.” I asked if I could have a chat with him afterwards, and again he said “Yes.” For he is a straightforward Aye-and-Nay talker—there is no polite pretending, no verbal embroidery, with J. R. Booth. He struck me as being the rare human marvel—a genius without vanity.

Genius is not an exaggerated definition. J. R. Booth gave the first clues to his future career at an early age by doing something that his relatives considered silly and something else that they considered insane. I should mention he came of a stock of seven brothers Booth who, over a century ago, emigrated from Ireland to Waterloo—a district within that vast stretch of Quebec territory known as the Eastern Townships. There they toiled, prospered, and multiplied; and it came to pass that J. R. Booth, of the rising generation, had to plough, chop wood, and tend stock. But homestead duties did not monopolise the young man’s attention. It was in his mind that the utmost power of a man’s body can accomplish but a minute fraction of the work waiting to be done in the world; and, undeterred by the titters of his intimates, he put in a lot of private time constructing amateur watermills on a rivulet that coursed through the paternal property. Those wheels were running in his mind when, at the age of twenty-one, he broke away from the traditions of his youth, and, with no more than nine dollars in his pocket, set forth to conquer the world in his own way, the good people of Waterloo shaking their heads over the departure of one whom they feared must be crazy.