“This is the Dukhobor Society’s trading store, where we have wholesale and retail departments for the sale of dry goods, hardware, leather, boots and shoes, groceries, crockery, farm implements, etc. We have seven grist mills, including one of 400 horse-power; three brickyards, where over seven million bricks have been made; about 800 horses; 800 head of cattle; twenty-five threshing machines; a number of barns and stables, and a fine assortment of ploughs, harrows, and other agricultural machinery. We have 13,000 acres in Saskatchewan, it being worth at least thirty dollars an acre, and the Society has now bought 15,000 acres in British Columbia—at Castlegar, about thirty miles south of Nelson—where a beginning has been made with fruit-farming. So you will see that our community, which numbers between seven and eight thousand persons, has become rich. The people who have made trouble for us are not many—not quite a hundred—and they do not belong to us, and we do not like what they do. Their Russian name would be called in English: The Men Without Any Clothes. We hope they will not make any more bother.”
Said the jovial Scotch miller, when I afterwards sat chatting with him in his cosy parlour: “I have a lot to do with the Dukhobors, and you may take it from me they are very nice people. As for the wild, fanatical set that sometimes go about with no clothes on, well, they are just the eccentric ones, and they don’t belong to the regular Society. One day I found a long-haired individual in the mill among those that work for me, a-whispering and talking away at ’em fit to beat the band. I saw what his game was—getting up one of those naked-crusade outfits to make a lot more bother. So I took and ran him out of the mill. They are normally as quiet, harmless, and industrious a people as you could meet anywhere. And such simple tastes they’ve got, too! Did you see that little patch of sunflowers along the road? Well, they grow them for their own food, and they munch away at the ripe seed as contentedly as possible. I tried those seeds once—but never again. A cut from the joint with some nice gravy is more in my line. All the same, you can’t help respecting them for their principles, especially when they are always so nicely behaved. And as for Mr. Verigin and the other heads of the Society, you couldn’t want to do business with nicer and more straightforward gentlemen.”
Said the highly intelligent and much travelled Roumanian storekeeper: “Nobody finds any fault with the Dukhobors themselves; but the system under which they live doesn’t give them a fair chance. They oughtn’t to be kept in their present uneducated state, and allowed to live in a superstitious belief that Peter Verigin is their heavenly ruler. The Society make a boast of the property they have amassed; but what an infinitely greater amount so many thousand families would have produced by this time if each man had been allowed to take up his quarter-section and been a free and independent citizen, bringing up his children to be properly educated and to speak the language of the country, instead of carrying on traditions of ignorance and superstition. As for their objection to bloodshed, and their preference for a non-meat diet—well, obviously those ideals can be preserved just as well by people who are mentally emancipated as by people living in a state of mediæval darkness. I am happy to say that, in spite of the measures taken to preserve the status quo, a little light is beginning to enter the community from without, and already many of the men have struck for independence, and withdrawn from the community. Some are living hereabouts on their own homesteads, and very fine and prosperous settlers they are proving.”
And with what my Roumanian friend said I found myself in hearty agreement. Having escaped from the yoke of autocracy to the political freedom of Canada, the least the Dukhobors can do, it seems to me, is to shed the mental fetters of an ignorant Russian peasantry and become enlightened Canadian citizens.
CHAPTER IX
THE HISTORY OF THE C.P.R.
To establish a great country and christen it after one of its districts—in other words, to take the name of a locality and make it apply over a region stretching away for thousands of miles—is to provide succeeding generations of schoolboys with an opportunity to form life-long misconceptions. If, when London was made into a county, it had been christened Pimlico, we should have a rough parallel to what happened in the case of British North America.
Knowing that Canada has existed for more than three centuries, people are apt (as I have previously pointed out) to scratch and shake their heads over the fact that, while the United States in the south have acquired a population of 92,000,000, Canada numbers only 8,000,000 inhabitants. It takes a lot of explanation to make them understand that historic Canada was a comparatively small area abutting on the St. Lawrence River; and that modern Canada—the huge country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific—is only thirty-eight years old.
You have to hammer away at the fact that the word “union” is the key to the extraordinary contrast afforded by the population of Yankee North America and the population of British North America; that the reason why there was expansion in the south was because the States were united, and that the reason why, until recent years, there was no expansion in the north was because, until recent years, the provinces were ununited.
They were ununited politically (a common allegiance not involving concerted action) and they were ununited physically.
Political union came by stages. The four principal eastern provinces (Canada West, Canada East, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), as we have seen, joined forces forty-four years ago; distant Manitoba threw in its lot with them three years later; remote British Columbia entered the combination during the following twelve months, on condition that its isolation should be remedied by a railroad; and in 1873—or just thirty-eight years ago—with the adhesion of the remaining eastern province (Prince Edward Island) there came into existence the vast Dominion of Canada, embracing not merely the regions named above, but the enormous intervening and adjoining areas known as the North-West Territories.