“But the worst mistake of all is to look after the details of management in Great Britain. Efficiency is impossible under those conditions. The management must be on the spot. Put in a man with the requisite knowledge and character and give him a free hand. If his work prove unsatisfactory, dismiss him and get somebody else; but so long as he is manager let him act as such. Have a home man if you like as consulting engineer. Let him go out and decide the general plan of development; but give the local manager a free hand in carrying out the campaign. Let the consulting engineer inspect his work, and learn his reasons for having run this cross-cut and that drift; let the consulting engineer decide whether he is doing well or ill, whether he is saving money or wasting it, whether he should be retained or dismissed; but do not relieve the local manager of responsibility. Do not have him work on cabled instructions based on cabled reports and office maps, and then expect efficient management and a successful mine. If he needs assistance and advice he needs them at the mine, and that is where he should have them.”
Those words, coming from the foremost Government geologist of Canada, carry great weight; and I hope Mr. Brock’s counsel will be taken to heart by the City of London.
And now—not to close this chapter in a minor key—I will glance briefly at Canada’s mineral production in 1910. It represented a value of £25,000,000, or rather more than a 14 per cent. advance on the figures for the previous year. Coal occupied the premier place, with a value of, approximately, £6,000,000. Silver came next (£3,420,000), while pig iron, nickel and gold each yielded a total in excess of £2,000,000. They were succeeded in the scale of value by copper and asbestos.
CHAPTER XIV
NEW SASKATCHEWAN
The story of modern Canada is a story of amazing mistakes and delightful discoveries. At every stage of development popular surmise has been made to look foolish by the accomplished fact.
“The statesman is alive who prophesied that if a railway were ever built around Lake Superior it would not earn enough money to buy axle grease.” So I was informed by Mr. Arthur Hawkes, the genial publicist, who added: “On my first visit to Canada in 1885 I heard an Ontario man warning emigrants against going so far into the wilds as Winnipeg.”
As for Saskatchewan, it was not so very long ago when people shrugged their shoulders over that “frozen and barren wilderness.” It was opened up by railways, and behold Saskatchewan to-day as a smiling country that is excelled for grain production nowhere in the Empire. I learn that the agricultural produce of the province has already reached an annual value of £30,000,000, the total cereal crop for a year—according to Government figures—exceeding 200,000,000 bushels. When one understands that this is the yield from only twelve per cent. of the available arable land of Saskatchewan, one begins to see grounds for the prophecy, which has been uttered by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, that the day is not far distant when Saskatchewan will produce annually a billion bushels of grain. And the curious fact has to be noted that the Saskatchewan of all those figures and references is not Saskatchewan at all, but only the southern half of Saskatchewan—the half that has been opened up by railways.
What particularly struck me in travelling through the province was that, when on the most northerly margin of the settled country, I kept coming upon farmers whose wheat and oats had won important prizes. The farmers were disposed to think the fact was sufficiently explained by their agricultural aptitude. But I could not help suspecting that their terrestrial latitude had a good deal to do with it. A six months’ Canadian summer is longer—from a plant’s point of view—than a seven months’ Canadian summer. For wheat and oats do not make much progress in the dark; and the lengthening of the winters as one goes north is, within a limit only to be fixed by experience, a disadvantage of no account beside the advantage of longer summer days.
Settlement has probably not yet reached the ideal latitude for wheat growing. At any rate, having regard to the rapidity with which railways are extending, the time has come when, to Canada and her prospective immigrants, the possibilities held out by Northern Saskatchewan have become a matter of eager interest. I will therefore focus such meagre evidence as is available on the subject.
The first witness we will call is the Venerable Archdeacon J. McKay, who for forty-five years has been in charge of Church of England missions in the West. For a decade he lived on the Churchill River, a little to the north of Lac la Rouge. Therefore he is in a position to give us tidings of territory situated about two hundred miles north of the limit of the surveyed lands—territory, however, which is still within the area of Central Saskatchewan.