[Fruit-Picking in British Columbia]
CANADA
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
CHAPTER I
THE DOMINION’S DESTINY
For those who mark the current of events, Canada’s great destiny is written plain. Canada in a few decades must possess more people and more realised wealth than Great Britain. Whether the centre of Imperial control will then cross the Atlantic is a point on which prophecies differ. Memories enshrined in Westminster Abbey will tend to conserve the ancient seat of government. Yet there is weight in the surmise that the logic of numbers will ultimately prevail.
Canada’s future is foretold in the past growth and present might of the United States. The same traditions, the same climate (over areas of chief significance), the same resources, and—most important of all—the same method of expansion, will produce, and are producing, the same result.
The history of the United States is contained in one word—immigration. That country has absorbed myriad migrants from northern regions of the eastern hemisphere; and it has absorbed most of them in recent times. Screw steamships are responsible. The population of the United States was about 17,000,000 when the first regular Atlantic service was founded by Samuel Cunard—the father of modern America. Only seventeen millions—less than the present population of Brazil! Such was the American nation when Charles Dickens visited it. The growth of population has gained in momentum with the increase and improvement of liners. We now have 92,000,000 cousins. Twenty millions—or nearly a quarter of the huge nation—date no farther back than Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The numerical strength of the Republic has more than doubled since the Tichborne trial.
Immigration, of course, rests upon advertising—a process which is far from being as modern as it sounds, the word occurring in the Bible (Numbers xxiv. 14 and Ruth iv. 4). The United States, ever since their foundation, have been sedulously advertised throughout Europe, partly by books and news-sheets, mainly by private correspondence. The prosperous settler writes to relatives and friends in the Old Country, urging them to come out; and such letters are the most potent stimulus that immigration can receive. They constitute advertising in its most convincing form. They represent an ever-expanding force working silently and unseen. I talked of this matter with Mr. J. Obed Smith—an authority—and he had the right word for what takes place. Those who go in advance “beckon” to those who follow. The United States are still receiving about a million immigrants every year—the result of beckoning.