The open and abounding West is no more. From California, from all the interior regions of the great dry plains rises the same cry, that the government should take measures to give the people more land; that by means of irrigation it should restore, in some measure at least, the opportunities which allured the men who in the old days followed in the pilgrimage “out West.” This changed and restricted region has problems entirely different from those of the West that was.
Once we wished a population to embrace the opportunities that abounded in the West. Now we wish to increase the opportunities for a population clamoring for a better chance than is offered anywhere in America. It is demanded that the government shall bring about reclamation of the arid lands, and their actual settlement in small tracts. “The political party that shall boldly advocate a great national irrigation appropriation will receive the support of millions of people, now homeless and discontented, who desire homes and an opportunity to make a living by honest labor.” This is the statement of a master in transportation, who has assisted in the importation of hundreds of thousands of these homeless and discontented people into an America too suddenly gone small. He would scarcely care to see our railroads under government control, but he can suggest a method by which the government could be immensely helpful to the Western people, and perhaps to the Western railroads!
In yet another prominent railroad office, the conversation lately turned upon the future of the carrying trade in the West, when another of these captains of transportation swept his hand in a large circle on a map that hung on the wall. Within his circle was included a good portion of Montana and Wyoming, with other parts of the great Western interior. “All this region must go under irrigation,” said he. “It is worthless to-day for farming purposes, but there exists no richer soil when once you get water on it. There is no county or state government, there is not even the richest railroad corporation, that can afford to put this vast acreage under the ditch. It is a problem for the national government of the United States; and, mark my words, that government will one day be obliged to solve that problem. Of course, the interest of our railroad in the matter is purely a business one. We want this country settled up, not by a few scattered grazers, but by many producing farmers. We want this country filled full of small land holders, not that we may carry their products to the East on our railway, but so that we may carry them west to the Pacific, and thence across the ocean to the Asiatic market. There must be a new West, and for that West the market must be found in Asia.”
The common carriers, therefore, tell us that our West is now beyond the Pacific; that the East has come into the West; that the Old World has come into the New; that the Latin methods of farming must supplant the Anglo-Saxon ways. Perhaps; but this will take some time. As against the likelihood of any early and sweeping national action in the matter, there remains chiefly the vis inertiæ of mental habit in the American farmer, who hitherto has not been acquainted with the doctrine of irrigation and reclamation. Vast tracts of California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas—large regions in what was once considered the irreclaimable desert of America, go to show that the Western-American can learn irrigation and can successfully carry on farming of that nature; but none the less, for the average American farmer, who has been accustomed to the wide-handed methods of his forefathers, this proposition will carry no immediate appeal.
The proof of this latter statement lies in that very emigration into Canada to which attention has been called, and which constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena ever known in the history of the American West. These dwellers under the Stars and Stripes, these citizens of the land of the free, of the land supposed to offer the greatest extent of human opportunity to-day, are flocking across her borders with the purpose of establishing homes in an alien land, and under a flag from which in a century gone by they made deliberate and forcible desertion!
They want the cheap lands, the wide acres, the great horizon of a West, even if they must find that West in land other than that which bore them! They do not want irrigated land that is worth one hundred dollars an acre, even though there be an unchanging and pleasant climate as an attraction thereto. They prefer a cold, bleak environment, a rude, hard life, with poorer markets, a looser touch with civilization, but with a bolder, a wider and freer individual horizon. There has been nothing in our history more pathetic than this. There has been nothing more cheerlessly disheartening in our history than the thought that we are exchanging thousands of men of this bold and rugged type, men who are willing and able to go out into the savage wilderness and lay it under tribute, for an equal number of thousands of shiftless and unambitious incoming population, who are willing to live on the droppings of the American table.
As to the extent of this American emigration northward into Canada, the figures are great enough to cause consternation in the mind of more than one railroad man, and to set on foot all possible measures of checking the outgoing stream. Within the year 1902 more than fifty thousand American citizens, some say seventy-five, even a hundred thousand, are thought to have taken up homes on the soil of Canada. These American emigrants took with them twenty million dollars out of the banks of Iowa alone. Great syndicates, in part made up of American capitalists and in conjunction with American and Canadian masters of transportation, have undertaken the settlement of large tracts of these cheap Canadian lands.
The settlers of the remoter West, the men from Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and so forth, largely move into Manitoba or other western British provinces. Farther to the east, in what is known as New Ontario under the new railroad industrial policy, an equally determined effort is making to influence American citizens to settle on lands subject to the rigorous climate north of Lake Superior. If only the settler shall come here he may have land at any price he likes, on terms of payment that shall suit himself. In all the large Canadian cities, whether under government countenance or not, there are emigration bureaus. In the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis there are yet other emigration offices, proclaiming as flamboyantly as they ever did for the lands of the United States, the attractions of a home in the far Northwest, across the borders of the United States.
Canada lost one-fifth of her population to the United States. She is regaining much of it to-day, because she still has a West, and we have none. There is systematic, deliberate and highly differentiated effort going on toward the influencing of this American emigration. To offset it we have nothing to offer except the incoming stream of city dwellers from Europe, and the possible policy of national irrigation, subject always to the dubious methods of American politics. Gaze now once more, if you like, on the picture of the old West and of the new!
England fears, and in some portions of Canada that fear is shared, that these Americans will not become good Canadian subjects; that, in short, Canada will become Americanized. Only the years will tell. These great popular movements are matters of individual self-interest. The day of the individual is indeed passing, yet it is not to pass without a fight to the last gasp upon the part of that individual himself. It would lie ill to suggest that the American government has not always properly treated its people, in spite of that vast modern meshwork of monopolies and combinations which has brought about practically an industrial slavery, and has gone so far toward bidding our once free American to hope for freedom no more. Yet the answer as to the patriotism of the American people lies silent before us in the records of the ticket offices of these railways that run from America into Canada.