As indicated in my account of the C.P.R., there are dangers to the country through the powers granted to the companies in their early years of constructive enterprise, but I found a very optimistic belief on the part of Canadians that the Canadian people will be strong enough to grapple with the railway companies if they show any signs of seriously abusing their privileges. The competition between the three great companies at present is so strong and so keen that the danger of their uniting for the oppressive exploitation of the people by a trust combining them all seems a possibility of the dim future. It is likely enough that some Napoleon of finance in the United States, Canada, or Great Britain may conceive and try to carry out the idea of such a Dominion Railway Trust. If and when that happens a very interesting situation will be created. He will not only have the public opinion of the Dominion expressing itself and bringing itself to bear upon the Dominion Parliament and Government, but he will have to deal with the public opinion of the several Provinces, and this is a power that will more and more have to be reckoned with. The Provinces are not at all likely to consent to the Dominion Government bartering away their Provincial rights in the use of the railways. It will be a very dangerous thing to the Dominion Government if it provokes a conflict between itself and the Governments of the Provinces. All the probabilities point to the continuance of the independent companies. There is room enough and to spare for a good fifty years to come for each of them to use all the capital it can command in the development of its own spheres of influence, and while that is so there seems no necessity for any big combine that would compromise the interests either of the passengers or the manufacturing and industrial users of the railways.
CHAPTER V
SETTLING ON THE LAND
The largest proportion of emigrants to Canada go with the intention of settling on the land. The villages of England, Scotland, and Wales are sending out tens of thousands of labourers’ and farmers’ sons dreaming golden dreams of success in the mixed farming of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, in the wheat growing and cattle raising of the Prairie Provinces, or in the fruit farming of British Columbia. They have been brought up in British methods of agriculture in a country where land is monopolised by the few, is rented by the cultivators, is subject to heavy taxation, and in which the drain upon the land for centuries has been so heavy that the soil has to be continually enriched with expensive fertilisers, and even then there must be rotation of crops. British agriculture is a most hazardous speculation in view of the uncertainty of our seasons, the increasing importation of foreign supplies, the fluctuation of prices, the nature of the soil, our climatic conditions, and our methods of agriculture. Of late years the tendency has been towards intensive cultivation and cultivation of early crops and fruit and vegetables under glass. We are naturally a conservative-minded people, and nobody is so conservative as the man bred on the land. The first thing to be impressed upon the British emigrant deciding to settle on the land in Canada is that he should keep on assuring himself that he knows nothing about farming at all, that when he reaches Canada he will have everything to learn and a very great deal to unlearn. This is a primary and essential condition of success. I was told many stories of immigrants from the Old Country who have arrived full of assurance, prepared to “knock spots” off the Canadians with their primitive methods of agriculture. They took a farm, they refused to ask or to take advice, and at the end of the first year they were poorer and sadder but wiser men. A good many of this type dropped farming altogether when their small stock of money was exhausted, and they were at their wits’ end to know how to carry on. They got a job on the railway, in a business house, or in some other occupation and had time to think about their mistakes, and if their desire was to resume farming they resumed it when they had saved a little money with the profitable wisdom of their past experience.
EVANGELINE’S WELL, ANNAPOLIS VALLEY, NOVA SCOTIA.
Canada is a land of inconceivable distances. This alone means much modification of English methods of marketing produce, and every wise farmer knows that skilful marketing is as essential as skilful growing. The English farmer hates nothing more than co-operation with other farmers. Almost every attempt to induce the English farmer to co-operate has failed in the face of his invincible objection to “allow anybody to come round ordering him what to grow and how to grow it,” what breeds of cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry he should raise and how he should feed them, when and how he should milk his cows and so on. His father and grandfather made their own butter and cheese in their own way, and he is going to make his in his way—he will be hanged if he will send his milk to a co-operative dairy for the butter and cheese to be made by these new-fangled methods. The Canadian farmer realises that apart from a considerable co-operation he is going to fail. He belongs to a little district commonwealth of farmers and is prepared to fall in with the commonwealth view of things.
Then the climate of Canada completely nonplusses the Britisher until he has learned to understand it. What are you to make of a temperature of forty below zero in winter and a foot and a half of snow frozen to the solidity of marble on the ground for three months at a time? And what are you to think of summer heat waves with the temperature mounting up beyond a hundred in the shade until you feel as if you were in a baker’s oven; and on the prairie, from 1,500 to 4,000 feet above sea level, the atmosphere for long periods is so dry that the surface soil is like dust and you have such incidents as hail-storms with stones from the size of a pea to the size of an egg, and “electrical storms” with an occasional cyclone thrown in? The agriculture of the prairie is “dry agriculture,” which is a science in itself. Canadian farmers accustomed to the conditions know how to deal with the conditions and make profits at which the British farmer’s mouth would water, and all they have to pay out of the profits beyond the cost of the growing is the cost of sending the produce to the nearest elevator or railway siding. Rent and rates do not worry them. The seasons are remarkably alike. Once in a dozen years, there may be a too dry or too wet summer with serious consequences to the quantity and quality of the corn they raise. There is practically little fluctuation in prices to worry them, for the more corn Canada produces the greater appears to be the world demand, and prices are much more likely to advance than to recede.
Let it be repeated, then, that the British labourer or farmer’s son or townsman impatient to adopt the simple life had better go out with a perfectly open mind, prepared to learn from those who know. I had many talks with farmers, business men who know the conditions of the country, and with the Ministers and Assistant Ministers of Agriculture of two of the Prairie Provinces. I wanted them to give me the best advice that I could pass on to different types of men thinking of emigrating from the Old Country and settling on the land in Canada. They were unanimous that the only wise course to adopt, whether the man were at home a wage-earning labourer or a farmer’s son whose father could give him a little capital, was to take the position of a farm hand under a Canadian farmer for at least a year. This would give him an insight into the conditions, and there need be no sense of humiliation, even to the son of a prosperous farmer at home, in taking the position of farm hand. The distinction between classes in Canada is almost obliterated. Most of the well-to-do farmers themselves started as farm hands. The independence of the working man is so developed that he thinks himself as good as the man who employs him. It is not considered a privilege conferred upon a farm hand to employ him, a privilege so great that he should regard his employer as an awful being holding his men’s fate in his hands. I heard of University men, young barristers, young journalists, young doctors, who had got tired of waiting at home for an opportunity that was slow to come, or who found themselves of too energetic and restless a temper to settle down under the conditions of British life, who had gone out to Canada and hired themselves to farmers in Ontario or the Prairie Provinces and were soon working on the land as to the manner born. It is the man with this willingness to learn and adapt himself to the conditions of work cheerfully, not counting the hours or the strenuousness of his labour in busy times, who is bound to get on as a settler on the land in Canada.