In Moose Jaw one of the three or four drunken men whom I saw in Canada—the drunken woman, I am told, is happily an unknown figure in the Dominion—was going along the main street repeating joyously “I’ve got some lots, I’ve got some lots.” Let us hope he had secured them before he had taken the liquor, otherwise he might wake up sober and find he was amongst those who had burnt their fingers.
It is not only in home or business sites, however, that the Real Estate man deals. There is a vast amount of Real Estate business done in “acreage,” as the Canadian calls agricultural land. A man or a company secures 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 or 50,000 acres of unbroken prairie. This is divided into farms. The usual map is produced showing the position of the farms. The railway line in actual existence or in contemplation is seen striking through the estate. There are three or four or half-a-dozen stations shown along the line within the boundary of the estate. You are told that the Canadian Northern or the Canadian Pacific Railway is going to make one of the stations a divisional point—you are further told that all around the region towns are springing up and other towns are certain to be started in a year or two. Every farm on the estate will be within three or four miles of a railway. These farms can be had at the giving-away price of $20 an acre to be paid for by $2 an acre down now and the remainder in instalments covering five or ten years. I was offered my choice in Toronto of as much as I liked to take of a 25,000 acre estate in Manitoba. The Real Estate man spread out his map before me and earnestly impressed upon me the quite exceptional “snip” that this acreage proposition was. I could not do better than to snap up some farms for myself and persuade my friends in England to do likewise. I am afraid that the half-hour of that Estate man was wasted, for reasons into which I need not enter. Now the proposition may have been all he stated it to be. A number of Anglo-Canadian combines have purchased such properties and divided them up into farms of from 25 to 500 acres, and men who have taken the land are fully satisfied with their bargains. On the other hand, the same speculator, not knowing much about acreage values, might easily get badly burnt over acreage. As a practical Canadian farmer said to me: “The land may look all right on the map and the visitor who does not know farming—especially the Englishman who does not know Canadian farming—may think it looks all right when he is taken over the estate; but the practical Canadian farmer has sharp eyes and wants to be assured that the thing is as good in reality as it looks on the map. You may buy a farm, for instance, and find that the land is stony and dry and that a lot of money will have to be spent in irrigation if crops are to be raised out of it. On the other hand, you may find that it may be low-lying and swampy, and that even more money will have to be spent on draining the land if it is to be any good for farming. Or it may be covered with trees that want stumping out, or the good surface soil may be very shallow and ten years of cropping will exhaust it, or there may be a dozen other things that will depreciate the value of the land.” Again there is that danger of “long-range speculation.” The projected railway may never become a reality. The station within four miles of your farm may exist only in the imagination. You may have to cart your stuff not four miles, but seven or ten miles, and the extra cost of cartage and of labour will considerably reduce the margin of profit. You may be fifty miles from a populous town which offers a market for produce other than wheat, and if you want to succeed in Canada it is well not to put all your eggs into the wheat basket, but to have dairying, chicken and egg-raising, and market gardening as other resources. No English farmer ought to buy land until, in the company of an experienced Canadian farmer, he has thoroughly examined it and studied its capabilities. The English investor, knowing nothing about Canadian acreage values and still more ignorant about the actual value of lots offered to him on this particular acreage investment proposition, should not risk his money without expert advice from the district. Such expert advice is usually to be had, though of course it has to be paid for, but no money is better spent than that spent in gaining such knowledge.
This chapter on Real Estate is written in no unfriendly spirit to the Real Estate men. I am convinced that many of those whom I met, both those dealing in town sites and those dealing in acreage, were men of sound judgment and good commercial honesty; but business is business, and the principle in the minds of a large number of the Canadian Real Estate men generally is caveat emptor—“let the buyer keep his eyes skinned—my business is to sell. I have to make my profit—it is the buyer’s business to take care that he makes his. If the land is not what he expected that is his look out—he must find somebody else as simple as himself to relieve him of it.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE HOMES OF CANADA
The people on the great ocean liners leaving the Clyde, the Mersey, and the Severn for Canada cross the Atlantic to make homes across the seas. The object of all business and agriculture is home-making. If Canada was simply a country in which money was to be made under uncomfortable conditions, people would soon get tired of going to Canada. There are countries under the British flag and under the flags of other colonising Governments which are simply money-making countries. The climate is unhealthy or enervating, the conditions of life are such as are uncongenial to those who have been brought up in this great homeland of the world. It used to be thought that Canada was not the kind of country in which it would be possible to settle down to such home life as is the ambition of men in Old England, in Germany and France, and in the older cities of America. It was a legend that Canada for a great part of the year was a country under the dominion of unbearable cold—a country in which the thermometer went down to arctic depths, in which the icy atmosphere cut as with dagger stabs to the marrow of the bones, a country that was buried under fathomless depths of snow. Well, during three or four months of the winter—from the end of November to the middle of March—the greater part of Canada is decidedly cold. The thermometer does sink to many degrees below zero, and the earth is hidden by a thick wintry white mantle. Canadians, however, laugh with huge enjoyment when they are asked whether they feel the cold—whether they ever keep warm in winter. They declare to a man and a woman that they never feel a quarter so cold in Canada as they do when they visit the Old Country, whether the visits are in an English winter or in a wet and cold summer. They resented Rudyard Kipling’s description of Canada as “Our Lady of the Snows.” This, they said, conveyed an entirely false impression of their country. As a matter of fact, they regard the winter as the most enjoyable season of the year. The virgin whiteness of the snow, the clear crisp air, the sunshine that floods the country week after week and month after month, the blueness of the sky, make it joy to be alive. The most pessimistic of curmudgeons feels happy and hopeful during the Canadian winter. His blood circulates briskly, his lungs drink in air of such purity that he feels almost as if he were walking on air with light and springy step. I met many Canadians who told of having experienced temperatures as low as 40 deg. F. below zero, and yet, they said, they kept warm and never experienced that marrow-chilling feeling that they get during an English December or March or even during an English summer, with its leaden skies, with a temperature somewhere in the 40’s or early 50’s, and the gusts of wind that search out every weak place in the body. The air is dry and still, and with these conditions it does not matter how low the thermometer may sink. The temperature is not only tolerable, but enjoyable, providing, of course, that the right clothing is worn, that the house is equally warmed, and that reasonable precautions are taken.
PLOUGHING AND HARVESTING.
As to houses, an indispensable institution of Canadian home life is the heat-raiser—the stove apparatus in the basement which supplies the steam-pipes carried through every room and also through every passage in the house. The heat-raiser has been carried to the last pitch of perfection to meet the needs of the Canadian winter. As a Montreal resident said to me, it would not do to go out of a room heated to 60 or 70 degs. into a passage where the temperature was below zero. It is this equal heating that prevents Canadians feeling cold in their homes, and Canadians coming to this country always complain of the coldness of our houses, and especially of the coldness of unheated bedrooms. English visitors to Canada, on the other hand, always complain that the houses are too hot, and still more that the railway trains, which are heated in the same fashion, are too hot. My own experience of railway travelling in Canada, of many nights spent sleeping in Pullman cars, confirms the testimony of English travellers. The temperature at times in the railway trains is almost unbearable, and it was a delight when the train stopped for five or ten minutes to alight on platforms sprinkled with snow and to breathe the clear crisp air. I have no doubt that the train-heating is as necessary as the house-heating having regard to the conditions. Canadians adapt themselves to the conditions, and what is abnormal to us becomes normal to them. The English visitor to Canada misses the open grate; the Canadian, and especially the Canadian housewife, testifies that the absence of the open grate is the greatest boon to the Canadian householder. It means cleanliness, saving of trouble, doing away with alternations of temperature which mean colds and general malaise. The cooking arrangements of Canadian home life are simplified, as are the heating arrangements, and in view of the difficulty—which is practically an impossibility—of obtaining domestic servants it is necessary to adopt every kind of labour-saving appliance on the market. The heating and cooking apparatus of Canadian homes is due mostly to the inventiveness of American manufacturers. Generally speaking Canadian home conditions are, as the Scots would say, “homologated” to the conditions prevailing on the American side of the border.