FOREWORD
This book is the fruits of a visit to Canada in which the author crossed the country from Montreal to Vancouver, and returned from Halifax, Nova Scotia. As a journalist and National President of the Brotherhood Movement, which advises Brotherhood emigrants going out, and arranges for their welcome by Canadian Brotherhood men, he found all doors open to him. He had countless talks with men of all classes, native Canadians and British settlers who had been in the country from two or three to forty years. Ministers of the Dominion and Provincial Governments freely answered his numerous questions as to the wisest course to be adopted by various classes of emigrants, and Dominion and Provincial State officials gave him all possible information in frank talk and by placing at his disposal valuable State publications. Ministers of religion, prominent business and professional men, journalists, “real estate” men, hosts and hostesses in whose homes he was graciously received, heads of Emigration Departments, leading officials of the great transcontinental railways, all contributed to his accumulating stock of information; and, needless to say, he lost no opportunity of seeing things for himself and forming his own judgments. In his railway journeys, amounting to 10,000 miles, he fraternised with the commercial travellers on the trains, and from them, and their discussions and comparison of notes among themselves, he picked up a vast amount of invaluable information as to the development, the trading methods, and the prospects of the country. It has been a long business digesting and reducing the material to order, but the author hopes that the book will prove helpful to those seeking a career in a land of illimitable possibilities, and to the increasing number of people at home who are tempted to invest money in Canadian undertakings. He is specially concerned to help those who decide on making Canada their homeland.
MAKING GOOD IN
CANADA
CHAPTER I
WHY PEOPLE GO TO CANADA
Between 350,000 and 400,000 people every year enter Canada with the intention of making Canada their home: 60,000 of these cross the border from the United States. Probably 50,000 to 70,000 are emigrants from the various non-British countries. The remainder are from the British Isles, and chiefly from England, Scotland, and Wales. The Irish prefer to go to the United States, where some twelve millions of people of Irish blood are already settled, and nearly every Irish family in the homeland has some representative in the States who will lend a helping hand. During the emigration season—from March to the middle of November—from 10,000 to 15,000 a week leave Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, and Southampton by the various lines for Canada. The steerage of an emigrant ship, viewed from one standpoint, is a melancholy spectacle. There would be from 700 to 1,500 people, men and women mostly under the age of twenty-five, and even whole families, leaving the Old Country behind them in order to make themselves citizens of a new country 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. In Parliament, and out of Parliament, there is dismal talk about “draining the country of its best blood,” and of “sending the cream of the working manhood and womanhood of our nation to become rival producers with our British farmers and workers in factories that will compete with ourselves.” Such talk is natural enough, but who can blame these people for leaving a land where they have seemed to be hopelessly pressed down by force of circumstances, with no prospect of ever rising, to a land that offers all sorts of opportunities to the man or woman with capacity, good character and grit? The way to quench the desire for emigration is to open wider the doors of opportunity at home, but that opening of the doors seems to baffle the wisest and most progressive and the most humanitarian of our statesmen. We live in a state of society that is the resultant of fifteen hundred years of social evolution, and evolution that has not always proceeded on right lines. We are a small country with a very great population, and the land for the most part is held up by a handful of owners, few of whom have had the vision to see that the real wealth of Great Britain lies not in its property but in its people. We have given rights to property and denied rights to people. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, deer, and pheasants must be taken great care of, for they have a saleable value, or they provide pleasure for the rich in their happy hunting grounds; but in our villages, country towns, and great cities hundreds of thousands of men and women with capable hands and willing hearts are either denied the right to earn a living wage or are compelled to work under such conditions as rob life of its joy and buoyancy. What wonder if the townsman whose wages are at starvation level, and whose employment is most precarious, who may be thrown out of work at any moment, who is dependent for his daily bread on the power or the will of an employer to provide him with a few miserable shillings a week in return for his labour, gets tired of it, and when he hears that in Canada there is work for all, and well-paid work, with opportunities to rise out of the ruck of the wage-earners into the proud position of landownership, should decide to try his luck and should find himself soon afterwards in the steerage of one of the great Atlantic liners with hundreds of like-minded companions? If we would stop emigration from the towns we must tackle the employment question, we must make employment secure, we must raise wages to a level that will make it worth a man’s while to stay in the homeland amid familiar surroundings. We must tackle the slums question. We create slums by our conditions of industry and employment. The unemployed rapidly degenerate physically, mentally and morally, and drift into the slums, consorting there with other hopeless and helpless ones who have been cast on to the social scrap-heap. London is the great wealth-producing, wealth-distributing and wealth-exchanging centre of the world. The Chancellor of the Exchequer recently said in the City of London that values to the extent of seventeen thousand millions passed through the Bank Clearing House of London in 1912, and yet there are districts in North, East and South London where in street after street whole families are herded in single rooms, sarcastically called “homes,” in house after house, living under conditions of misery which would be unendurable were it not that the misery is so continuous that the sense of pain has been dulled almost out of existence.
In our villages, which, it is complained, are being depopulated by the increasing emigration of the labourers to Canada, what has been done to induce the young countryman to remain at home? There are few characteristic agricultural villages in which the worker on the land receives as much as 15s. a week, and he is taught to regard himself as a very happy man if anybody is good enough to employ him at all. The housing and the sanitary conditions in many of these villages are still of the most repulsive character. The land often belongs to one or two owners who decline either to part with plots of it for building cottages or to build themselves. Young men wishing to marry are prevented from realising the desire because there is no cottage vacant in which they can start housekeeping. I was told that from one village of little more than a thousand population half-a-dozen young men migrated in little more than a year because they wanted to get married and would have to wait until somebody died and vacated a cottage. The land question will have to be settled in a revolutionary way, a way that will make it possible for a labourer to become a small-holder in his own country, and to occupy a decent house which shall either be his own freehold or shall be let to him at a reasonable rent, if the emigration from the villages to Canada and the increasing emigration to Australia is to be checked. Why should a young fellow who has been educated at the expense of the State, who reads his halfpenny paper and perhaps frequents the village reading-room and has learned to think for himself, remain in the village, submitting to the humiliating conditions which would be imposed upon him, and to the closing of the door of hope to his legitimate aspiration to better himself? Young fellows of the middle class and the upper class naturally look to the prospect of bettering themselves. They are educated with that object in view, and in every possible way are encouraged to make the most of their natural capacity and their education; but to the village labourer, as to the average wage-earner in the city, education in the vast majority of cases only sharpens the sting of misery and deepens the sense of humiliation. We must take human nature as it is. We must accept the logic of our social system. If we are not prepared at whatever cost to make Great Britain worth remaining in to the more intelligent and aspiring of our young men and young women we have no right to complain if they leave Great Britain, and if, by leaving the homeland, the country is drained of its best blood.