That inflow of British capital into Canada is one of the most significant of the developments of the last few years. British noblemen, who have found it increasingly difficult to get profits out of the land in the Old Country, have been prospecting in Canada. They have bought up large blocks of land along the lines of railway development, and have been making large profits out of the reselling and the settlement of their estates. Not that Canada will tolerate in the Dominion the creation of a feudal land system such as we have in the Old Country. Land ownership, not tenancy from a landlord, is the rule in Canada, and if there were any danger of landlord monopoly being created in Canada public opinion would soon force the Dominion and Provincial Governments to put a stop to it, but in land purchase and the reselling, in railway construction and in the development of the rapidly-growing industrial concerns of Canada, hundreds of millions of British capital have already been absorbed and the cry is still for more. Everywhere on my tour in the Dominion I heard the complaint, “All we want is capital. We have all the natural resources that any country could desire, but for years to come every penny we can get hold of has to go into capital expenditure.” The head of a great firm of agricultural implement manufacturers at Hamilton told me that his firm, a branch of an American firm, has spent within five years something like five million dollars in opening branches at various centres, and he said, “I might almost say we have not yet got back a dollar. The farmers are making large profits, but they have no money to spend. As soon as they sell their wheat they need money to increase their holdings, to buy machinery and stock, and we have to let them have our machines on long credit, or to be paid for on the instalment principle. But,” said my informant, “we are absolutely sure that we shall reap our reward, and a very rich reward, within a year or two.” The commercial travellers told me the same story. They are doing a great and increasing trade in the new cities that are springing up at the rate of one a day along the lines of railway construction. “But,” they said, “at present the traders, the farmers, the business men, have to be putting all the money they can make or borrow into the land, into building and into stock. They will give us their orders on condition that we allow them a year, two years, three years to pay for the stuff. We know they will pay and we let them have the stuff, confident that we are getting in our footing for a trade that will be enormously and increasingly profitable as years go by.” Travellers of Canadian and American firms told me that here is where British firms are being beaten just now. They have not taken the trouble to understand the conditions in which trade has to be done in a new country with a rapidly increasing population and with its resources only beginning to be developed. British firms want to do trade as in the Old Country and with their European continental customers on practically cash down or short credit terms, and if they cannot do trade on these terms they do not think it worth while doing it at all. The consequence, so the Canadian and American commercials assured me, will be that the trade will be almost monopolised by the Canadians and Americans and European firms that recognise the necessity of meeting Canadian customers on their own ground. Long credit and easy instalment terms must be regarded in the light of initial capital expenditure. Waiting for the money for what seems to English traders an exasperating and inordinate time is the only condition on which Canadian connections can be built up. British traders will have only themselves to blame if they refuse to conform to the conditions and find within five years or so that the ground has been hopelessly cut from under their feet.
The increasing immigration of British young people into Canada, the increasing inflow of British capital, are of course making Canada a country of surpassing interest to people in the homeland. My hope in these chapters—based on my personal observation and on talks with a large number of men “in the know” in all the Provinces of the Dominion—is that this book will prove useful to British readers. There is an earnest desire alike on the part of those who are considering Canada as a country offering careers to bright and energetic young men, and on the part of those with capital to invest, and who want a larger profit than capital usually yields in our own country, to learn what are the real facts about Canada—the country, the people, the resources, the development, the prospects. My desire is to make this book thoroughly practical, with a view to meeting the wants of such readers.
CHAPTER IV
THE ROMANCE OF RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION
Modern Canada, as has been intimated, is the creation of railway enterprise. But for the railway, not only the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia, but the larger portion of the Eastern Provinces must have remained unpopulated and undeveloped. In pre-railway days population followed the banks of the St. Lawrence and the shores of the Great Lakes. There were a few small scattered inland villages kept in communication with the world by different “portages.” What was the use of cultivating the land, felling the timber, and working the minerals when there were no means for their conveyance and marketing? With the coming of the railway, however, a great and glorious future dawned upon Canada. Millions of square miles of “acreage” of what had been considered worthless wilderness were seen to be rich in untold potentialities of corn-raising. The interminable forests presented themselves as sources of inexhaustible wealth. The lakes, other than the Great Lakes, scattered through the Provinces, and the rivers navigable for hundreds of miles, were seen through the eyes of practical imagination as equally sources of wealth to vast populations of the future who should reap the harvest of the fish and use the waters, in conjunction with the railways, as means of transport.
The first railway in Canada was the short local line between Laprairie, Quebec Province, opposite Montreal, and St. John, on the Richelieu River, a distance of just under seventeen and a half miles. This railway was incorporated into the system of the Grand Trunk Railway, which received its Charter in 1852 from the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. For a long time, however, railway construction hung fire, partly due to the political troubles which came to an end with the reconciliation of the French and English and the creation of the Dominion of Canada by the Act of Confederation. It was the daring enterprise of the Canadian Pacific Company that really inaugurated the development of Canada to which the Dominion owes its present prosperity and its great future.
We are not accustomed in the Old Country to talk affectionately about a railway as a friend of the people and the country, but I had not been long in Canada before I found that everybody talks of the “C.P.R.” as if it were a personal friend. As I travelled westward through the Prairie Provinces to Vancouver, farmers, commercial travellers, business men, politicians, everybody kept bringing up what the Canadian Pacific Railway has done for the Dominion. “The C.P.R. has made Canada,” “The C.P.R. is at the back of Canada,” “Canada owes its future to the C.P.R.,” and such expressions are heard all the while with monotonous reiteration. The C.P.R. appears to fulfil the function in Canada discharged by the weather in England of bridging awkward pauses in conversation. It might be imagined that fairy financiers with no sordid thought of dividends devised the scheme and carried through the construction of the C.P.R. out of sheer benevolent desire to do good. But financiers are not built that way. The fathers of the C.P.R. were just men with vision who had a great dream, and they persuaded investors to back the dream with millions of capital in the face of the pessimistic cawings of a grand army of croakers. “The earnings of the C.P.R.,” it was said, “will not pay for the axle-grease that it will use.”
Forty years ago Canada was practically the Canada of the British conquest of Quebec and the French cession to England. Even to-day the entire population of the Dominion, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is not more than that of Greater London. West of Ontario stretched for nearly 1,500 miles the level prairie land, many hundreds of miles from the United States border northwards to the regions of Hudson’s Bay. The prairie was roamed by buffalo, moose and caribou, who found rich feeding in the abundant grass of the most productive soil of the world. Few besides the Indians and the Hudson’s Bay traders, following certain traditional trails, traversed the prairie. It was regarded as for ever a waste as the sea is a waste. What was the use of cultivating an inland wilderness 1,500 miles from the populated part of Ontario, and cut off by the Rocky Mountains from British Columbia and the Pacific? But the projectors of the C.P.R., in their dream, saw the prairie waving with harvests; they saw cities rising amid the “waste,” and their financial souls rejoiced in visions of phantom trains conveying wheat enough to feed hundreds of millions along the phantom “steel” of the as yet unsubstantial dream of the C.P.R. They convinced the Government that there was “something in it,” and the Government gave every encouragement to them to “go ahead.” To-day it might seem to some that the Government was too generous in the concession of miles of land on either side of the line to be constructed, but then the land had no value at all at the time, and it never would have value till the “steel” was laid, and lots of people who were considered shrewd judges prophesied that even then the line would stretch for thousands of miles through country doomed for ever to be uninhabited and profitless. To-day, for 3,800 miles, the C.P.R. “steel” spans Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Atlantic, to Vancouver, on the Pacific. Its sleepers are laid a foot apart. Its sectional construction parties have their wooden houses and workshops at convenient intervals along the route. Thousands of towns and villages have sprung up on either side and several of them are leaping ahead to the size of cities running into hundreds of thousands of population. The C.P.R. literally created four new Provinces of the Dominion, each now with a Government of its own, Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament complete—Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Other railways are striking across Canada—the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk are racing each other to the Pacific, which they expect to reach this year—but the C.P.R. was the prophet pioneer, and on running down by its line from the Rockies into Vancouver I found, thirty to forty miles out of Vancouver, the construction men at work on the double track, which is to duplicate the single line from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The C.P.R. feels that it has got to be “on its mettle,” as well as on its metal. Quite apart from rivalry, which it does not fear, for the new lines will open up new country and get their traffic from the new towns and villages and farming and lumber districts, the present resources of the C.P.R. are heavily overtaxed to meet the growing traffic of the Prairie Provinces, while the opening of the Panama Canal is certain to set in a tremendous flow of traffic towards the Pacific, as well as through the Lakes to the States and westward to the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic.
People tell stories of the ubiquity and omniscience of the C.P.R.; of its grandmotherly benevolence to the farmers, and its liberal treatment of its employés. One shrewd settler at Regina told me that the C.P.R. has rather “spoiled” the farmers by doing too much for them. There is the matter of grain elevators, for instance. Grain is stored in these huge tin-plate structures until it can be removed by the freight trains. The farmers, said the critic, ought not to depend on a railway for the storing of their grain. They should combine to provide their own elevators. As it is, scores of millions of bushels have to remain in ear on the prairie waiting to be threshed until the elevators are empty, or the freight trains are available in the sidings. Prompt transit is necessary, or the best of the market may be missed. The C.P.R. has encouraged settlement on its concessions on the easiest terms to suitable men. Just now it is creating “ready-made farms,” with house, etc., all provided, for men with a little capital to enter into possession of at once. Then it has its hotels all along the line. At a pleasure resort in the Rockies a Canadian “drummer” said “the C.P.R. is running up a sixteen-storey two-million dollar hotel at Lake Louise.” It even regulates the time along the route. There is “C.P.R.” time, changing in the central part of Canada to the European-Continental twenty-four hour system. The story is told of a visitor who got tired of having C.P.R. “deepos,” elevators, hotels, and the rest pointed out to him, and when he asked what hour it was, and was told “22.18 C.P.R. time,” he answered, “Good heavens! Does the C.P.R. own the sun and the time, too?”