Then suddenly a change came. The failure of the West to lure pioneers was not due to poverty of soil or lack of natural riches: its resources were greater than the most reckless orator had dreamed. It was merely that its time had not come and that the men in charge of the country's affairs had not thrown enough energy into the task of speeding the coming of that time. Now fortune worked with Canada, not against it. The long and steady fall of prices, and particularly of the prices of farm products, ended; and a rapid rise began to make farming pay once more. The good free lands of the United States had nearly all been taken up. Canada's West was now the last great reserve of free and fertile land. Improvements in farming methods made it possible to cope with the peculiar problems of prairie husbandry. British capital, moreover, no longer found so ready an outlet in the United States, which was now financing its own development; and it had suffered severe losses in Argentine smashes and Australian droughts. Capital, therefore, was free to turn to Canada.
But it was not enough merely to have the resources; it was essential to display them and to disclose their value. Canada needed millions of men of the right stock, and fortunately there were millions who needed Canada. The work of the Government was to put the facts before these potential settlers. The new Minister of the Interior, Clifford Sifton, himself a western man, at once began an immigration campaign which has never been equaled in any country for vigor and practical efficiency. Canada had hitherto received few settlers direct from the Continent. Western Europe was now prosperous, and emigrants were few. But eastern Europe was in a ferment, and thousands were ready to swarm to new homes overseas.
The activities of a subsidized immigration agency, the North Atlantic Trading Company, brought great numbers of these peoples. Foremost in numbers were the Ruthenians from Galicia. Most distinctive were the Doukhobors or Spirit Wrestlers of Southern Russia, about ten thousand of whom were brought to Canada at the instance of Tolstoy and some English Quakers to escape persecution for their refusal to undertake military service. The religious fanaticism of the Doukhobors, particularly when it took the form of midwinter pilgrimages in nature's garb, and the clannishness of the Ruthenians, who settled in solid blocks, gave rise to many problems of government and assimilation which taught Canadians the unwisdom of inviting immigration from eastern or southern Europe. Ruthenians and Poles, however, continued to come down to the eve of the Great War, and nearly all settled on western lands. Jewish Poland sent its thousands who settled in the larger cities, until Montreal had more Jews than Jerusalem and its Protestant schools held their Easter holidays in Passover. Italian navvies came also by the thousands, but mainly as birds of passage; and Greeks and men from the Balkan States were limited in numbers. Of the three million immigrants who came to Canada from the beginning of the century to the outbreak of the war, some eight hundred thousand came from continental Europe, and of these the Ruthenians, Jews, Italians, and Scandinavians were the most numerous.
It was in the United States that Canada made the greatest efforts to obtain settlers and that she achieved the most striking success. Beginning in 1897 advertisements were placed in five or six thousand American farm and weekly newspapers. Booklets were distributed by the million. Hundreds of farmer delegates were given free trips through the promised land. Agents were appointed in each likely State, with sub-agents who were paid a bonus on every actual settler. The first settlers sent back word of limitless land to be had for a song, and of No. 1 Northern Wheat that ran thirty or forty bushels to the acre. Soon immigration from the States began; the trickle became a trek; the trek, a stampede. In 1896 the immigrants from the United States to Canada had been so few as not to be recorded; in 1897 there were 2000; in 1899, 12,000; in the fiscal year 1902-03, 50,000; and in 1912-13, 139,000. The new immigrants proved to be the best of settlers; nearly all were progressive farmers experienced in western methods and possessed of capital. The countermovement from Canada to the United States never wholly ceased, but it slackened and was much more than offset by this northward rush. Nothing so helped to confirm Canadian confidence in their own land and to make the outside world share this high estimate as this unimpeachable evidence from over a million American newcomers who found in Canada, between 1897 and 1914, greater opportunities than even the United States could offer. The Ministry then carried its propaganda to Great Britain. Newspapers, schools, exhibitions were used in ways which startled the stolid Englishman into attention. Circumstances played into the hands of the propagandists, who took advantage of the flow of United States settlers into the West, the Klondike gold fields rush, the presence of Laurier at the Jubilee festivities at London in 1897, Canada's share in the Boer War. British immigrants rose to 50,000 in 1903-04, to 120,000 in 1907-08, and to 150,000 in 1912-13. From 1897 to the outbreak of the war over 1,100,000 Britishers came to Canada. Three out of four were English, the rest mainly Scotch; the Irish, who once had come in tens of thousands and whose descendants still formed the largest element in the English-speaking peoples of Canada, now sent only one man for every twelve from England. The gates of Canadian immigration, however, were not thrown open to all comers. The criminal, the insane and feeble-minded, the diseased, and others likely to become public charges, were barred altogether or allowed to remain provisionally, subject to deportation within three years. Immigrants sent out by British charitable societies were subjected, after 1908, to rigid inspection before leaving England. No immigrant was admitted without sufficient money in his purse to tide over the first few weeks, unless he were going to farm work or responsible relatives. Asiatics were restricted by special regulations. Steadily the bars were raised higher.
Not all the 3,000,000 who came to Canada between 1897 and 1914 remained. Many drifted across the border; many returned to their old homes, their dreams fulfilled or shattered; yet the vast majority remained. Never had any country so great a task of assimilation as faced Canada, with 3,000,000 pouring into a country of 5,000,000 in a dozen years. Fortunately the great bulk of the newcomers were of the old stocks.
Closely linked with immigration in promoting the prosperity of the country were the land policy and the railway policy of the Administration. The system of granting free homesteads to settlers was continued on an even more generous scale. The 1800 entries for homesteads in 1896 had become 40,000 ten years later. In 1906 land equal in area to Massachusetts and Delaware was given away; in 1908 a Wales, in 1909 five Prince Edward Islands, and in 1910 and 1911 a Belgium, a Netherlands, and two Montenegros passed from the state to the settler. Unfortunately not every homesteader became an active farmer, and production, though mounting fast, could not keep pace with speculation.
Railway building had almost ceased after the completion of the Canadian Pacific system. Now it revived on a greater scale than ever before. In the twenty years after 1896 the miles in operation grew from 16,000 to nearly 40,000. Two new transcontinentals were added, and the older roads took on a new lease of life. At the end of this period of expansion, only the United States, Germany, and Russia had railroad mileage exceeding that of Canada. Much of the building was premature or duplicated other roads. The scramble for state aid, federal and provincial, had demoralized Canadian politics. A large part of the notes the country rashly backed, by the policy of guaranteeing bond issues, were in time presented for payment. Yet the railway policies of the period were broadly justified. New country was opened to settlers; outlets to the sea were provided; capital was obtained in the years when it was still abundant and cheap; the whole industry of the country was stimulated; East was bound closer to West and depth was added to length.*
* During the Great War it became necessary for the Federal
Government to take over both the National Transcontinental,
running from Moncton in New Brunswick to Winnipeg, and the
Canadian Northern, running from ocean to ocean, and to
incorporate both, along with the Intercolonial, in the
Canadian National Railways, a system fourteen thousand miles
in length.
The opening of the West brought new prosperity to every corner of the East. Factories found growing markets; banks multiplied branches and business; exports mounted fast and imports faster; closer relations were formed with London and New York financial interests; mushroom millionaires, country clubs, city slums, suburban subdivisions, land booms, grafting aldermen, and all the apparatus of an advanced civilization grew apace. A new self-confidence became the dominant note alike of private business and of public policy.
With industrial prosperity, political unity became assured. Canada became more and more a name of which all her sons were proud. Expansion brought men of the different provinces together. The Maritime Provinces first felt fully at one with the rest of Canada when Vancouver and Winnipeg rather than Boston and New York called their sons. Even Ontario and Quebec made some advance toward mutual understanding, though clerical leaders who sought safety for their Church in the isolation of its people, imperialists who drove a wedge between Canadians by emphasizing Anglo-Saxon racial ties, and politicians of the baser sort exploiting race prejudice for their own gain, opened rifts in a society already seamed by differences of language and creed. In the West unity was still harder to secure, for men of all countries and of none poured into a land still in the shaping. The divergent interests of the farming, free trade West and of the manufacturing, protectionist East made for friction. Fortunately strong ties held East and West together. Eastern Canadians or their sons filled most of the strategic posts in Government and business, in school and church and press in the West. Transcontinental railways, chartered banks with branches and interests in every province, political parties organizing their forces from coast to coast, played their part. Much had been accomplished; but much remained to be done. With this background of rapid industrial development and growing national unity, Canada's relations with the Empire, with her sister democracy across the border, and with foreign states, took on new importance and divided interest with the changes in her internal affairs.