Of course there are plenty of genuine citizens in Vancouver, with all the enterprise and intelligence that help to make cities great. Practically, too, the greatness of Vancouver is in the end assured. It is already a magnificent port, having a big trade with the East, but nothing to what it will have. The Panama Canal will make it the centre, by sea, of the world. Again, it is the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and is destined, every one says, to become the terminus of the Grand Trunk, and any other railroad that wants to outlet on the Pacific. Wheat has begun to come through it from the prairie that used to go west to Montreal. The new reciprocity treaty will divert some of this freight to the south, no doubt, but that remains to be seen. In any case, besides being a port, Vancouver will remain the business capital of a province endlessly rich in minerals and timber, and increasingly rich in fruit- and farm-land. Some day, therefore, Vancouver will extend to those remote spots where already town lots are being disposed of. Some day. Only, a big city should not live upon its future; and the sale of such lots miles off in the backwoods to people who, having bought them, cannot pay for them or cannot put up houses on them, or cannot afford to live in those houses even if they put them up, because there is nothing for them to do there and their money has run out—this sort of sale, while it enriches the real estate man, does not enrich anybody else. Moreover, it creates a restless spirit among those genuine farmers out in the country who would honestly be farming their land, if real estate agents would leave them alone, and not persuade them that it is just as profitable a game to hang about waiting for opportunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course they, like most other people who get as far as Vancouver, are not mere innocents. Sellers and buyers are probably equally aware of the risks they run; but where a tide of speculation sets in, the shrewdest people seem ready to take the most absurd risks. And the slump has taken so long in coming, and the possibilities of Vancouver seem so immense, that speculation in land has become a perfect fascination.
'What will it be worth next year?'
That is the formula you constantly see at the end of an advertisement of some town lot—five miles, perhaps, from anywhere. The correct answer varies. If the slump does not come off next year, the lot may be worth double what is being asked for it now. If the slump does come off it will be worth a twentieth, perhaps, of what was given for it. Slump or no slump, this method of building up a city is unsatisfactory. Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg—these have become great as the centres of comparatively populous provinces, in which wealth has been gradually and carefully created by agricultural and industrial enterprises established on a firm basis. The jobs have been waiting for the men. In Vancouver alone, of all big Canadian cities, the men are waiting for the jobs, or, what is worse, waiting in the belief that money comes anyhow, and that jobs are not the prerequisite of money-making. I do not wish to give the impression that Vancouver is full of unemployed people, still less of unemployable ones; merely that many of the people there employed are not engaged in the undertakings that ensure the continuity of a city's prosperity.
Certainly any picture of Vancouver that made it out gloomy would be a mistake. Nothing could be livelier than its streets and its people; and if the slump does not come, and the Jeremiahs are wrong, Vancouver citizens will be justified of any amount of exultation. Already they have most of the things that make citizens pleased and proud—a beautiful site, fine streets, the most splendid of public parks, water-ways innumerable in front, and, behind, a country good to look at and rich in potentialities. Vancouver's industries, even if they do not justify the size of the place, are important and prosperous; and its propinquity to the salmon fisheries and vast timber tracts of British Columbia is something which alone would make a great town. In tone it is new world compared with Victoria, but old world compared with Seattle. There are many English people there. Living is high. No coin under five cents is, of course, in use, and when you start the day by paying that sum for a newspaper marked one cent, you find it difficult to beat down prices during the rest of the day. Apropos of newspapers, I was told of a very successful strike among the paper-boys of Vancouver some little time ago. Many people must have heard of it, but it is worth retelling. The strike was headed by a youthful organiser, popularly known as Reddy, from the colour of his hair. Reddy was alleged to be thirteen years of age at the time, but Pitt was not so much older when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Holding the firm conviction that he and his fellow-workers were entitled to at least two cents out of the five for every paper sold (I am not sure of my figures), Reddy proclaimed a strike, and conducted it so successfully that the newspaper proprietors of Vancouver were compelled to wait upon him humbly, and yield in every particular to his demands. Among historic strikes this seems worthy of a place.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND
There are no lotus-lands attached to the Dominion, and will not be, unless we make over to it at some date the West Indies. But because Vancouver Island has a climate excelling that of any other part of Canada, and a beauty of scenery not surpassed anywhere; because also the men who have settled there have reckoned these possessions dearer than other things, such as the fat soil of the prairie and the chance of growing quickly rich, Canadians of the mainland are given at times to lay a charge of lotus-eating against them. I think the charge is an unfair one. Life may be less strenuous on the island, and there are men there, no doubt, who take their work there over easily. Against this has to be set the fact that the work that does go on in Vancouver Island goes on all the year round, that the colonists are men with an eye to the far future as well as to the immediate one (they have, that is to say, an English ideal of permanent residence instead of the notion of getting what they can from the place and decamping), and that in their hands, if the island is not being developed as fast as it might be, it is at least safe from spoliation and waste. Some day, when the mainland Canadians have time to consider the amenities of a country life as well as the necessities, they will find themselves going to the island for hints.