In organization, Canada is today, of course, like Australia, but whereas the commonwealth of Australia is but recent and was formed only after the scaffolding of development had been created, the Dominion of Canada was created
in season to direct the most active period of frontiering. During the most significant period, therefore, Canada has had an organization that resembled our federal states. The resemblance, however, is partly superficial; in Canada the specified powers belong to the provinces, the undefined powers to the Dominion. Neither provinces nor Dominion, moreover, have possessed the legal inviolability of absolute sovereignty. The credit of all has been protected by the judicial unity of the empire, and the stability of the currency has not been a subject for politics. Diplomacy, also, has belonged to the mother country, although the proximity of the United States has not allowed it to be the blank it was so long in its Australian sister-colonies.
Economically the development of the Canadian frontier has more resembled that of the United States, for the capital required has come most largely from or through other sections of the same colony. As compared with the United States, however, development has been, until quite lately, slow. Consequently those regions which have passed beyond the frontier stage have continuously controlled the central government. There has been no parallel to the Jackson régime. Credit, therefore, has been doubly guarded, by the majority in Canada, and by Canada’s position within the British Empire. With the credit of the Dominion and of the provinces intact, there have been no intrinsic obstacles to the development of transportation and the control of resources by the public, and public works have played an important part. At the same time the period of greatest need coincided with the high tide of the individualistic movement in the Anglo-Saxon world. The principles of John Stuart Mill, of Cobbett and Bright, of Gladstone, Carlyle, and Emerson, dominated a generation devoted to the task of breaking down time-worn systems of social control and releasing the individual. The period of new regulations dictated by rising democracy had not swung in. Therefore, a very considerable portion of the
task was left to private corporations, to whom were granted very considerable proportions of the natural resources. Corporation control and public enterprise, therefore, combined with unusual harmony in developing and exploiting a frontier which was, indeed, represented, but which could control in neither a positive nor a negative sense.
The recent and sudden expansion of the Canadian frontier in the west and northwest has created a new balance. The situation in Canada today resembles that in the United States when the advance of population from the Alleghanies to beyond the Mississippi gave the frontier an unusual political weight, and elected Andrew Jackson. This region is just now in the position where it is so eager to get capital that it is ready to agree to almost any terms to secure its railroads and farm machinery. When pay time comes, its sentiments will change. It is difficult to see how it can upset credit, but that, in combination with the democracy of the older portions of Canada, it will make its voice felt and play a part in Canadian politics that the frontier has never played in the long course of Canadian history, no student of frontiers can doubt.
On the whole, Canada has secured its capital at low interest rates, lower probably than any other frontier except Australia and New Zealand. It has, however, sacrificed the control of its natural resources to a considerable degree. The direction of its development has attracted both public attention and the labor of its strongest men controlling private capital. In none of the frontiers have the two systems been so equally blended.
Most hapless of the frontiers is that of Manchuria. It is at present a represented province of an imperial republic, which furnishes most of the labor required, but can furnish neither capital nor protection. Its capital comes, for the most part, from two rival foreign powers, who are not really creditor nations, but who are so eager to invest in Manchuria that they borrow from still other countries for the purpose. The
local community has no more to say in regard to its development or the partition of its resources than Siberia. It does not, indeed, rest under any such obligation of paying as does Australia, for power rather than money return is sought by Russia and Japan, who furnish it with money on their own security and, therefore, at reasonably low rates. Undoubtedly, however, the successful grasp of power will mean such a hold on natural resources as will give those countries, in return for their guarantee, rewards which will be more satisfactory to them than to the actual conquerors of the Manchurian wilds. It will be interesting to see whether sectional interests will unite the Russian and Japanese settlers with the Chinese majority against the foreign capitalists, or whether racial antagonism will prove stronger than economic. Countless cross currents already chop the surface, and conditions point rather to a problem than a state.
Wide as is the field covered by the frontiers discussed, the Mississippi Valley, Argentina, the wilds encircling the Caribbean, Siberia, Australia, Canada, and Manchuria, it covers barely half the area where since the year 1800 European civilization has been struggling to establish itself by the occupation of regions wholly or partly vacant. Different as have been the conditions classified under which the simple underlying factors universally involved have operated, more have been left undescribed. Algiers has had a frontier incorporated as an integral part of France, a centralized republic. In fact, practically every region of Africa has presented a frontier, and the handling of frontier conditions by English, French, and Belgians, Boers, Germans, Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards, and American negroes. The greatest frontier area today is Brazil, and every country of Latin America has a frontier and its own slightly varying organization and balance of forces, while the British, French, and Dutch are all severally trying their hand on the particular problem of a tropical American frontier. Some portions of India, Persia,
Arabia, Indo-China, China, Korea, the Philippines, Formosa, and many South Sea Islands, present the problem under special guises. Sweden, Norway, Russia, Canada, and the United States are all dealing with the possibility of pressing civilization into the fastnesses of the Arctic.