Chapter 9 No.9

For years Canada was regarded chiefly in England as a dumping ground for slums. "You have broken your mother's heart," thundered an English magistrate to a young culprit. "You have sent your father in sorrow to the grave.

Why-I ask you-do you not go to Canada?" That such material did not offer the best fiber for the making of a nation in Canada did not dawn on this insular magisterial dignitary; and the sentiments uttered were reflected in the activities of countless philanthropies that seemed to think the porcine could be transmogrified into the human by a simple transfer from the pig-sty of their own vices and failure to the free untrammeled life of a colony. Fortunately Canada has a climate that kills men who won't work. Men must stand on their own feet in Canada, and keep those feet hustling in winter-or die. It is not a land for people who think; the world owes them a living. They have to earn the living and earn it hard, and if they don't earn it, there are neither free soup kitchens nor maudlin charities to fill idle stomachs with some other man's earnings.

"Why do you think so many young Englishmen fail to make good in Canada?" I asked a young Yorkshire mill hand who had come to Canada with his five brothers and homesteaded nearly a thousand acres on the north bank of the Saskatchewan. The house was built of logs and clay. There was not a piece of store furniture in it except the stove. The beds were berths extemporized ship-fashion, with cowhides and bear-skins for covering. The seats were benches. The table was a rough-hewn plank. These young factory hands had things reduced to the simplicity of a Robinson Crusoe. They had come out each with less than one hundred dollars, but they had their nine hundred and sixty acres proved up and wintered some ten horses and thirty head of cattle in a sod and log stable. They had acquired what small ready cash they could by selling oats and hay to newcomers. The hay they sold at four dollars a ton, the oats at thirty cents a bushel. The boy I questioned had all the characteristics of the overworked factory hand-abnormally large forehead, cramped chest, half-developed limbs. Yet the health of outdoor life glowed from his face, and he looked as if his muscles had become knotted whipcords.

"Why do I think so many young Englishmen fail to make good settlers?" he repeated, changing my question a little. "Because, up to a few years ago, the wrong kind of people came. The only young Englishmen who came up to a few years ago were no-goods, who had failed at home. They were the kind of city scrubs who give up a job when it is hard and then run for free meals at the soup kitchen. There aren't any soup kitchens out here, and when they found they had to work before they could eat, they cleared out and gave the country the blame. Men who are out of work half the time at home get into the habit of depending on charity keeping them. When you are a hundred miles from a railroad town, there isn't any charity to keep you out here; you have to hustle for yourself. But there is a different class of Englishmen coming now. The men coming now have worked and want to work."

And yet-at another point a hundred miles from settlement I came on a woman who belonged to that very type that ought never to emigrate. She was a woman picked out of the slums by a charity organization. She had presumably been scrubbed and curried and taught household duties before being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the slum marks-bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she had lived in her shanty three years and it was still bare of comfort as a biscuit box, to explain why the Dominion regards this type as unsuitable for pioneering. The American or Canadian wife of a frontiersman would have had skin robes for rugs, biscuit boxes painted for bureaus, and chairs hand-hewn out of rough timber upholstered in cheap prints. But the really amazing thing was the condition of her children. They were fat, rosy, exuberant in health and energy. They were Canadians. In a decade they would begin to fill their place as nation makers. Back in England they would have gone to the human scrap heap in hunger and rags. Ten years of slums would have made them into what their mother was-an unfit; but ten years of Canada was making them into robust humans capable of battling with life and mastering it.

The line is a fine one and needs to be drawn with distinction. Canada does not begrudge the down-and-outs, the failures, the disinherited, the dispossessed, a chance to begin over again. She realizes that she has room, boundless room, for such as they are to succeed-and many more; but what she can not and will not do is assume the burden of these people when they come to Canada and will not try and fail. What she can not and will not do is permit Europe to clean her pig-sties of vice and send the human offal to Canadian shores. Children, strays, waifs, reforms-who have been taken and tested and tried and taught to support themselves-she welcomes by the thousands. In fact, she has welcomed 12,260 of them in ten years, and the cases of lapses back to failure have been so small a proportion as to be inconsiderable.

In the early days, "the remittance man"-or young Englishman living round saloons in idleness on a small monthly allowance from home-fell into bad repute in Canada; and it didn't help his repute in the least to have a title appended to his remittance. Unless he were efficient, the title stood in his way when he applied for a job, whether as horse jockey or bank clerk. Canadians do not ask-"Who are you?" or "What have you?" but "What can you do?" "What can you do to add to the nation's yearly output of things done-of a solid plus on the right side of the yearly balance?" It is a brutal way of putting things. It does not make for poetry and art. It may be sordid. I believe as a people we Canadians, perhaps, do err on the sordid side of the practical, but it also makes for solidity and national strength.

Ten years have witnessed a complete change in the class of Englishmen coming to Canada. The drifter, the floater, the make-shift, rarely comes. The men now coming are the land-seekers-of the blood and type that settled England and New England and Virginia-of the blood and type, in a word, that make nations. Hard on the heels of the land-seekers have come yet another type-the type that binds country to country in bonds tighter than any international treaty-the investors of surplus capital.