Part 6

Another Canadian railway that has a remarkable record is the Canadian Northern, which claims to have grown at the rate of a mile a day for the last sixteen years. This railway also has obtained most liberal government assistance and is a transcontinental system in the making. In fact, contracts are let for the completion of the whole distance between the city of Quebec and Port Mann in British Columbia; but it has gone on the plan of building short lines in different districts, to be afterwards combined and connected to form the whole system. Already it has run many branch lines from Winnipeg—westward and northward and southward—into the great grain-growing districts, and in 1912 it hauled no less than sixty million bushels of wheat.

There are as well a number of smaller railways, and also a number of lines (1,308 miles in length in 1912) in which electricity is the motive power. Many of these are, of course, the street railways of cities and towns.

There is much of human interest connected with a great railway, dissipater of romance, destroyer of the picturesque, as it is generally asserted to be. Consider it from the large point of view of its inception, its planning, its organization; the political fight to gain for it a legalized existence and the support of public funds and grants of land. It may be that Canada has time and again been recklessly generous in the price she has given for her transportation schemes, and that she has paid too highly for the services of the forceful men able to overcome the difficulties of such enterprises—but railways and yet more railways is still her cry; and the Napoleon of finance who can organize the company to build them is counted worthy of a reward so rich that he and his associates may be tempted to grasp at more than their share of the good things that their line opens to the world, and to use their power not always for the public good. Canada needs the great organizers of industry and more of them; but she needs, too, statesmen ever watchful of the public interests, who shall know how to economize as well as how to spend, and shall be strong enough to keep control over, and use for the good of all the people, the different human forces which are engaged, blindly or wisely, selfishly or nobly, in making out of several comparatively weak provinces a big nation, which patriots hope and trust may be also a great nation.

From the other point of view, the subject of railways—as it touches the life and well-being of individuals in Canada—is also intensely interesting. Not long ago I talked with a man who had done well in the West, but had gone into a district ahead of the railway, expecting it to be made in a year. With this hope he had settled forty miles from his next neighbour, seventy-five miles from a post office, and fifty miles from the point where he had to market his grain; but instead of one year he had to wait ten for the promised line. No wonder that the dweller in the country places loves to see the train pass by. It means in illness, possibility of getting skilled help of doctor and nurse, in health, opportunity of intercourse with friends and neighbours; for the young and old, a fuller social life; for the farmer, access to markets and oftentimes prosperity instead of failure. In one word, it means opportunity in a thousand ways.

Of course, the railways employ a great army of men upon their construction on the one hand, and their operation on the other. In 1912 the C.P.R. alone had 85,000 employees on its pay rolls. The numbers finding employment in connection with the transportation systems in this “country of magnificent distances” as it has been called, would be vastly increased if those engaged in the subsidiary trades were taken into account, such as the making of iron rails, the construction of cars and engines, the cutting of railway ties and so forth.

A great change has taken place in Canada recently in the occupations of the people. Sixty years ago there were only twenty-eight or thirty different kinds of manufactures carried on in the country, and of the manufacturing establishments the chief were—shipyards, saw, grist, carding, and woollen mills; distilleries, tanneries, breweries and foundries, several of which are very closely connected with agriculture. The great woollen mills and the tanneries, for instance, are all closely dependent on farm products, as the saw mills are on the natural crop of wood, and all these with distilleries, in addition, were very early established on a small scale in the several districts to supply local demands.

By 1891 there were three hundred different kinds of manufactures, instead of thirty, and the number of workers employed had multiplied five-fold. Since then the capital invested, the value of their output, and the importance of Canada’s manufacturing, has continued to increase, the development during the last decade being the greatest on record. Manufactures of wood and manufactures connected with food are still specially important.

Manufactures have been artificially encouraged by the so-called “National Policy,” or tariff, arranged to protect home industries. One result of this has been the stimulation of the growth of the towns and cities. In Ontario the last census showed a considerable increase in the population as a whole, a greater increase in the urban population and a falling off of over 50,000 in the rural population. No doubt this is due in part to the exodus to the West, but the towns of Ontario can well support more than their old quota of population, and there are excellent markets near at hand for all the fruit, vegetables, and other farm products that can be raised. The same story comes from New Brunswick and that peaceful little agricultural community, Prince Edward Island.

The fact that Canada is becoming a manufacturing as well as an agricultural country is, however, in a large degree a natural development. There is no question that its opportunities are not confined to agriculture. It is, indeed, singularly favoured by nature with water powers, from which electricity for light and power can be developed readily and cheaply, and can be conveniently transmitted for hundreds of miles for use by great cities or by single farms.

As England’s great coal fields determined that she should become a great manufacturing nation, Canada’s immense number of cataracts and rapids promise that she, too, shall be great in the same line. Everyone has heard of the “harnessing of Niagara”; but not everyone realizes how much electricity is used in Canada. Many a little town, only a few months old, has stepped at once from the stage of lighting with lamps to that of brilliant electrical illumination. But if facilities for obtaining power are the first necessity for manufacturing, Canada has opportunities also in the variety of her natural products, from field, forest and mine. A third reason, strongest of all, perhaps, is that her people are ambitious, and rightly or wrongly feel that it is necessary to the realization of their nationhood that a proportion of their population should be engaged in manufacturing.

There is at least this strong excuse for such a position, that always there will be people to whom agricultural pursuits will not be congenial, and, if there were no opportunities apart from cultivation of the soil in Canada, many of her young people would continue to go elsewhere. At the present day, there are over a million Canadians in the United States, who have been attracted thither by the opportunities offered by its cities and industries. Some of these are now returning—drawn home to a great extent by the opening of new industries in their native land.

Unquestionably the prosperity of Canada rests mainly upon agriculture; and legislation that has any tendency to foster the growth of the towns at the expense of the country must in the long run prove injurious. Canada is, however, only following the example of older lands, when she rejoices in her big towns, and in the consequent massing of wealth in restricted areas, for the absence of these (at least as society is now constituted) limits the sphere of human activity; and, if Canada desires anything strongly, it is, perhaps, to be an all-round nation, possessing not only these material advantages of which we all hear so much, not only the chances for the honest worker, but also opportunities at least for the cultivation of science and art, literature and music. Now the cultivation of these is not easy in little frontier towns and hamlets and solitary farms deep in the country. But the manufacturing industries build up the towns, and the towns make possible a kind of co-operation in the things of the mind, that has been almost unheard of in the country.

Hasty visitors sometimes sweepingly and condescendingly accuse Canada of being “crude” and utilitarian, and of being in earnest chiefly about the pursuit of the “Almighty Dollar,” and assert as a matter of course that the finer side of life is neglected, but often these critics would discover, if they stayed in the land a little longer, that much patient cultivation of the higher interests of humanity is going on beneath the surface, as it were. Moreover, if much and rich flowering has not occurred, the field—of human beings—is at present extremely small. The newcomer often expects at once much too much and too little, and makes his comparisons, forgetful of the fact that outstandingly great poets or painters, altruists and heroes are rare everywhere, and that they cannot be expected to be numerous in half a century of time, amongst a population of three or four or even seven millions. At Confederation, less than fifty years ago, Canada had only three and a quarter millions of people, and, for several decades after that, the growth was very slow.

Often, I would venture to say, that the “crudeness” complained of is as much in the surroundings as in the people themselves; and the critic from the Old World should not forget that, so far as the environment of the colonists is concerned, they often have nothing about them in the way of the refinements of life which they do not owe to themselves; whereas the beautiful city or house or church with which he contrasts their deficiencies of comfort or beauty was probably largely a heritage from past ages.

But the reverse idea applies to the people themselves. Though they are dwellers in a new country, many overseas Britons are extraordinarily conscious of their own and their national past. They are more keenly conscious of what it stands for than many of the stay-at-home folk, who have some dim feeling that “colonists” (though their own sons and daughters) are people without a history and without a link to the great days and great deeds of their ancestors. His past is the cherished possession of many a Scot and many an Englishman, who has done brave work in building up the new country, and it seems rather like giving him “the cold shoulder” when a new arrival, flitting rapidly through the country, or even intending to cast in his lot with it, talks always of everything British as “ours,” and of everything “colonial,” as “_yours_.” As Kipling suggests, the overseas Briton looks back to “the abbey” and much else that in the old land “makes us we,” with no less love and veneration than the Englishman at home.

VI THE OLD PROVINCE OF NOVA SCOTIA

I NOW propose to give some account of the nine provinces in succession, with regard to their extent, physical features, climate, natural resources, and the conditions and pursuits of the people. I shall also endeavour to give information as to the prospects in each province for immigrants from the British Isles. Of course, in the space at my disposal, I can touch but slightly on any of these points. I will begin with Nova Scotia, the province that lies nearest to England, though curiously enough it is little-known by English people compared to many of the more westerly regions. Except in winter, when the Canadian mail steamers cannot go to Quebec, and so land their mails and their cabin passengers at Halifax, Nova Scotia seems somewhat off the line of tourist and immigrant travel, which passes up the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the north of the little group of Canada’s three “Maritime Provinces.”

It is possible for anyone to live long in another part of Canada without getting much idea of the history, resources or characteristics of the “Provinces down by the Sea,” but it adds immensely to one’s interest and pride in the Dominion when one realizes that Quebec and Ontario—wealthy and important as they unquestionably are—are now only a part of Canada, and that for a comprehensive understanding of the country as a whole, there is needed at least some knowledge of the prairie provinces, and British Columbia to the west, and of the little old less restless Lower Provinces to the east.

The story of Nova Scotia is full of interest from the days early in the seventeenth century, when the first little company of French colonizers tried so gallantly to found Port Royal, down to the present time. The long struggle of the French and English for the possession of the land, the frightful deeds of their Indian allies, the coming of the Loyalists and other pioneers, the gallant fight for British liberty and “responsible government,” all furnish incidents not less worthy of the poet’s song than that pitiful deportation of the Acadians, which inspired Longfellow’s pathetic but rather misleading poem of “Evangeline.”

I can spare little space for history, but before I go on to tell what I can of Nova Scotia—and for seven years quaint old Halifax was my home—I should like to say that whatever else this smallest, save one, of the Dominion’s nine provinces fails to produce, she has been singularly successful in the producing of men. Upon the roll of her “notables” are the names of Haliburton—“the father of American humour”—Inglis, who defended Lucknow; Cunard, founder of the line of great Transatlantic steamships; Sir Provo Wallis, Admiral of the Fleet; Dawson, of geologic and educational fame; whilst other well-known names of men still at work might be added to the list.

The very name—Nova Scotia—forces comparison with old Scotland, but the former is not quite three-quarters the size of the latter, nor has it much more than one-tenth of the population. It is also far south of its namesake; in fact, there is almost eight degrees between the latitudes of the north of Nova Scotia and the south of Scotland, but the Arctic currents in the West Atlantic have their influence on the climate, making the Nova Scotian winter cold, and the spring late, though the extremes of heat and cold are not so severe as farther inland. During a recent year at Halifax, for instance, only once did the mercury fall to “zero,” and only once in the hottest month, July, did it travel up to 98 degrees Fahrenheit.

On the Atlantic coasts there is a good deal of rain, fog and “Scotch mist,” but summer and autumn are often delightful seasons of bright, clear, not too hot, weather. In the inland and western parts of the province the climate is drier and not quite so variable.

Like her namesake, Nova Scotia turns towards the ocean a deeply indented, forbidding coast; but the interior lacks “Old Scotia’s” grand mountains, though it has a backbone of sterile hills running through the province, beside the Cobequid Mountains, in Cumberland County, and many a high rugged cliff in Cape Breton Island. This new Scotland has also its stretches of wild moorland and its lakes, set amongst dark spruce firs. But between “the barrens” of the Atlantic Coast, there is here and there a fertile valley; and on the Bay of Fundy side, but sheltered from its cold mists and winds by the long ridge of the North Mountain, stretches the far-famed Annapolis valley, where in spring the whole landscape seems one vast white orchard, save for the pretty little houses, half hidden amongst the bloom.

That side, too, is the region of the salt marshes, formed by the action of those phenomenally high tides of the Bay of Fundy, which were amongst the few remarkable features of Canada thought worthy of mention in the “Geographies” put into the hands of British children a generation ago. In course of ages these mighty tides have left vast level deposits of marine mud—the salt marshes—liable to invasion of the waves at spring tides, but easily turned by a little labour into pastures and hay meadows and grain fields of almost inexhaustible fertility. All that is necessary is to build dykes or embankments of tree trunks and clay to keep back the highest tides; and this work was begun long ago by some of the early French immigrants, who had been accustomed to reclaiming land from the sea in their own country. If, at any time, the fields should show signs of exhaustion, the fertilizing waters may again be let in for a short season; indeed, farmers living near undyked marshes are accustomed to haul loads of the precious sea-mud to their upland fields. Of something the same character as the dyked lands are the “intervales” along the rivers, which are said to be “invariably rich and productive.”

The abundance of pasturage and hay makes good dairying, and Nova Scotia is emphatically a country of mixed farming. Almost all crops suited to a temperate climate can be grown in some part of the province. But, during a recent year, of all agricultural products, hay brought most money into the farmers’ pockets; then came live stock products, potatoes, apples, oats, “garden truck,” and so in a descending scale.

Not only the farming can be described as “mixed” in Nova Scotia. The occupations of her people (in number somewhat under half a million) are also mixed; and though agriculture takes first place, fishing, lumbering, mining and manufacturing are of importance, all the great industries setting “new records” last year.

In fishing, Nova Scotia was long the leading province of the Dominion, but in 1912, British Columbia, with her immense catch of salmon, stepped before her. In the Atlantic province, though the lobster fishery is valuable and is to the dwellers on the sterile southern coast the chief source of ready money, the cod fishery is worth most of all, a fact quaintly recognized by the habit of the shore people of referring to a cod as “a fish,” and to all others of the finny tribe by their specific names of haddock, halibut and so forth.

The fishing hamlets consist of little whitewashed cottages dotted at random about the weather-beaten rocks, beside the fine natural harbours or little coves where the boats run in for shelter, alongside ramshackle stages where the cod are dried in the open air, and by fish-houses, often emitting the peculiarly horrible odour of over-kept “bait.”

Despite all drawbacks, there is a fascination in the jumble of boats and nets and lobster traps, whilst the fisherfolk themselves, fresh-complexioned, clear-eyed, sturdy-limbed, simple, kindly and straightforward, are a good stock one would fancy to set against the threatening degeneration of the race by the unwholesome crowding into towns. Some 30,000 men find employment, on sea and shore, in connection with the fisheries. The fishermen are generally rather poor, but the more enterprizing members of the fraternity often pass from the sailing of a fishing boat to that of a coasting vessel.

In the coast villages tiny stores, with stock small in quantity, great in variety, are plentiful, and some of the fishermen attempt to add to their incomes by farming, often in a rather haphazard, amateurish fashion. Along the shore east of Halifax horses are scarce, and in the little hay-fields even a one-horse mowing machine is an unusual sight, and it is quite common to see two men, or it may be a man and a girl, carrying the cured hay to the barn on two stout poles. In those parts the fisherfolk take little pains even to improve their own fare by growing vegetables, but the soil is discouraging. In fact, one resident of a coast village near Halifax complained, “There ain’t no soil. There’s nothing but grits!”

Some of the fishermen prosecute their craft only “inshore,” using small boats, remaining out but a few hours and fishing with hand lines as well as with trawls from the dories. These men are very dependent on the weather; but gasoline motor boats are coming into use, enabling them to go out when it would be impossible with sailing boats. The “bank fisheries,” chiefly of cod, are carried on by schooners of about 100 tons, manned by twelve to twenty men, who go out, two by two, in dories, using trawls upon which are thousands of hooks. In the rivers, smelts, salmon, trout and eels are taken; and there are natural oyster beds, now yielding a few hundred barrels of oysters annually, which it is said, with improved management, may yield thousands. In fact, better methods may do much to make all the fisheries of Nova Scotia much more productive.

Of the forests of the province, something under one and a half million acres remain ungranted, and four or five times as much is owned by farmers and held or leased by lumber and pulp companies. As everywhere in the Dominion there has been untold loss from fires and wasteful methods, but the idea of “conservation” promises better things in future. Pine, of which there used to be large quantities, has become scarce; but spruce (of more recently discovered value) and birch, a good furniture wood, are extremely plentiful. The saw mills are generally situated on the rivers, near tide water; thus their product can be loaded directly into vessels, which carry it far and wide.

In several counties, a quantity of timber is used in the building of schooners and fishing boats, but the palmy days of shipbuilding in the province have passed. It may be, however, that there will be a revival, and that Nova Scotia will soon be sending forth iron (instead of wooden) ships to plough all seas, for she is richly endowed with mineral wealth. In fact, like Massachusetts, she seems to have every gift of nature—coal, iron, magnificent harbours, and not a little water power, all awaiting development—to make a great manufacturing region. Through her northern counties and Cape Breton Island stretches a rich and enormous coal field, and iron ores (scarcely touched as yet) are found in every county save one.

Nova Scotia ranks third of the provinces in manufactures, following the larger and much more populous provinces of Ontario and Quebec, but the value of her manufactured products (which include foods, textiles, chemicals, paper, vehicles, vessels and a variety of manufactures of iron and steel) has more than doubled in a single decade. Nova Scotia is said to have the “largest individual self-contained steel-making plant in the world,” but the growth of the iron and steel industry is due not only to natural advantages and to the genius of different “captains of industry,” but to the bounties and protective duties granted in its interests by successive governments of the Dominion.