CHAPTER I

WHY PEOPLE GO TO CANADA

Between 350,000 and 400,000 people every year enter Canada with the intention of making Canada their home: 60,000 of these cross the border from the United States. Probably 50,000 to 70,000 are emigrants from the various non-British countries. The remainder are from the British Isles, and chiefly from England, Scotland, and Wales. The Irish prefer to go to the United States, where some twelve millions of people of Irish blood are already settled, and nearly every Irish family in the homeland has some representative in the States who will lend a helping hand. During the emigration season—from March to the middle of November—from 10,000 to 15,000 a week leave Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, and Southampton by the various lines for Canada. The steerage of an emigrant ship, viewed from one standpoint, is a melancholy spectacle. There would be from 700 to 1,500 people, men and women mostly under the age of twenty-five, and even whole families, leaving the Old Country behind them in order to make themselves citizens of a new country 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. In Parliament, and out of Parliament, there is dismal talk about “draining the country of its best blood,” and of “sending the cream of the working manhood and womanhood of our nation to become rival producers with our British farmers and workers in factories that will compete with ourselves.” Such talk is natural enough, but who can blame these people for leaving a land where they have seemed to be hopelessly pressed down by force of circumstances, with no prospect of ever rising, to a land that offers all sorts of opportunities to the man or woman with capacity, good character and grit? The way to quench the desire for emigration is to open wider the doors of opportunity at home, but that opening of the doors seems to baffle the wisest and most progressive and the most humanitarian of our statesmen. We live in a state of society that is the resultant of fifteen hundred years of social evolution, and evolution that has not always proceeded on right lines. We are a small country with a very great population, and the land for the most part is held up by a handful of owners, few of whom have had the vision to see that the real wealth of Great Britain lies not in its property but in its people. We have given rights to property and denied rights to people. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, deer, and pheasants must be taken great care of, for they have a saleable value, or they provide pleasure for the rich in their happy hunting grounds; but in our villages, country towns, and great cities hundreds of thousands of men and women with capable hands and willing hearts are either denied the right to earn a living wage or are compelled to work under such conditions as rob life of its joy and buoyancy. What wonder if the townsman whose wages are at starvation level, and whose employment is most precarious, who may be thrown out of work at any moment, who is dependent for his daily bread on the power or the will of an employer to provide him with a few miserable shillings a week in return for his labour, gets tired of it, and when he hears that in Canada there is work for all, and well-paid work, with opportunities to rise out of the ruck of the wage-earners into the proud position of landownership, should decide to try his luck and should find himself soon afterwards in the steerage of one of the great Atlantic liners with hundreds of like-minded companions? If we would stop emigration from the towns we must tackle the employment question, we must make employment secure, we must raise wages to a level that will make it worth a man’s while to stay in the homeland amid familiar surroundings. We must tackle the slums question. We create slums by our conditions of industry and employment. The unemployed rapidly degenerate physically, mentally and morally, and drift into the slums, consorting there with other hopeless and helpless ones who have been cast on to the social scrap-heap. London is the great wealth-producing, wealth-distributing and wealth-exchanging centre of the world. The Chancellor of the Exchequer recently said in the City of London that values to the extent of seventeen thousand millions passed through the Bank Clearing House of London in 1912, and yet there are districts in North, East and South London where in street after street whole families are herded in single rooms, sarcastically called “homes,” in house after house, living under conditions of misery which would be unendurable were it not that the misery is so continuous that the sense of pain has been dulled almost out of existence.

In our villages, which, it is complained, are being depopulated by the increasing emigration of the labourers to Canada, what has been done to induce the young countryman to remain at home? There are few characteristic agricultural villages in which the worker on the land receives as much as 15_s._ a week, and he is taught to regard himself as a very happy man if anybody is good enough to employ him at all. The housing and the sanitary conditions in many of these villages are still of the most repulsive character. The land often belongs to one or two owners who decline either to part with plots of it for building cottages or to build themselves. Young men wishing to marry are prevented from realising the desire because there is no cottage vacant in which they can start housekeeping. I was told that from one village of little more than a thousand population half-a-dozen young men migrated in little more than a year because they wanted to get married and would have to wait until somebody died and vacated a cottage. The land question will have to be settled in a revolutionary way, a way that will make it possible for a labourer to become a small-holder in his own country, and to occupy a decent house which shall either be his own freehold or shall be let to him at a reasonable rent, if the emigration from the villages to Canada and the increasing emigration to Australia is to be checked. Why should a young fellow who has been educated at the expense of the State, who reads his halfpenny paper and perhaps frequents the village reading-room and has learned to think for himself, remain in the village, submitting to the humiliating conditions which would be imposed upon him, and to the closing of the door of hope to his legitimate aspiration to better himself? Young fellows of the middle class and the upper class naturally look to the prospect of bettering themselves. They are educated with that object in view, and in every possible way are encouraged to make the most of their natural capacity and their education; but to the village labourer, as to the average wage-earner in the city, education in the vast majority of cases only sharpens the sting of misery and deepens the sense of humiliation. We must take human nature as it is. We must accept the logic of our social system. If we are not prepared at whatever cost to make Great Britain worth remaining in to the more intelligent and aspiring of our young men and young women we have no right to complain if they leave Great Britain, and if, by leaving the homeland, the country is drained of its best blood.

But, after all, ought we to take so tragic a view of the situation? We are coming to understand that the world to-day is not divided into so many water-tight compartments. The old idea of a country and a nation as an isolated entity, enjoying its own advantages and regarding other countries as rivals, whose gains were its loss, has gone by the board. The world has been wonderfully opened up in these later years. The seas are ploughed by countless ships, carrying from country to country the products of their agriculture and their manufacturing industries. Wealth is made all round by the mutual exchange of those products. If France prospers, or Germany, or Russia, England gains, for those countries have the more to spend on the things that England manufactures. Still more is this the case with the British dominions beyond the seas. South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are countries of our kinsmen. Blood is thicker than water. Those people look naturally to the home country as the country that offers them the most valuable market and as the country from which they shall obtain what they themselves desire to buy and use. Take Canada, for instance. Year by year it is increasing not only its selling but its buying power; it is becoming a most valuable customer to the homeland. Those who go out from us become our customers. The more they prosper the more they purchase from the Old Country. The farm labourer earning his 15_s._ a week goes to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, or British Columbia and takes a pre-empted homestead of 160 acres. He has served, probably, a year or two on a farm, learning the methods, studying the situation, developing his manhood. If “the magic of property turns sand into gold,” what can it not do for 160 acres of fertile prairie? The labourer “breaks the prairie,” plants his corn, reaps his harvest, sends it to the elevator, fills his pocket with the price, and is so satisfied with himself that he wants to increase his holding. He does increase it. He spends money on stock, machinery, all the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life, and much of the money that he spends comes to the Old Country to stimulate our manufactures and our commerce. A young fellow who has left a Warwickshire or Berkshire or Leicestershire village returns to his village five years afterwards on a winter holiday after he has disposed of his crops. He spends his money freely. He is as independent as the biggest farmer in the district. The other young fellows of the village talk with him and hear his story. “Why don’t you fellows go out?” he says to them. “Why do you stop here? You will never be any better off here. Do as I did—go to Canada. There are farmers there almost fighting each other for every good man going out who can do anything on the land. You will find a job at once with good wages, and there is no reason why in four or five years you should not be doing as well as I am.” The village lads listen with both ears and with eyes and mouths open. Their latent discontent with the conditions under which they work and live is roused to activity. Whenever two labourers meet together in the field or on the road, in the barber’s shop, in the public-house, the talk is of “how well Tom Jenkins or Sam Brown has done” in Saskatchewan or Alberta. He is besieged with inquirers who bombard him with questions about the country, the climate, the prospects, and what steps they should take to get out and what they ought to do when they arrive. There are old schoolmates whom he encourages and tells them that if they will only come out to his district he will see to it that they get a job immediately on their arrival—very likely he will be able to give them a job himself. One such labourer’s return—and there are few villages in the country in which you do not hear of such returns—sets up a stream of emigration to Canada from that village, and the stream, unless a thorough-going scheme of land reform is carried out, and carried out soon, is bound to deepen and broaden.

Then there are the tenant farmers and their sons. In the Old Country good land is highly rented and the conditions of tenure often such as to make farming one of the riskiest of occupations. A man wants security of tenure if he is to get the best out of his land. The old rough-and-ready methods of agriculture are little good in these days. Intensive culture is the means of making money to-day. Brains and capital must be put into the land if the land is to yield a profit. The farmers who are making most money in our country are those in districts where it is possible to secure the freehold of the farms they cultivate. Quite recently I was in Leicestershire in a district where almost all the farming land is freehold property. There I found a farming family who were making large profits out of the intensive culture of open land and out of the growing of tomatoes, cucumbers, and grapes under glass. A member of the family told me that this could not or would not have been done on rented land, for a man will not be fool enough to invest capital in the land, and people will not lend him the money to invest, unless he can look forward for several years to getting the return. It is little wonder, therefore, that the farmer, still young, heavily rented, with one or two experiences of a bad season, with the fluctuation of prices inevitable in a country like our own, and always at the mercy of a landlord, should look longingly across the seas to Canada, when he has heard of the ease with which there a man may become owner of his farm and may make money in all sorts of ways if he has the farming instinct properly developed, is a good business man, is able to adapt himself to the circumstances of the district in which he settles, and is prepared to put brains and “elbow grease” into the land.

The Governments of all the Provinces of Canada just now are offering large inducements to such men to settle in the territories of the Dominion. Within the last year or two the Legislatures of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have passed Acts under which large farms may be purchased, in a condition ready to yield immediate profits, by loans, 80 per cent. of which will be guaranteed by the Province, to suitable men. Thousands of small farmers and farmers’ sons are now doing exceedingly well in the Provinces of Canada who went out with very little capital, but, being the right sort of men, every opportunity was given them to show of what metal they were made.

Probably, at this moment, three millions of the seven millions and a half of the population of Canada were British-born. This means that hundreds of thousands of families in the Old Country are linked by ties of tender relationship to the citizenship of Canada. The British-born Canadians return home to spend their Christmases. The winter is their holiday season, and they have alike plenty of time and plenty of money to dispose of. They tell their stories of their success in Canada, they remove prejudices against the people, the country and the climate, and they awaken the ambition of young and ambitious members of their families to “go and do likewise.”

Again, Canada has offered a field for the investment of British surplus profits second to none in the world. During the last few years our country has been passing through a period of unprecedented prosperity. It has been impossible to find employment in the industries of our country for the annual two hundred millions or so of surplus profits, and much of that surplus has been pouring in a river of gold into Canadian channels for the development of the country.

There are tens of thousands of business men and financiers in Great Britain who are deeply interested in the exploitation of Canadian land, railways, and manufacturing industries. They pay frequent visits to Canada to look after their interests there, and Canadian representatives of those interests are continually coming over to this country to propose further developments and to open up new channels for investment. These business firms and financial concerns are the means of increasing the stream of emigration into Canada. They send their travellers, clerks, expert engineers, mechanics, and what not to Canada to assist in the development of their interests. It is said that Canada has taken almost more British capital during the last ten or fifteen years than it has been able to absorb and that there may be a temporary set-back. The set-back could not be more than temporary, for everybody who has investigated the resources of Canada is convinced that those resources are rich beyond all calculation and that thousands of millions of capital can be profitably employed in developing them. I hope that incidentally this little book may be of some use to those who have legitimate financial interests in Canada as well as to those who may be thinking of emigrating and to those who are interested in emigrants.

The Canadian Governments are all very keenly alive to the social and economic value of every immigrant of the right sort. Every man able and willing to work and to adapt himself to the conditions means an addition to the economic development power of the country. He is alike a producer and a consumer. He makes a home, and that home means increased trade to the producer and consumer of every necessary of life. This is why not only the Dominion but all the Provincial Governments are offering inducements to the right sort of emigrant to make his home in Canada. There are many emigrants who are not of the right sort. The man who is shiftless, aimless, addicted to self-indulgent vices at home, who shirks work, who is always grumbling, is not wanted in Canada. The man who can work, but whose ideas are limited, who has been employed in some specialised branch of a specialised industry at home, and who expects to find employment in that specialised branch of that identical industry in Canada, and thinks himself deceived and deeply wronged if he cannot find employment in that specialised branch—he, too, ought not to go to Canada. The man who succeeds is either the man willing to go on the land and who is prepared to stand the racket of a little hardship until he has learnt the ropes, or else the man—clerk, mechanic or what not—who is willing to take the best job that offers and to work at it until something more congenial and offering greater opportunity turns up. Men such as these, granted that they have good health and a reasonable amount of intelligence, simply cannot fail in Canada.

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