CHAPTER VI

CANADIAN INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT

On the voyage up the St. Lawrence to Montreal a leading citizen of London, Ontario, discussed with me the question of Protection and Free Trade. We were passing French Canadian villages and towns on either side of the river in the Province of Quebec. The French Canadians now, as ever, are agriculturists, living a quiet rural life, raising their crops, fattening their cattle, breeding their pigs, which contribute so largely to their own larders. Said my London friend, “I have been spending six months in Europe, partly on the Continent, but with frequent visits to England. I have been amazed at the evidences of the overpowering prosperity of your British industries under the system of Free Trade. If I were living in Great Britain I should be a Free Trader out and out. You have the instinct of manufacturing industry. You had a long start of all your rivals. Geographically you are marked out to be the great manufacturing, producing and distributing centre of the world. You would be most foolish to attempt to overthrow a fiscal system under which you have done so well. But when I come to Canada I am a Protectionist out and out. You see those villages and towns. From the agricultural point of view Quebec is a flourishing Province enough, but you cannot build up a modern nation out of a race of agriculturists pure and simple. You must have manufacturing industries, and at present, as a manufacturing country, Canada is in its infancy. Our people have to acquire the manufacturing instinct. Until they have acquired it, if we allowed our country to be flooded with the manufacturing products of the United States, of the Old Country, and of France, Germany, and other countries, we should be beaten hands down and our rising manufacturing industries would be strangled in their cradle. You Britishers do not understand why we Canadians favour Protection. Protection really means that we are compelling the United States and yourselves to teach us how to become a manufacturing nation.” This will not satisfy, perhaps, English Free Traders, among whom I confess myself to be a convinced believer in the open market, but it is the view-point from which I found Canadians throughout the Eastern Provinces generally looked at the question. When I visited some of the manufacturing cities and saw the factories, through several of which I was taken, I was forced to think there was something after all in the views of the Ontario Londoner.

Take Hamilton, Ontario, for instance. This flourishing city is one of the oldest in Canada. It is magnificently situated for trading on the shores of Hamilton Bay, a land-locked harbour at the head of Lake Ontario. The manufacturing quarter is well away from the beautiful residential quarters, where the prosperous Hamiltonians live in handsomely-built houses, each isolated on its own freehold plot, surrounded by a border of grass or shrubs with abundance of forest trees. It rises to the Mountain, as a steep hill is called, from the summit of which there is a very striking view of the city and a picturesque outlook over one of the most fruitful parts of the Dominion, abounding in peach and apple orchards and vineyards. Hamilton is only forty miles from Niagara Falls, and its interest in the Falls is utilitarian as well as artistic and sentimental, for it is the electric power generated at the Falls which drives the works of Hamilton, lights its streets and houses, and supplies the heating power. On my visit to the Falls I saw the great power-house in which the mighty rush of the Rapids is harnessed and tamed by the engineering skill of man and compelled to serve alike the industrial prosperity, the domestic comfort, the tram service, and the house and street lighting not only of Hamilton, but of Toronto and of many other cities. The first thing that strikes a visitor to Hamilton, if he should arrive after dark, is what he will consider the scandalous luxury of the brilliant electric lighting with which the fronts of business houses and places of entertainment literally blaze, but should the visitor express his concern at such apparent wicked waste he will be told that electricity is so cheap that its cost is practically negligible. It is to the cheapness of natural sources of power, that is given without stint, that the growing manufacturing prosperity of Canada is largely due.

It was my privilege to be convoyed around Hamilton and to be introduced to the heads of departments of some of the principal factories by Mr. H. M. Marsh, Commissioner of Industries. Through him I learned that there are no less than 400 manufacturing industries in the city, with four suburban electric railways having a combined mileage of eighty-three. There are seventy-eight churches, thirty public and four private schools, not counting a technical school, a college of music, a normal school, and a collegiate institute. There are six steamship lines connecting Hamilton with the chain of the Great Lakes and enabling it to send its products cheaply right into the centre of Canada and far south and west into the heart of the United States. Seven steam railways also enable Hamilton to send its manufactures by land transit over the North American continent and to the principal ports of the Dominion and the United States. The extent of the turnover of money in the city is shown by the fact that the bank clearings in 1911 were $125,250,000, an increase of more than $24,000,000, or nearly £5,000,000, over 1910.

A more significant fact forcibly driven home to me is that some of the largest and most rapidly advancing factories are branches of American firms. More than thirty-five American firms have invested an enormous amount of capital in buildings and plant to produce their specialities in Hamilton. On the Canadian side at Niagara Falls I found the same significant fact. The explanation is that given by my London, Ontario, friend. The Canadians are compelling the Americans to plant their factories in Canada in order that they may employ Canadian labour and teach the Canadians how to become a manufacturing nation. At the Falls I was told that by manufacturing on the Canadian side the American firms save from 10 to 35 per cent. duty which they would have to pay if their goods crossed the river. It pays them better to build and manufacture in Canada than to pay the duty.

The manufacture of agricultural implements of the most modern type for culture on the wholesale scale plays a very large part in the industrial life of Hamilton. I went over the Oliver Chilled Plough Works, an undertaking of the last year or two, but which is already doing business on an enormous scale. The works, I was told, are more up to date than even the parent works in the States, for with the ground at their disposal, and with the experience of the past, it was possible to eliminate everything that was disadvantageous and so to construct the factory and to lay down the plant as to meet exactly the requirements of the business alike in Canada and in other markets. Nothing could be more ideal than the conditions under which this industry is carried on. The ploughs produced are power ploughs furnished each with a number of coulters, from half-a-dozen to nine or more, capable of dealing with the most refractory surface. The coulters are modified to meet the varying conditions of heavy or light soil. I saw a vast number of the component parts, witnessed the processes of manufacture, the dipping of parts into baths of paint, and complete ploughs ready to be sent out either to break the virgin prairie or to replough land that had been harvested.

On a still greater scale were the works of the International Harvester Company, another branch of a famous American firm. More than three-quarters of a century ago Mr. McCormick, forbear of the present controlling McCormick—he was a pious Presbyterian with the Scottish instinct for getting on—invented a reaping machine which answered so well in a Virginia wheatfield that it led to a revolution in agricultural machinery. All sorts of machines were produced and have been continuously improved for all the principal operations of agriculture on the grand scale. To-day McCormick’s International Harvester Company is the greatest agricultural machinery industry in the world. The firm saw the opportunities offered by the development of the Prairie Provinces and were quick to take advantage of them. I was told that farmers can get all the machinery they need without paying a cent down. The firm looks to the future rather than to the present. It knows that its money is safe and will fructify in the fields of the farmers, to whom it gives the longest credit. Again I saw the processes of manufacture of the parts of reapers, binders, tedders, self-dumping and other rakes, hay lubbers, huskers and shredders, harrows, drills, and ploughs. I was shown a forty-five horse power plough driven by a gasolene engine. It is furnished with twelve coulters, each 14 inches deep. It will plough twenty acres a day of ten hours, and if necessary can be run throughout the whole twenty-four hours at certain seasons. Anything more perfect and capable of getting through so much work at such a small expenditure of human labour it would be impossible to conceive. It is such machinery as that turned out by the Oliver Chilled Plough Works and the International Harvester Works that has made the marvellous wheat production of the Prairie Provinces, increasing constantly at the rate of millions of bushels a year, possible.

Hamilton is also the scene of enormous works of the Canadian Westinghouse Brake Company, a branch of the Pittsburg Company, whose brakes are necessities of existence to every railway company and to most of the electrical tram systems of the world.

A constant stream of immigrants pours into Hamilton. The demand for labour is insatiable. I noticed in the International Harvester Works that warnings and regulations for the guidance of the _employés_ were printed in seven languages. It was evident that the workmen were a cosmopolitan mixture of races. They included many men from the Balkan States, Italians, Russians, and others who in Canada take more kindly to manufacturing and railway construction employment than to the life of agriculture. Mr. Marsh informed me that in March 1,200 men could readily be found employment in the various Hamilton factories.

Ontario, with its four millions of population out of the seven millions of Canada, is the great manufacturing Province, although there are growing manufactures in the Eastern Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec. A Government publication summarising the industries of Ontario states that, in addition to Hamilton and in and around Toronto, at London, further west on its own river Thames; at Brantford, Chatham, Guelph, Kingston, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, St. Thomas, Stratford, Berlin, Collingwood, Galt, Ingersoll, Oshawa, Sarnia, Sault Ste. Marie, Woodstock, and scores of other centres, the mills and factories are busy. They produce vast quantities of iron and everything that iron makes, from a tin-tack to a locomotive. The agricultural machinery made in Canada stands so high in reputation that it finds a market not only in South America and in the sister realms of Australia and New Zealand and in the Mother Country itself, but in continental Europe. Several other special lines of manufacture, including parlour organs, are now well known abroad; but in most branches the Canadians themselves use all that their manufacturers produce; and here in the towns of Ontario are produced not only such wares as we have just mentioned, but cotton, woollen and leather goods and clothing; waggons and carriages, on wheels or runners; furniture, paper, and almost everything else that is made of wood; foodstuffs, plain and fancy—but really there is no end to the list.

These manufacturing towns are spread over the Province in a way rather strange to Old Country men, whose centres of industry are generally to be found clustering in a few districts marked out for such a purpose by particular local advantage. There is no “Black Country” in Ontario. There is, however, one district where manufacturing towns are particularly numerous, in the south-west part of the Province. There is no coal-field here, but the great coal-fields of Pennsylvania lie just across Lake Erie; and this region has the enormous advantage of lying within easy reach of Niagara Falls. The glory of the Falls is their beauty, and it is to be hoped that their beauty and grandeur will be religiously preserved for ever. The Falls, however, provide an enormous force, which can be used without destroying or greatly injuring their appearance. This force is already being developed by the Ontario Government and private enterprise, and is being conducted through electric cables to the manufacturing towns, where it will provide motive power for almost unlimited machinery.

At Sault Ste. Marie, where the water of Lake Superior pours out into Lake Huron, a gigantic iron and steel industry is being developed. At the upper end of Lake Superior again are the twin seaports, Fort William and Port Arthur, where millions of bushels of prairie grain are loaded yearly in a multitude of steamers and shipped down to ports on the eastern shores of Lake Huron.

Travelling westward I passed out of Ontario with its lakes and wooded hills into Manitoba, the first of the Prairie Provinces. Within the memory of middle-aged men Manitoba and all west of it was practically a grass-grown wilderness, spangled during the summer months with a succession of flowers of many varieties that grow magnificently—some of them such as are the pride of gardens at home. There is a picture of the Provincial capital, Winnipeg—which is now as large as Bradford—in 1872, showing a tiny market town of about 2,000 population. Among the figures in the picture is that of the late Lord Strathcona, then the directing spirit of the Hudson’s Bay Company. To his enterprise is largely due the subsequent development of the country. The population to-day exceeds 200,000, and the city, at the fork of the Red River and the Assiniboine, in addition to being the corn exchange of the West, is becoming a manufacturing centre of the first importance. Main Street, Winnipeg, is a scene of surpassing interest to the English visitor. I was told that, if you knew how to distinguish them, you might meet in a walk along Main Street people of forty nationalities. At night it dazzles with the glare of its electric lights. There are hotels to suit every pocket, great departmental stores employing each their 500 to 2,000 “clerks,” shops fitted up in the most modern American style and offering the world’s best to the Winnipeg folk and visitors to the city, who appear to have inexhaustible supplies of dollar bills. The money turned over in Winnipeg would make a handsome revenue for a fair-sized kingdom. Its citizens build churches without counting the cost, and the churches, with such preachers as the Congregational Dr. J. L. Gordon, a flaming orator, with a rush of rainbow rhetoric, and the Presbyterian “Sky Pilot,” Dr. C. R. Gordon, draw crowded congregations and often turn away hundreds from their services. There are no fewer than 115 churches and five colleges, including the Wesley Training College for ministers. At St. Boniface, near by, is a large French settlement with a fine cathedral church, recalling the fact that here was a famous Roman Catholic mission to the Indians and half-breeds. In the burial ground of the cathedral I saw the tomb of Louis Riel, the French half-breed who, at the beginning of the development of the West, raised the Indians and half-breeds against the Canadian Government and paid for the rebellion with his life. It is the development of the West with its increasing population that has been the making of Winnipeg. It does a wholesale trade of more than £6,000,000 a year, and has more than 400 factories, employing something like 20,000 workers. A very large number of English immigrants have settled in Winnipeg, and many of them have rapidly become rich men, while they have sent for their young relatives and friends to join with them in taking advantage of the wonderful opportunities offered to men with grit and business enterprise. For young men not disposed to go on the land, but desiring a business career, I should say there is not a better place to make for than Winnipeg. Such departmental stores as Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s establishments, with the scores of huge concerns in every department of trade, with the sixty banks and the offices of professional men, Real Estate agents and the like, are always on the look-out for young fellows who are not afraid of work and are willing to adapt themselves to the conditions of the country. I did not gather from what I saw of business methods in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and the cities farther west that the work is more exacting than it is in the Old Country. The hours usually are certainly shorter. What is demanded is the willing heart, a quick intelligence and the ability to do just what is required. The “slacker” in Canada hangs fire as he does in England. I heard some comparisons between native Canadians and English new-comers in business houses, which were rather in favour of the new-comers. It is said that the young Canadian is much more ready to get time off for a baseball match or a pool contest than is his English competitor. It may be that the English competitor is usually a young fellow with ambition and energy above the average, or he would have stayed in the Old Country, where the temptations to slacking are so numerous and so fascinating.

On the journey of 300 miles odd from Winnipeg to Regina, the capital of the central Prairie Province of Saskatchewan, the traveller sees the prairie stretching out on either side of the line to the horizon. Early in the summer it is a sea of green growing wheat; towards harvest time it is a sea of gold, with the wheat to the height of a man; after harvest the prairie presents the appearance of a vast encampment with the wheat stooks waiting for the threshing. The threshing over, the prairie glows at night with conflagrations as if a hostile army was marching through the land destroying as it went, but all that is happening is the burning of waste straw and refuse from the threshing, the ashes being the only fertiliser that the soil has so far received. There are brand-new towns and villages at every three or four miles, each the centre of a rapidly-growing trade with the farmers and other settlers in the district. What will most strike the English visitor, however, is the succession of elevators along the line, resembling huge square or oblong towers with a turret on the top. The elevators are the receptacles of the corn ready for the market. Each will hold an enormous quantity, ranging from scores of thousands to millions of bushels. Many of the elevators belong to the wholesale buyers or to great milling firms. A large number have been built, however, by the railway companies to hold the grain until transport is available to convey it to the markets. So great is the pressure between the harvest and Christmas time that all the freightage rolling stock of the companies is called into service, and all the elevators are crammed to bursting point with the wheat and oats, and even then the farmers complain that wheat has to remain in the fields week after week because the elevator accommodation is insufficient. It is a revelation to the travelling visitor of the inconceivable food-growing capacity of Central Canada, of which as yet scarcely the half of the cultivable soil has been broken. It is easy to understand and to believe the boast that Canada, when its cornlands are fully cultivated, will be able to feed four-hundred-millions of the world’s population.

This enormous agricultural production means, of course, great and expanding demands for the products of manufacturing industries. In the early years of the Prairie Provinces’ development the needs were all supplied from the East, but the Prairie Provinces, like the Eastern Provinces, have their own industrial ambitions, and they are setting to work to become as far as possible manufacturing suppliers of their own necessities. Let me describe as illustrations what is taking place at Moose Jaw and Regina, the latter the capital of Saskatchewan Province.

Moose Jaw, as the name of a city, provokes smiles. It derives its name, according to local belief, from the discovery of the jaw of a moose on its site before the Canadian Pacific Railway drove its steel across the prairie. Moose Jaw was an insignificant village, and, but for the railway, an insignificant village it would have remained, its only population a few Indians and a handful of half-breeds, with an occasional visitor in the person of a Hudson’s Bay or Eastern trader or a mounted police trooper. The railway pioneers, however, saw in Moose Jaw a strategic position for a railway centre, and immediately the village began to grow by leaps and bounds. The C.P.R. has spent millions of dollars in Moose Jaw on its fifty-three miles of trackage, its stock-yards, its freight sheds and its trains and depots, built prophetically with a view to the needs of the future great manufacturing and distributing city. The Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern Railways are now entering Moose Jaw, and within a year or two fourteen lines will radiate from the city, linking it up with all Canada and the United States. Great flour mills have been established, and huge meat-packing plants, bridge and iron works are among other manufacturing concerns. The applications for building permits for new factories, mills, banks, business houses and the like are increasing with a rapidity that makes the people early on the spot smile their broadest and shake hands with each other at the stream of gold flowing into their bank accounts. To the Englishman, accustomed to the harmonious lines of handsomely-built business streets and macadamised roads, with their hard surface and the broad pavement, Moose Jaw does not make a particularly favourable first impression.

Moose Jaw is at present a muddy place, with “side walks” only just making their appearance. With sewage construction, water and gas supply and other necessaries in progress, the roads are always “up,” but the automobile owners who kindly “run us round” care nothing for a foot depth of mud and ruts such as were never seen in English lanes. They are “cross country” riders of the most fearless type, and bump English visitors in and out of the ruts and up and down folds of the prairie in a fashion that puts British courage to a severe test. Moose Jaw mud, like all prairie mud, is of the fattest, stickiest kind, but, as a leading citizen said to me, “Our streets five years ago were just muddy tracks, but it was prairie mud; it grew our ‘No. 1 Hard,’ the world’s standard in wheat; it gave us our money, and we cheerfully put up with it.”

Moose Jaw has boundless confidence in itself. It believes, like all the cities of the West, that it is the city with a future. Other cities may be going ahead, but Moose Jaw will always show them the way. The pride of local patriotism is nowhere so highly developed as in these Western cities.

“Have you been at Winnipeg lately?” asked a Winnipegian of a man on the train. “Yes, I was there at the beginning of last week. It’s a growing city.” “Ah!” said the Winnipegian, “but you should see it now!” And here, be it said, the people of all these provinces and cities are consummate masters of the art of “boosting.” They have boundless faith in their cities and themselves, and they try to infuse their faith into others. They say, in effect, as a firm that opened a new shop in one of the cities inscribed across the frontage, “We are It. Watch us Grow.”

Moose Jaw, I am certain, would never dream of yielding the palm to Winnipeg or any other city of the prairie. Those other cities might have got the start, but Moose Jaw will catch them up and overtake them. Since my return it is reported that an inexhaustible supply of natural gas has been discovered near to the city. If this be so, then the cheapening of power which the gas will cause will certainly justify Moose Jaw in its most optimistic anticipations of its future.

As to Regina, it is bound, as the capital city, to go ahead alike as a business, a manufacturing, and a social centre. It is the commercial centre—the Railway Junction City—of millions of acres of corn-growing prairie. At Regina I had an insight into the municipal life of a Western Canadian city. We are discussing at home town planning, the land question, the education question and all sorts of social reforms which to carry out make heavy demands on the rates and taxes. We are a very ancient country with a most complicated web of vested interests and an overcrowded population. There is sharp division between class and class, Church and Church, party and party. Canada, and especially Western Canada, with its unlimited area of land, originally the property of the State, is able to deal with all such questions and problems in a way that is impossible in our own country. “Single tax” and “town planning” go together in these new cities. The newborn municipal authority decides what shall be the area of the city. The lines of development are decided on. The city surveyor draws up a plan of the sections, which are sub-divided into convenient lots. The plots are then assessed. Those purchasing a plot must pay the tax on the assessment, whether it is built on or not. Plots are reserved not only as sites for schools, city hall, parks, and other public purposes, but to provide by their sale, when the value has enhanced by natural increment, for the building and possibly the maintenance of the schools and other public institutions. Thus, at Regina, I was shown the new City Hall, built at a cost of £100,000, and was told it had not cost a penny in rates, for the whole of the cost was met by the sale of municipal reservations of land. In those cities schools, as soon as families arrive, are among the first and finest buildings to be erected, but the cities grow so fast that the school accommodation is soon out-distanced, and temporary schools spring up, to give way at the earliest possible moment to splendid permanent buildings. It was good to see the youngsters romping in their playtime, and to be told that “There’s not a poor person in our city, Sir, and we don’t mean there to be one. Sure!” Banks are numerous, with very handsome buildings, but one soon understands why they multiply. The banks finance the builders of the great hotels, “departmental stores,” the builders of their own homes on the residential lots secured—for every householder wants to live in his own detached freehold house on his own freehold plot—and they also finance the farmers and others engaged in gathering the “gold of the prairie.”

Regina is laid out on the best lines with wise prevision of the needs of the future. In the town planning quarters are reserved for manufacturing industries, business centres, residential streets and suburbs, schools and churches. The quarters are being rapidly occupied, but the city, of course, is still in a very unfinished condition. Like Winnipeg and Moose Jaw, however, it believes that Regina is “It.” It has a brand-new Parliament House, a long, spacious building, with a handsome façade facing a grassy park with a lake fed by the Waskanna rivulet. I had a chat with Mr. Motherwell, Minister of Agriculture, himself a model farmer, a prairie Cincinnatus, who is deservedly held in the highest estimation by his fellow-citizens. Those Ministers of State of the Prairie Provinces, and even those of the Dominion Government at Ottawa, are not the awful unapproachable beings that Ministers of State are in the European Governments. They are men of the people, sprung from the people, not usually educated in colleges and universities, but educated practically in the school of the world. They understand thoroughly the conditions and the needs of their country, and my talks with Mr. Motherwell and other public men, with the information in the shape of Government publications which they placed at my disposal, were a revelation of the practical foresight and wisdom with which the Canadian Governments are laying the foundations of the vast populations which within a few years will occupy the Provinces. Nowhere in the world is the necessity of an educated people more keenly realised, and nowhere is such generous provision made for the education. The best lots on the surveyed sites of the town to be laid out by newly-formed municipalities are reserved for schools—not only the spots on which the schools are to be built, but spots which by their unearned increment, as the town develops, shall be sold and the proceeds applied to the maintenance of the schools. This avoids trouble over the levying of rates for educational purposes, for it was impressed upon me that the schools and their maintenance, and other public services, do not cost a penny to the ratepayer. My Regina cicerone, a migrant from the East, “ran me round” on an automobile, and continually called my attention to buildings just finished or in process of construction, such as “Our City Hall—$500,000; a new bank at that corner, $600,000; a new church, $70,000; a departmental stores going up there, $1,000,000; a railway company is to build a million dollars hotel there.” In the early summer of 1912 a cyclone cut a path through the centre of the city, destroying three churches, with much private property. At five on the morning following the cyclone, architects, builders and owners of the destroyed property were surveying the ruins and planning the buildings to rise on the cleared site. At a “turkey supper” the Mayor of Regina, Mr. M’Ara, told how the city has advanced in civilisation since, a very few years ago, a predecessor in the mayoral chair went to welcome the first religious convention held in the town. That mayor had been a “Wild Westerner,” more at home at the poker table than at a gathering of grave divines, but he did his best to make them feel at ease. “You are very welcome,” he said, “to our city. I hope you will make yourselves thoroughly at home. In order that you may feel perfectly free, I have given orders to lock up the entire police force.” Regina has three daily papers and a weekly.

Regina’s manufacturing quarter is already a hive of most profitable industry. As at Hamilton, the workers are a very cosmopolitan company. There are something like 10,000 people from the Balkan States and other countries of Eastern Europe, while there is a large and prosperous German colony. The English and American elements of the Regina population are somewhat concerned over the growth of the non-Saxon element. They are taking steps to Canadianise these people by means of schools, missions, and other educational and moralising forces. There is no reason why, within half a century, the present population of 50,000 to 60,000 of Regina should not swell to half a million. I must not forget the Methodist College, opened in 1912 at a cost of something like £120,000, to give the best possible higher school education to the lads and girls of prosperous families of the Province. The Presbyterians are following suit with a proposed college on even a greater scale. A Regina correspondent tells me that within a month £100,000 was promised towards the Presbyterian college. Men so keenly alive to the educational needs of the city and Province may be trusted not to let the grass grow under their feet in matters of industrial development.

Beyond Saskatchewan is the Province of Alberta. Alberta, Canadian fashion, firmly believes that it is “It.” Not only is the Province destined to become one of the richest cornfields and most luscious ranching grounds of Canada, but it is enormously rich in mineral resources, which will be the basis of great manufacturing industries in the future. Already coal-fields covering an area of at least 11,000 square miles have been located. Alike in North and South Alberta, towns are growing with mushroom rapidity, and new towns are being planted every week with the rapid pushing of the “steel” of the railway companies. An American journalist, Mr. W. J. Shunks, of Chicago, has described in picturesque American fashion how towns are “built while you wait,” so to speak, in these amazing Western Provinces:—

“Half-way between Lake Superior and the Manitoba prairies, in the heart of the virgin forest, the Grand Trunk Pacific town-builders put their pencils on the map and gave orders. Presto! The new town of Graham, with its divisional railway shops, its roundhouses, its stores and banks, springs into being. At the edge of the prairie section they decree another larger railway city, with immense repair shops, car works and foundries. Transcona is born! As the rails are flung Pacificward, across the prairies, there spring into being a string of communities, with important divisional centres of the Melville, Watrous, Wainwright and Edson type, at regular intervals.

“I don’t know whether these Grand Trunk town-builders deliberately planned a _de luxe_ edition or not. Certainly, they got one out when they put Mirror, Alberta, on the map. Mirror is about half-way between Calgary and Edmonton. It is almost in the geographical centre of the Province of Alberta—in the heart of one of the richest agricultural sections. It is to be an important divisional centre, on the Grand Trunk Pacific’s line connecting Calgary and Southern Alberta with the main trans-continental line from Winnipeg to Edmonton.

“The town site of Mirror is natural—that is, the railway company did not have to look for one in that particular location. They found it, ready made, on the west bank of Buffalo Lake, the largest body of fresh water in the province, and a natural summer resort. The town site is on a ridge with gentle slopes—eastward to the lake, and westward to the railway right of way.

“Mirror—though it borrows its name from an English publication, _The London Mirror_—will be a typically cosmopolitan town of the Canadian west. Around it are farming districts of marvellous prosperity. There are rich and vast coal mines in the immediate vicinity. Scientists say that this district is in the heart of the gas and oil belts of Alberta. In natural resources, beauty of location, and future prospects, Mirror is a blue ribboner among the new municipalities.

“When the town site of Mirror was first placed on the market—July 11 and 12, 1911—there were 577 lots sold at auction in 660 minutes. The aggregate purchase price of these lots was $250,000. That was the beginning. Many more lots have been sold since. Before Mirror was a month old it had two banks, five stores, three lumber yards, one hotel, three restaurants, two pool rooms, a sash and door factory and a newspaper. When it reaches the mature age of one year it will be a wonder.

“The really important feature in all this town building is that conditions require it. The country is being thickly settled with prosperous farmers. Merchants, manufacturers, bankers, artisans, doctors, lawyers, ministers—all the factors in urban population—follow the trails the farmers blaze. It is their door of opportunity.”

In Southern Alberta is the city of Medicine Hat, whose name is a constant joke to the Englishman who knows it only as a name. I must confess to sharing in the ribald joking until I made the acquaintance of Medicine Hat. Having seen it, how can I describe it? I had chaffed a London journalist—standing in the front rank of newspaper globe trotters—until he scowled savagely at the mention of it. I shall joke about it no longer. Medicine Hat has got to be taken very seriously indeed.

Locally its name is familiarly shortened to “The Hat.” It gets its name from its extraordinary location. There is a large circular depression of the prairie, surrounded by sharply-rising sandy walls. The depression, with the prairie stretching out above from the rim of the walls, bears a rough resemblance to an inverted low-crowned hat, with an endless Quaker brim. Through the depression runs the broad silver belt of the South Saskatchewan River. The depression suggests a worn-down volcano crater, and the speciality of Medicine Hat confirms the suggestion. Underneath is pent up an inexhaustible storage of natural gas. The Indians knew of the gas, and associated it with magic and devilry, hence the name of “Medicine Hat.” Rudyard Kipling’s imagination was impressed by Medicine Hat, and he styled it “City born fortunate, built upon hell.” No wonder the hollow crown is being filled with huge flour mills and factories, while the brim is being eagerly snapped up for residential purposes. The gas is pure and ready for use to supply alike power, light and heat. There are “gas wells,” from which the gas rushes at a tremendous pressure, but it is tamed and made to do its work, at a cost to the consumer of only 7½_d._ per thousand cubic feet. That means to the householder fuel as well as light. Manufacturers are encouraged to settle in “The Hat” by the offer of “free power” for five years. As it costs nothing to generate the power, and the supply is unlimited, it pays the authorities to make the concession. Last winter four huge flour mills were to be put up by different companies, and about thirty factories are already at work, while inquiries are crowding in from other firms. “The Hat” expects to have a population of half-a-million by the time its young men are middle-aged. The South Saskatchewan gives it the purest drinking water, and in the summer the prairie will be making gold for the farmers, much of which will gravitate into “The Hat.” I might add that the street lamps burn all day because it is cheaper to let them burn than to employ labour in putting them out and relighting them.

I found further on, at Calgary, that that city is also utilising natural gas, but in this case it has to be brought in pipes some 200 miles. I was told that the work of trenching, laying the pipes, and putting on the gas supply had been done within two months—a fact of which Calgary was properly proud. At Calgary, a cattle and horse-raising centre, I saw the month-old University of Calgary, housed in a modest temporary building, with some seventy students. The Dean, Dr. Braithwaite, showed me a syllabus of some seventy subjects, and the plan of a block of University buildings that might well make Oxford or Cambridge “sit up and take notice.” It would take at least $50,000,000 (£10,000,000) to realise the scheme, but the Dean said, “It may take fifty years, but it will be done.” Already a few citizens have subscribed 450 acres of land, in a glorious situation, on high ground a few miles from the centre of the city, with the serrated line of the Rocky Mountains cutting the western horizon seventy miles away, and $500,000 are given as a beginning. There is a strong rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton and Saskatoon, further north in Alberta. The State University is at Saskatoon, but Calgary is going ahead with its University for South Alberta, and will worry the Government for a charter empowering it to confer degrees when its students are ready for the degrees.

Central Alberta, unfortunately, I was unable to see, but I heard much about it even on the Atlantic before I landed in Canada. There were on board two of the leading citizens of Edmonton, Alberta. They told me of the inexhaustible natural resources of the western-most Prairie Province, backing on to the Rocky Mountains—land that yields 36 to 40 bushels of wheat and 50 and more bushels of oats to the acre, and under the surface thousands of square miles of the best coal waiting to be mined. “And there are other things,” said an ex-City Commissioner. “We have a lake—Cold Lake—scarcely noticed on the map, yet I have seen forty teams a day drawing the white fish from that lake for the American market. When the great lakes, such as the Great Slave and the Lesser Slave, are opened up, they will yield inexhaustible supplies of fish, of enormous value. It’s marvellous! I’ve been ten years farming at Edmonton—that is to be an old-timer in a city that has risen in population from 5,000 to 55,000 within the decade—and I never cease to marvel at what both land and water give us.” That “It’s marvellous!” I kept hearing from Canadian lips all the way across.

As to British Columbia, it is destined to be a great holiday resort alike of Canada and of the North-Western American States. We catch sight of the serrated line of the Rockies at Calgary, clearly visible through the transparent atmosphere at a distance of seventy miles. From Calgary over the Rockies, and the descent through British Columbia to Vancouver, is a run of twenty-six hours. The scenery surpasses even that of Switzerland.

Canadians who have spent a holiday at Lake Louise or other centres for mountain climbing and glacier exploration find even their abundant and eloquent vocabulary insufficient to express their ecstatic admiration. I passed through British Columbia and back in the middle of November, but even then the hours of daylight were hours of continuous delight. From the windows or the platform of the observation car rise on either side the shaggy sides of mountains and beyond them peaks and peaks towering above each other over the snow line, until they are lost in the dim distance. Anything more exquisitely lovely than sunrise in the Rocky Mountains it is impossible to imagine. The gilded snow peaks look like cubes and pyramids of glittering gold. The railway itself is a continual wonder. It is a triumph of the mind, the resolute will, the skilful hands, and the Napoleonic organisation of labour and mechanical ingenuity over the forces of Nature, which it would almost seem intended to place the Rockies as an everlasting barrier between the prairie and the Pacific. The railway now tunnels through the living rock, now corkscrews up apparently impossible gradients, now throws itself across terrific chasms, now winds along the edge of precipitous cliffs, now runs through gloomy ravines as it makes its westward journey to the coast.

British Columbia is as confident of its magnificent future as are its sister Provinces. With the opening of the Panama Canal it looks forward to such an outlet for its agricultural and manufacturing products as will draw millions of people to the country and make it not only by its scenic glories a gem of the Imperial crown, but one of the Empire’s richest wealth-producers. As the railway descends to the lower slopes of the Rockies the country opens out. There are large and lovely lakes swarming with fish, a country abounding with valleys that rival Annapolis valley of Nova Scotia and the Niagara country of South Ontario in their fitness for fruit growing, while the humidity of the atmosphere, the soft Pacific breezes, the flood of summer sunshine, and the mildness of the winter give British Columbia enormous advantages over its eastern fruit-producing rivals. Fruit alike of temperate and sub-tropical climates ripens to perfection with marvellous rapidity, yields incredible crops, and is of the richest flavour. In the autumn of 1912 and again in 1913 collections of British Columbia fruit won the gold medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in London. Already British Columbia is sending its apples and other fruit to Australia and New Zealand, having the profitable advantage of producing its fruit during the antipodean winter. Large numbers of British and American farmers are settling in the valleys of British Columbia, and millions of British capital are being invested in the purchase and development of farms.

Then British Columbia is one of the greatest lumber producing countries of the world. Millions of square miles of forests are waiting to be utilised. One of the sights of British Columbia is the freight train, sometimes a hundred waggons long, drawn by two powerful engines, conveying the prepared lumber to the coast for shipment to the States, or climbing the Rockies eastward for the prairie. The country is fabulously rich also in minerals, including gold. Scarcely the surface of the mineral richness has yet been scratched. When the mining resources are fully developed those resources alone would mean that British Columbia will be one of the richest States of the Dominion. The population of a country more than twice the size of Great Britain is as yet only about 600,000, and more than a third of its population is that of Vancouver city and Victoria in Vancouver island. I spent some time in Vancouver city, which, within a dozen years, has grown from 12,000 to over 100,000. Its main streets, such as Hastings Street, with its splendid shops, would do credit to Leeds or Manchester. The “sky scraper” is evident in Vancouver, and will be more evident if land values continue to increase as they are increasing now. During my stay a record in land values was made by the sale of a site on Hastings Street at $7,500 per foot frontage. The site was already occupied by a fine block of buildings, but the block was scarcely considered in the transaction. It was to be torn down in order that a new block of palatial magnificence might be erected upon it. It is clear as the day that with its possibilities British Columbia within fifty years will be the home of a people exceeding the population of Belgium and Holland, and even richer than the people of those two most industrious countries. The Grand Trunk and the Canadian Northern “steels” have already reached, or are about to reach, the coast, opening up huge tracts of country that will be developed after the Canadian fashion, towns being started every other day of the week and becoming within ten years places of importance as centres for the supply of the surrounding country. A great number of these towns will become centres of manufacturing industry, for in British Columbia, as in the other Provinces, the desire for manufacturing industries is almost a fever. The banks, the great insurance companies, and other financial concerns express their faith in the future of British Columbia by their willingness to advance millions for its agricultural and industrial development. The visitor to British Columbia soon discovers that the Province might well be named the Nova Scotia of the Pacific, for, as men of Scottish blood were among the pioneers, discoverers and settlers, so Scotsmen by the thousand, with their keen scent for places where money is to be made, have flocked, and are flocking, into British Columbia. The outstanding names in Vancouver and Victoria are Scottish names. I met one Scotsman in the timber trade just arrived from Glasgow. He had done well in Glasgow, but he told me that Glasgow was nothing compared to British Columbia.

The notes I have given with regard to the industrial development and the industrial prospects of the Provinces of Canada are scanty enough, but I hope that the glimpse given of the conditions and the outlook will prove serviceable alike to those in the Old Country seeking homes and careers in Canada, and to those also with loose money, who cherish a legitimate desire to invest that money in something more remunerative and less precarious than are most of the openings for investment in Great Britain. A Lethbridge man told me that for ten years he had been trying to convince his friends in England that the current rate of 8 per cent. interest on mortgage loans in the Canadian Far West was as safe as 4 or 5 per cent. invested in gilt-edged securities in the Old Country. He had succeeded at last in so persuading them, and several of his friends had commissioned him to take charge of their savings and make fructifying use of them in assisting the agricultural and industrial development of the Far West.

The warning, of course, must be given that land sharks and sharks of other descriptions run in hungry troops in Canada, and that a man in England with money to invest should be quite sure that his agents or friends in Canada are in the know and can be thoroughly relied upon.

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