CHAPTER XVI

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION

There is vague talk at times about the Americanisation of Canada. Very dismal people talk about its Americanisation by force of arms. Minor pessimists think the change will come about peaceably. How can the Canadians--they ask--continue to assert themselves for ever against the constant influx from the other side?

Monsieur André Siegfried, in that most lucid and excellent book, _Les Deux Races en Canada_, considers this question a little, but the very fact that he has called the book _Les Deux Races en Canada_, shows that he considers the question premature. The two races he treats of are not the Canadians and the Americans, but the French Canadians and the Canadians who are not French. Certainly these two peoples are at present, and must for a considerable time to come, be considered the two main races of the Dominion. They {148} are still for all practical purposes separate without being hostile; and it is quite possible that one of these may Canadianise the other before any real Americanisation makes itself felt. Should the French Canadians get the upper hand, it is pretty certain that American influence would get a set-back of perhaps centuries. Yet English writers as a rule never seem to consider this contingency. Perhaps if they did, they would begin to think that they would rather see Canada Americanised than Gallicised.

Still the Americanisation may happen, and it is at least an interesting possibility. Let us consider the task that lies before the Americans. They will have to absorb--

(1) The French Canadians.

(2) The Canadian born, who are not French.

(3) The English who have immigrated.

(4) Foreign immigrants; _e.g._ Scandinavians, Galicians, Italians, Doukhobors--all that strange assortment of people who have flowed in from the poorer countries of Europe.

The Americans themselves represent at present only a small fifth in this conglomeration of nations. Still, they have this in their favour, that they start in while Canada is still an unfixed nation. French Canadians--a small {149} third--only number about three millions. Non-French Canadians about the same. The whole population is under ten millions. It may in fifty years be ten times that number. So that anything may happen.

Meanwhile, many effective American influences are at work. Their order of effectiveness is not easy to define, but when one considers their representatives of business enterprise, capital, journalism and farming at work in the country, one can see that the Americans are likely to go far.

What is their present value to the Dominion? Take American farmers. They are an undoubted gain to Canada in so far as they possess energy, capital, a knowledge of the local conditions, versatility and adaptability. I hardly know if it is an example of their versatility or their adaptability, but as soon as they cross over the line, American farmers who were Tariff Reformers instantly become Free Traders. It is not, of course, that they have adopted nobler principles in their new country. It is merely that, having become Canadians, they have now to support Canadian manufactures, and pay more for their farming machines and shoddy clothes. Naturally they think tariffs a mistake.

{150}

Setting aside for a moment this political elasticity as of doubtful value, Canadians may still wonder if the American farmer is all gain to them. Is it an objection, for example, that the American introduces the purely commercial spirit into farming? Not entirely. Not certainly so far as love of gain induces promptness and enterprise. It is, however, an objection if it destroys that love of the land which causes the English farmer to stick by his farm, generation after generation. Perhaps American farmers have not that land love in any case. If they had, they would not have crossed the line. In most cases, they have crossed it to make money--more money. It may be argued that the English farmers come further for the same purpose, but that is not really the case. English farmers who come are mostly men who were tenants, and find themselves either not making money or expecting to have their rents raised if they do. Or they are the sons of farmers who have not the capital to start farming in the old country, or cannot get the land. The American farmer is usually quite ready to admit that he is in Canada to make money, and his enemies will admit for him that though this ideal may lead him to adopt new methods {151} of farming which are good, it also induces him to adopt that very old method of farming which consists of getting all you can out of the land, putting nothing into it, selling it to a fool and moving on to fresh land--which is a bad method. Any one who is acquainted with the States at all, knows how at present people there are awakening to the viciousness of this practice. All their papers and speakers are full of the wastefulness which Americans practised in the last century thinking it to be smartness. Fine land, they say, was spoilt by it; forests were annihilated; water supplies were overdrawn; people were made restless. It was getting rich quick at the expense of posterity, and it bred in Americans a nomadic spirit, and an imprudence in considering the future, which has become a menace.

Canadians cannot altogether condemn the American farmer, for just these methods spoilt so much of the land in Ontario; and only now are their farmers beginning to improve on them. Still, they would do well to indicate to American farmers that they are welcome only as improvers and not as wasters of the new country. The trouble is to give an effective indication of that kind. Settlement of the land is still reckoned, especially by the {152} railway companies, as the first of virtues, covering a multitude of sins; though even they, I think, are recognising a little that the English farmer, whose aim is not an immediate fortune, but a home which he can retain for his life and hand over to his children after him, is not to be scorned as he was a few years ago. The ready-made farms, made possible by the irrigation work of the Canadian Pacific Railway, are the chief example of the attempts made to draw the Englishman. 'We hope,' said one of the Canadian Pacific Railway officials, speaking a few months ago before the London Chamber of Commerce, 'that the Englishmen on these farms will leaven the lot.' A few years ago, compliments of that sort were not being offered to the English farmer in Canada. Probably he was not so good a type as comes in now. But it is to be remembered that the English immigrant has always had more adaptations to make than the American. To the American from the northern States, Canada is the country he is used to--only a little more north. The Englishman finds a new soil, new climate, new manners, and new methods. I should say that man for man, the English farmer knows at least as much as the American about farming, and {153} a great deal more than the average Canadian. But when he goes out to Canada he has to put this knowledge behind him and learn afresh--a difficult thing for a conservative race. The American can hold on to what he knows and simply go ahead. The accident of birth has given him a fine start over the Englishman.

The same advantage belongs to other Americans in Canada. Business men, capitalists, journalists have only had to cross a non-existent line, instead of an undeniable ocean. When Canadians complain that Englishmen take no interest even in those Canadian schemes for which they have found the money, they forget that capitalists cannot always be close to their investments. I repeat, the Atlantic is not a thing to be denied, nor is it fair to call the English mere moneylenders because they have not always personally accompanied their loans. At least they have shown themselves trustful of the men on the spot.

Nevertheless, I think that Canada has every reason to be grateful for the able business men whom the States have sent her. That negro porter at the Niagara Hotel who said that Canadians were a stupid people, and would have done nothing without the {154} Americans, was taking rather a spread-eagle view of the facts. Still there is no doubt that American brains have been--and still are--of great service to Canada; nor can I see that they can be charged with Americanising tendencies. Business men are nearly always cosmopolitan in their achievements, whatever their motives may be.

It is rather different with American journalists. They can hardly as yet be charged with being citizens of the world, and where their influence penetrates, an American trend is noticeable. They are beginning to leave their mark in Canada. Canadian papers are numerous and creditable, but an American atmosphere broods over them. The most trivial incident is magnified by headlines, which repeat three times over in large type and increasingly pompous language all and more than all that follows in the news space. I am not talking of the best Canadian newspapers but of the average ones. If their methods are American, so very largely are the matters they deal with. In some small up-country Canadian journal one will find the leading columns occupied with the account of some dinner given, say, by Mrs. Van So-and-So of New York, wife of the Coffin King, {155} with full accounts of the costumes, menu, etc.,--wearisome and vulgar matter, staringly of no interest whatever to the bucolic readers of the journal in question. But it was all very cheaply wired from the States: whereas news from England would be costly in the extreme. The result is that Canadians--in spite of their local sagacity--are at least as ignorant of the things that happen in Great Britain and Europe as we are of what is happening in Canada. Often I have felt while the Canadian-born were talking to me of the 'Old Country,' talking of it too, not only in a loyal, but a fond and even wistful manner--that they had in their minds a picture of it that would probably have fitted England better in the fourteenth century than it does now. A poor, worn-out, tottering old country is what they are thinking of; and nothing would amaze some of them more than to see modern England as it is.

Why should they have got this idea into their heads? Largely, I suppose, because the new with them is necessarily best. The old things were put up anyhow by men in a hurry and they are always superseded by better things. The very epithet 'old' connotes badness to a Canadian. Then, again, it is a {156} country of young men, and young men are apt to favour youth, which they hardly associate with England. No country--not even Spain--can be as antique and ramshackle as many of them undoubtedly believe England to be. Birmingham and Manchester are on paper such very ancient cities compared with Regina and Moosejaw that the untravelled Canadian thinks pityingly of the former; whereas he considers the latter infinitely up-to-date and important, and would be hurt to know that we have in England hundreds of little prosperous country towns very like them, of which the ordinary Englishman hardly knows the names and, if he did, would think no more of than he would think of Regina and Moosejaw.

I would not seek to minimise that Canadian pride and optimism which finds such satisfaction in everything that they build. Pride and optimism are valuable assets to any country. All I would suggest is that they should realise that the English habit of grumbling and self-depreciation does not indicate that all Englishmen live in a tottering old realm, doing nothing but decay and grumble.

Here we come back to newspapers. Most people derive their facts from newspapers nowadays, and if Canadians find that everything {157} of importance happens in the new world, whereas in the old world nothing happens except an occasional sensational murder or the deposition of a third-class king, they cannot infer that Europe is still an important continent, and that perhaps the most important country in it is England. What is to enlighten them? I suppose the receipt of more news from Europe.

Probably the All Red Cable would do much in this direction. News has to be cheap or it is not news (the converse proposition that news if it is cheap must be news, is not true). Much also might be done by private enterprise. English publishers could do more to push their wares. So could English magazine proprietors. Most of the books and magazines one can get in a hurry in Canada are American. English Cabinet Ministers might now and again make a tour in the Dominion and explain to Canadians some of those political principles in which at home they have such fervid belief. It may be that the Americanising tendency is too strong for any of these suggestions to be of much avail in combating it. Reciprocity treaties between the States and Canada may inevitably result in closer union, though I never could feel that it was a marked human characteristic to pine for fellow-citizenship with the man whom {158} one supplies with bread in return for a reaping-machine. Trade relations may result in that mystic fraternal sentiment by which nations come together, though hitherto in the world's history men have never shown any very frantic desire for a heart-to-heart intimacy with their tradespeople. 'Utility, Reciprocity, Fraternity' sounds rather a cold cry by which to rally two great people together.[1]

[1] This chapter was written before the Reciprocity business flamed forth. I return to the subject later.

When all is said and done, and there are a hundred other pros and cons which might be considered, the chief obstacle to the Americanisation of Canada is climate. Canada is north and America is south; and those two show less inclination to rush together than even east and west. Of course it is not extremes of north and south that are represented in the two countries;--along the boundary the climates are not dissimilar. Yet it seems to me that while Canada is bound to be mainly a country of northern peoples, Americans are fast becoming more and more southernised, I do not mean in the old sense of becoming languid and effeminate and semi-tropical, but southernised in just the same way as the French from being Norsemen have become southernised. Have {159} you seen prints of old Paris when it was a Gothic city? If you have, you will realise the completeness of the change that has come over it. It spreads itself to the sun now, faces to the Midi, and some such change might easily come over New York, Chicago, and the rest of those at present northern cities. Already the typical American is far from being the son of a grim and dour Pilgrim Father. Rather he is lively and energetic--with a temperament always on tiptoe--logical and apt to be materialistic, yet sentimental and passionate too. You find such a temperament among the French and Italians of northern Italy. It is the sun working on them. Even the stolid German and the moody Scandinavian feels it when he gets to the States, and thaws--into an American.

It is not so in Canada. The northern immigrants there remain silent and frosty, though the touch of fortune makes them perhaps more genial. Canada will never become a southern country, even though its northern parts are rendered temperate by the cutting down of timber and constant ploughing. No, I think Canadians will remain a hardy and somewhat dour race, slow-moving on the whole, but industrious and virtuous, suspicious of talkers and hustlers; so suspicious, too, of free {160} thought and new morals as to lay themselves open maybe to the charge of hypocrisy; given at times to self-distrust and self-depreciation, but for the most part steadfast, and holding in their hearts the belief that there is no place like Canada and no men like the inhabitants thereof.

In short, they are as likely as not to end by becoming Anglicised.

{161}