CHAPTER XXVII

A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY

A diminutive Japanese who picked up my fairly heavy trunk, slung it over his shoulder and walked down the platform with it as though it were nothing but a shawl, was the first person I met in Vancouver, reminding me that that land-locked sea below was the Pacific, which white men do not own but only share with the brown and yellow Orientals. I wonder--will the day come when the latter want an ocean all to themselves? And are there, in view of this contingency, plans of this intricate coast among the Japanese naval archives? They knew the other side pretty well before the war began with Russia, and they are not a people to leave things to chance. The yellow men have known the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver as long as the white men, and put in a great deal of work there and eaten much humble pie, and also realised by the constant {259} rise in their wages--ten times anything their own country offers--that the white man is strangely lost without them. They had no flair for colonising half a century ago, when the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but they have it now.

Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The ground sloping to the shut sea, girt with those huge, straight trees that give a sense of luxuriance to this northern Pacific coast which no tropic country can excel, is a perfect situation for a big city. Vancouver is a big city. It is so big that many people are afraid for its immediate future. They say that it is already far bigger than it has any right to be, and that by the dubiously beneficent aid of innumerable real estate men, it is increasing at a pace that is bound to end in disaster. The slump had been expected in 1909, it was expected last year, it is expected this year. Some year it will come; and if I were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant of Vancouver, I should then head a deputation which had for its purpose the dumping in the sea of a large number of the real estate agents who swarm hungrily in the place. There is a big street entirely filled with their offices, and the mark of them is {260} everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that encyclopædic work _Canada in the Twentieth Century_, jeers at the English for their distrust of the real estate man, who, he thinks, serves a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to the real estate man, says Mr. Bradley, if you want to buy land, than to the bar loafer. There is a great deal in that. In individual cases they are excellent men. But, collected together in vast numbers, as in Vancouver, they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer never can, and that is by so magnifying the importance of the buying and selling of land, that people take to it in exchange for work, and falsely imagine that enormous prosperity is coming to a place which is in reality doing nothing but changing its land at fancy and speculative prices, expecting the prosperity somehow and some day to follow of itself.

I suppose Seattle, with less justification, is in very much the same case. Both, besides being ports with great expectations, happen to be the last place, so to speak, in their respective countries; and there is something magnetic in the attraction of a last place. Thither drifts that very considerable population which, by getting on geographically, almost persuades itself that it is getting on materially. Having {261} attained the limit, it stays there and does as little as it can. Such people give a city a false air of greatness, and are, in fact, a surplus population with nothing to do but bid up land against one another.

Of course there are plenty of genuine citizens in Vancouver, with all the enterprise and intelligence that help to make cities great. Practically, too, the greatness of Vancouver is in the end assured. It is already a magnificent port, having a big trade with the East, but nothing to what it will have. The Panama Canal will make it the centre, by sea, of the world. Again, it is the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and is destined, every one says, to become the terminus of the Grand Trunk, and any other railroad that wants to outlet on the Pacific. Wheat has begun to come through it from the prairie that used to go west to Montreal. The new reciprocity treaty will divert some of this freight to the south, no doubt, but that remains to be seen. In any case, besides being a port, Vancouver will remain the business capital of a province endlessly rich in minerals and timber, and increasingly rich in fruit- and farm-land. Some day, therefore, Vancouver will extend to those remote spots {262} where already town lots are being disposed of. Some day. Only, a big city should not live upon its future; and the sale of such lots miles off in the backwoods to people who, having bought them, cannot pay for them or cannot put up houses on them, or cannot afford to live in those houses even if they put them up, because there is nothing for them to do there and their money has run out--this sort of sale, while it enriches the real estate man, does not enrich anybody else. Moreover, it creates a restless spirit among those genuine farmers out in the country who would honestly be farming their land, if real estate agents would leave them alone, and not persuade them that it is just as profitable a game to hang about waiting for opportunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course they, like most other people who get as far as Vancouver, are not mere innocents. Sellers and buyers are probably equally aware of the risks they run; but where a tide of speculation sets in, the shrewdest people seem ready to take the most absurd risks. And the slump has taken so long in coming, and the possibilities of Vancouver seem so immense, that speculation in land has become a perfect fascination.

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'What will it be worth next year?'

That is the formula you constantly see at the end of an advertisement of some town lot--five miles, perhaps, from anywhere. The correct answer varies. If the slump does not come off next year, the lot may be worth double what is being asked for it now. If the slump does come off it will be worth a twentieth, perhaps, of what was given for it. Slump or no slump, this method of building up a city is unsatisfactory. Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg--these have become great as the centres of comparatively populous provinces, in which wealth has been gradually and carefully created by agricultural and industrial enterprises established on a firm basis. The jobs have been waiting for the men. In Vancouver alone, of all big Canadian cities, the men are waiting for the jobs, or, what is worse, waiting in the belief that money comes anyhow, and that jobs are not the prerequisite of money-making. I do not wish to give the impression that Vancouver is full of unemployed people, still less of unemployable ones; merely that many of the people there employed are not engaged in the undertakings that ensure the continuity of a city's prosperity.

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Certainly any picture of Vancouver that made it out gloomy would be a mistake. Nothing could be livelier than its streets and its people; and if the slump does not come, and the Jeremiahs are wrong, Vancouver citizens will be justified of any amount of exultation. Already they have most of the things that make citizens pleased and proud--a beautiful site, fine streets, the most splendid of public parks, water-ways innumerable in front, and, behind, a country good to look at and rich in potentialities. Vancouver's industries, even if they do not justify the size of the place, are important and prosperous; and its propinquity to the salmon fisheries and vast timber tracts of British Columbia is something which alone would make a great town. In tone it is new world compared with Victoria, but old world compared with Seattle. There are many English people there. Living is high. No coin under five cents is, of course, in use, and when you start the day by paying that sum for a newspaper marked one cent, you find it difficult to beat down prices during the rest of the day. Apropos of newspapers, I was told of a very successful strike among the paper-boys of Vancouver some little time ago. Many people must have heard {265} of it, but it is worth retelling. The strike was headed by a youthful organiser, popularly known as Reddy, from the colour of his hair. Reddy was alleged to be thirteen years of age at the time, but Pitt was not so much older when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Holding the firm conviction that he and his fellow-workers were entitled to at least two cents out of the five for every paper sold (I am not sure of my figures), Reddy proclaimed a strike, and conducted it so successfully that the newspaper proprietors of Vancouver were compelled to wait upon him humbly, and yield in every particular to his demands. Among historic strikes this seems worthy of a place.

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