:y<^y./:^i^i^Mi'!^m 
 
 %^J^\^±^,J'^L^jrrk, 
 
 TO-DAY 
 
 'VN 
 
 J Wf / 
 
 X- 
 
 ArriOBSON
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 MAY TREAT MORRISON 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 ALEXANDER F MORRISON
 
 CANADA TO-DAY
 
 BOOKS ON CANADA 
 
 CANADA. By Sir John G. Bourinot. 
 With Map and many Illustrations. Large 
 crown 8vo, cloth, 5s. 
 
 [Story of the Nations.) 
 
 THROUGH CANADA IN HARVEST 
 TIME. A Study of Life and Labour in 
 the Golden West. By James Lumsden. 
 Fully Illustrated, and with Map. Large 
 crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. 
 
 THE CANADIAN CONTINGENT AND 
 CANADIAN IMPERIALISM. By W. 
 Sandford Evans. Profusely Illustrated 
 from Photographs, and with several Maps. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 CANADIAN CAMP LIFE. By Frances 
 E. Herring. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth, 6s. 
 
 AMONG THE PEOPLE OF BRITISH 
 COLUMBIA: Red, White, Yellow, and 
 Brown. By Frances E. Herring. 
 Fully Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth, 
 6s. net. 
 
 IN THE PATHLESS WEST. By Frances 
 E. Herring. With Fourteen Illustra- 
 tions. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. net. 
 
 London : T. FISHER UNWIN.
 
 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 BY 
 
 J. A. HOB SON, M.A. 
 
 author of 
 
 "the evolution of modern capitalism " 
 
 " imperialism " etc. 
 
 
 LONDON 
 FISHER UNWIN 
 
 ADELPHI TERRACE 
 I 906
 
 
 • • • • 
 
 
 2:,;:v-. i*-; -. 
 
 » .^ *.• . • ; • • 
 
 [.4// y?/;^;*/^ Reserved]
 
 
 C9 
 
 US' 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 It is usual for visitors who commit to 
 print their impressions of a new country, 
 
 g the information they have gathered, and 
 the judgments they have formed, to offer 
 apologies for publication, in the hope 
 of averting, in some measure, the hostility 
 naturally felt by those invited to read 
 a book of travel written by one who 
 cannot claim a thorough knowledge of 
 
 c/j the land of which he writes. Such apology 
 
 ^ is, however, both futile and unwarranted. 
 
 ^ It is futile because the dwellers in the 
 foreign country, seldom content with the 
 appraisal of a stranger, are not deterred 
 by such formal apology from detecting 
 a " tone of superiority " in a visitor who 
 presumes to found judgments or even 

 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 opinions upon such slender knowledge, 
 and from pouring scorn upon the retailer 
 of observations " from a car window." 
 The contemptuous resentment with which 
 foreigners regard these lucubrations of 
 a stranger is not lessened, but increased, 
 when the foreigners are not, or ought 
 not to be, foreigners at all, but distant 
 fellow- subjects of a widely divergent 
 empire. Relations of feeling are never 
 so delicate as between distant members 
 of a family, and the relations of a self- 
 governing group of colonies towards the 
 Mother Country have always afforded con- 
 spicuous examples of this truth. This 
 " touchiness " extends to all forms of 
 public expression, especially through the 
 Press ; nor is it confined to the expressions 
 of persons whose position gives weight 
 to their words, and may even influence 
 policy. It follows the humblest wielder 
 of a pen. " I suppose you will write a book 
 when you get home," is the constant half- 
 satirical ejaculation that confronts the 
 visitor who really " wants to know," 
 and tries to put what he considers relevant
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 questions. If he is wise he disclaims any 
 such intention, postponing his decision to 
 write until he has got home, but not 
 apologising for his writing when he has 
 done it. 
 
 I have also claimed that apology is 
 unwarranted, at anyrate in cases where 
 the impressionism that belongs to such 
 work is executed with honesty and care. 
 The saying that " the onlooker sees most 
 of the game " is applicable here when 
 the onlooker can claim any sort of specta- 
 torial skill. A visitor to a country which, 
 like Canada, in spite of its size, is extremely 
 compact, strung on to two railroad lines 
 running east and west with a few off- 
 shoots, can really get a substantially com- 
 plete bird's-eye view of the main features 
 of its external development in a com- 
 paratively short time. So, too, of the 
 broader aspects of the character of its 
 people — their interests and aspirations 
 (industrial, political, recreative), what they 
 talk about, how they occupy their leisure, 
 what they read — a visitor who keeps 
 eyes and ears open, and both seizes and
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 makes opportunities, may learn much. 
 Of course he will miss all the finer texture 
 of the spirit and life of the people, will 
 learn very little of their domestic life or 
 the subtler psychology that underlies their 
 social and religious institutions : he will 
 make some false generalisations by im- 
 perfect induction, some absolute errors 
 of observation or of record, upon which 
 critics will rightly fasten for the harrying 
 process which they profess. But the 
 large points of similarit}^ and difference, 
 distinctive of the present place and 
 prospects of such a country as Canada 
 in the progress of the world, will stand 
 out more plainly to an observant new- 
 comer than to a native who sits too near 
 and whose intelligence and feelings are too 
 closely involved in the details of the life 
 in which he lives. 
 
 Great changes are taking place in Canada. 
 These changes are rooted in economic 
 facts of the iirst importance, relating 
 to the development of the soil for certain 
 primary industries of food production and 
 mining, and the great modern s^^stems
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 of road-making. The interaction between 
 the economics and the poHtics of a country 
 rapidly subjected to such changes, their 
 effect in stimulating the intellectual and 
 moral energy of a people confronted with 
 this great task of progress, the strong 
 suction of labour and capital from outside, 
 yielding its supply of new industrial and 
 social energy, and the problems raised by 
 this assimilation, belong less to the Canadian 
 specialist than to the general student of 
 comparative politics. The special rela- 
 tions subsisting between Canada and 
 her great Republican neighbour form 
 another group of issues where the judgment 
 of the unimpassioned outsider has some 
 advantage. 
 
 But I have no wish to over-appraise 
 the cursive method of inquiry here adopted ; 
 I only claim that it is not to be set aside 
 as mere impertinent interference, but should 
 be recognised as one proper focus of study, 
 to be supplemented by the fuller and 
 more detailed information and reflection 
 which long residence alone can give. 
 
 The larger part of this small volume
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 was contributed during the winter of 
 1 905-1 906 in the form of letters to the 
 Daily Chronicle, to which journal I am 
 indebted for permission to reproduce these 
 lines. In republishing them I have made 
 a number of corrections and additions. 
 
 Following the suggestion and skilled 
 advice of my friend, Mr. Russell Rea, 
 M.P., whose theoretical and practical 
 grasp upon the politics of commerce is 
 not surpassed by any politician of our 
 time, I occupied myself, while in Canada 
 and the United States, in making a special 
 inquiry into the present condition of 
 the tariff issue in these countries, with 
 particular reference to the relations between 
 Canada and Great Britain on the one 
 hand, the United States upon the other. 
 A portion of this study, chiefly statistical, 
 and bearing closely upon the recent effect 
 and the prospects of the Preferential policy 
 adopted by the Laurier Government, I 
 have included here, partly for amplification 
 of certain matter set forth in more general 
 terms in the descriptive chapters, partly 
 in order to supply to those who still concern
 
 PREFACE XI 
 
 themselves with hopes of Imperial federa- 
 tion upon a commercial basis certain 
 important facts and tendencies that can 
 only be conveyed by figures. 
 
 J. A. H.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. CANADA BOOMING 
 
 II. Canada's boom city . 
 
 III. A CANADIAN IMPERIALIST 
 
 IV. THE PACIFIC SLOPE 
 V. CANADIAN PROTECTION . 
 
 VI. THE AMERICANISATION OF CANADA 
 
 VII. THE FRENCH IN CANADA 
 
 VIII. COLONIAL PREFERENCE 
 
 IX. BRITISH SLACKNESS 
 
 X. THE WHEATFIELDS 
 
 XI. Canada's new blood 
 XII. Canada's destiny 
 
 XIII. FUTURE OF CANADA 
 
 I'AGE 
 
 3 
 
 20 
 27 
 
 17 
 48 
 
 56 
 64 
 71 
 7^ 
 86 
 
 99 
 106 
 
 PART II 
 
 Canada's fiscal future 
 
 xiii 
 
 115
 
 PART I
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CANADA BOOMING 
 
 To visit Canada just now is a bracing 
 experience for the torpid Briton. For 
 Canada is conscious, vocably, uproariously 
 conscious, that her day has come. Side- 
 tracked in the march of development 
 through the nineteenth century, a sparsely 
 peopled, poverty-stricken colony, she has 
 watched her neighbour across the border 
 grow big and strong and opulent, arrogating 
 to her great union all the power, the fame, 
 the very title of i\merica. Left up there 
 in the cold, broken in three pieces by the 
 huge waste of Western Ontario and the 
 Rocky Mountains, her unmapped north- 
 west owned by a trading company, winning 
 a mean and a precarious subsistence by 
 old-fashioned agriculture, forestry, and 
 fishing, the Canadian Provinces, even after 
 achieving the dignity of a Dominion, 
 continued to feel themselves the Cinderella 
 of the Western World. Now all this is 
 changed : the poor relation has come
 
 4 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 into her fortune, a single decade has swept 
 away all.. her diffidence^ and has replaced 
 it by a spirit of . boundJess confidence and 
 booming, enterpjise, , '. . 
 
 The breeze: of. this.jexhilaration, blowing 
 from the new north-west, penetrates the 
 whole country to-day. It meets us as we 
 enter, through the majestic portal of the 
 St. Lawrence, the quaint old French city 
 of Quebec, with its tortuous streets and 
 its old-world gravity ; the handsome 
 modern commercial city of Montreal is 
 all astir with the swelling tide of trade and 
 finance ; official Ottawa shows nothing 
 of the sedate dignity of a Governmental 
 capital, her clubs and offices are tense with 
 the spirit of the " boom." 
 
 Everywhere the wondrous tale is taken up 
 anew of the rush of settlers into Manitoba 
 and the two new provinces, the railroad 
 enterprise, the millions of acres of black 
 wheat-soil, and the " bumper " crop of 
 hard wheat garnered this fall ; a hundred 
 million bushels is the popularly adopted 
 figure, though the more calculating put 
 it down at eighty-five. Judges of the 
 High Court and Cabinet Ministers here in 
 Ottawa are concerned far less with politics 
 and litigation than with the discovery of 
 some large new wheat area south of Calgary, 
 or of some engineering difficulty on the 
 new Grand Trunk Railway : all the
 
 CANADA BOOMING 5 
 
 younger officials and business men have 
 come back from some hunting or fishing 
 hohday, and bring tidings of fresh develop- 
 ments. 
 
 The greatest business enterprise in 
 Canada, the Canadian Pacific Railway, is 
 straining every nerve to meet the new 
 demands, putting forth new tentacles into 
 the north ; the Grand Trunk is pledged to 
 spend some 20,000,000 dols. within the next 
 five years, and a few years will probably 
 see three virtually independent systems 
 of transcontinental railway. 
 
 Every able-bodied man can find a job ; 
 there is no reserve army of unemployed. 
 " We have no poor," the Minister of 
 Labour assured me, a statement probably 
 correct if poverty means failure to get a 
 living according to the customary standard 
 of subsistence. In the great city of 
 Montreal the secretary of the C.O.S. told 
 me that, though there was no poor-law or 
 other public provision, no one was in want 
 of food and home except a small wreckage 
 of helpless immigrants and some stranded 
 ne'er-do-weels. Certainly, though there 
 were plenty of " mean streets " in the 
 French quarter, I could see no signs of a 
 shmi population, and beggars and loafers 
 were not in evidence. It is fair, then, to 
 assume that all Canada is on a wave of 
 rising prosperity. While the centre of
 
 6 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 this boom is the well-nigh unlimited supply 
 of land in Manitoba, Alberta, and 
 Saskatchewan alleged to be capable of 
 growing "No. i hard wheat/' every other 
 Canadian industry feels a sympathetic 
 stimulus — mines in British Columbia and 
 Nova Scotia, the great lumber " limits " 
 in Ontario, the manufactures in Toronto 
 and Ottawa, and the mixed farming in 
 the older provinces. 
 
 Last, not least, the financial boom — the 
 floating of companies for developing newly 
 tapped areas of agriculture and for specula- 
 tion in the citylands in Winnipeg, Edmonton, 
 Brandon, and a score of '' cities with a 
 future." Not only business men, but 
 politicians, the clergy, the Press, and 
 every other vocable instrument, is preaching, 
 praising, and prophesying. Now Canada 
 (no longer the United States) is " God's 
 own country, sir ! " Now the twentieth 
 century " belongs " to her. Now her 
 population and her prosperity will swell 
 until she becomes the corner-stone of the 
 temple of the British Empire. 
 
 I am not concerned just here to discuss 
 the substance of these high hopes so much 
 as to mark the faith and confidence that 
 inspire them and help towards their ful- 
 filment. For no one can have followed 
 intelligently the career of the American 
 Republic without recognising that her
 
 CANADA BOOMING 7 
 
 greatest source of power has been not her 
 rich and varied natural resources, her 
 great aptitude for mechanical invention, 
 not even the tough adaptive fibre of her 
 inhabitants, but the broadcast, bounding, 
 and even reckless confidence in her power 
 of achievement, or her " destiny." Now 
 the really remarkable event in Canada is 
 the recent quickening of this self-same 
 faith, not a blind faith in a Providence 
 outside ourselves that is going to do " big 
 things " for us while we sit still, but a 
 compelling impetus to take things in hand 
 ourselves, and force them to take shape 
 according to our will. 
 
 It is this spirit one feels everywhere 
 throbbing in Canada : its main outlet 
 at present is frankly " materialistic," mak- 
 ing for the development of natural resources 
 in field, forest, fishing, mine, among a 
 people of tough, sturdy individualists, with 
 the powerful physique of a farm-bred 
 folk and the personal independence of 
 a race of men owning the land they till. 
 
 Almost all the successful manufacturers, 
 bankers, politicians, State officials I have 
 met were born in some little back country 
 village in Quebec, Ontario, or Nova Scotia ; 
 all keep in touch with the land ; and 
 though some tenancy is creeping in, 87 per 
 cent, of the farmers in Canada own their 
 own farms, less encumbered by debt or
 
 8 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 mortgage than any other agricultural people 
 in the world. 
 
 This faith in Canada is visibly unifying 
 the diverse sections, races, and religions, 
 and is taking shape in a " nationalism " 
 which, at present mainly economic, is certain 
 to have important political bearings when 
 Canada has leisure to think out her political 
 career. The old French colonists of 
 Quebec, the Scotch and English of the 
 Maritime Provinces and of Ontario, and 
 the rich new blends of American, British, 
 and mid-European races forming in the 
 north-west and along the Pacific, are now 
 being subjected to the fusing heat of a 
 stronger, wider feeling of nationality, which 
 is breaking the barriers that once seemed 
 well-nigh impassable between the French 
 of the ancient regime, the United Empire 
 Loyalist, the hustling Scotch trader, and 
 German, Sclavonic, and Scandinavian 
 settlers in the west. 
 
 It is simply the spirit of America, 
 breaking out after a long period of incuba- 
 tion, across the northern frontier of the 
 States. The history of the " coming of 
 the west," the wonderful transformation 
 of the Mississippi Valley into a rich 
 and populous civilisation within two genera- 
 tions, is ripe for repetition farther north. 
 It is, in fact, the natural drive of American 
 civilisation, following the line of least
 
 CANADA BOOMING 9 
 
 resistance. Its inevitability is apparent 
 as we follow the New England pioneers 
 of the early nineteenth century pushing 
 into the fertile virgin lands of Ohio, their 
 sons, cramped in the new abode, moving 
 ever farther west, first into Illinois, the 
 next generation into Minnesota and the 
 Dakotas. Now all the best of these lands 
 is fully taken up, and the trek force, 
 riot yet spent, is diverted across the border. 
 This movement of agricultural population 
 in the States is attended, of course, by a 
 similar pressure in Ontario and the more 
 eastern provinces of Canada. Though 
 huge areas of cultivable land still cry 
 out for settlers in Ontario, thousands of 
 her young and vigorous sons are con- 
 tinually moving west. It is not easy for 
 the stolid citizens of ancient European 
 States, where the sentiments of old feudalism 
 with its hereditary attachment to a single 
 patch of earth still survive even in these 
 days of rapid travel and of migratory 
 trade, to realise the lightness of the hold 
 which his farm has on the ordinary settler 
 in a new country. There is no village 
 where his family has lived for perhaps 
 twenty generations, and where scores of 
 people are his kinsmen by blood ; no 
 churchyard holding the bones of his fore- 
 fathers and representing history in its 
 intimate significance ; no countryside with
 
 10 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 its gathering of tradition that stretches 
 back into the dim ages; no " Deadman's 
 Lane" or "Lovers' Walk"; no ancient 
 Manor House with its worshipful memories 
 of '* the great" — nothing to fasten locality 
 upon the heart and the imagination. The 
 farmer in Dakota or Ontario, borne 
 westward from some German or Norwegian 
 village, has entered a bare land, marked 
 out his rectangular claim under the Home-v 
 stead Law, cleared and fenced his land, 
 and by dint of hard, plodding toil got 
 it under cultivation or laid it out in pasture, 
 with a rude log cabin for home, and some 
 barns. No doubt he has impressed his 
 personality upon the soil, he has " made " 
 a farm, has tamed for human use and 
 livelihood a piece of " savage " mother 
 earth, and it might seem as if love must 
 follow labour. But this does not seem 
 to be the case. The American or Canadian 
 farmer has little local sentiment ; he 
 is not farming " for his health," but as 
 a business, to feed his family, pay off his 
 mortgage, send his children to college, 
 retire as old age comes on to the nearest 
 town that can give comfort and society 
 to his declining life. There is little to 
 feed any love of locality : one section of a 
 great wheat or cattle belt is hardly dis- 
 tinguishable from another ; his farm is 
 just like his neighbour's, worked on the
 
 CANADA BOOMING ii 
 
 same plan, growing the same crops, and 
 subject to the same chmatic and other 
 conditions. Such a farm has no individual 
 character, and the life in it is generally 
 bare and bleak. This explains the loose 
 attachment which leads the young to 
 move away from the paternal acres without 
 a qualm ; the notion that they should 
 live in a place because they were born 
 and bred there never enters their mind. 
 It is much the same with the old folk ; 
 if they hear of better land to be got cheap, 
 why should they stay ? The world is 
 an open road, they are " economic men," 
 led "as by an invisible hand " in search 
 of land that will yield a profit to their 
 labour. 
 
 The spirit of America thus expressed in 
 the constant pressure towards new and 
 better land of course brings many other 
 common factors of American life to the fore. 
 The Americanisation of Canada is some- 
 times spoken of as if it were an intrusion 
 or invasion of alien institutions. No such 
 thing. The simple fact is that Canada 
 is American ; her climate, soil, flora and 
 fauna, her people and their ways of life 
 are so nearly related that political diver- 
 gence is of comparatively small significance 
 in any broad estimate of the present and 
 probable future of the Canadian nation. 
 The concrete illustration of this general
 
 12 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 truth I will set forth later. At the outset 
 I wish to emphasise the important fact 
 that the new Canadian boom is simply 
 another large local outburst of the energy 
 which has made the United States what it 
 is to-day.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 CANADA'S BOOM CITY 
 
 Winnipeg is commonly described as the 
 Chicago of Canada. The history of the 
 great American agricultural capital is 
 always before the mind of the Winnipeger, 
 who has seen his city grow in a quarter 
 of a century from a quiet little country 
 town of 6000 inhabitants into a city of 
 nearly 100,000, with every prospect of 
 doubling its numbers within the next ten 
 years. Its position as a railroad centre, 
 through which must pass all traffic between 
 east and west, has made it the commercial, 
 manufacturing, and financial capital not 
 only of Manitoba, but of the whole north- 
 west. 
 
 The development of the new wheat 
 territories is registered in the tearing growth 
 of this big " boom " city, for almost 
 all the grain that passes out of the north- 
 west to feed the world, and almost all the 
 flood of immigration that pours into the 
 new settlements, pass through Winnipeg. 
 
 13
 
 14 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Already in its brief career it has tasted 
 the ups and downs of fortune. After 
 the Canadian Pacific came through in 
 1881 it enjoyed a brief spell of prosperity, 
 in which its population doubled and land 
 speculation of the most frenzied sort 
 occurred, to be soon followed by the 
 collapse of 1883, which sent all these 
 premature hopes and activities topphng 
 to ruin. The time was not yet due ; 
 Manitoba had been over-boomed, and the 
 genuine resources of the newly acquired 
 provinces had not been explored. 
 
 Signs of this earlier rise and fall are not 
 wanting to-day. The great hotel in which 
 I sit was run up during the boom of the 
 eighties by an enterprising citizen, who 
 hung on to the vacant building until at 
 last he was shaken off, and retired a broken 
 man to a remote farm hfe in the prairies, 
 where he died in poverty. Had he held 
 on and lived he would be a rich man 
 to-day. Such, however, are the common 
 incidents of a boom city. 
 
 The entire structure of such a city 
 changes every few years. The present 
 handsome and commodious railroad station 
 is the third in twenty years, while the 
 big building going up in Main Street is 
 the third post office. The " best hotel " 
 last year is replaced by a " better " one 
 this year, and the omnipotent C.P.R. is
 
 CANADA'S BOOM CITY 15 
 
 erecting a palace of its own, which will 
 absorb the wealthy travellers next year. 
 
 All the modern conveniences of street 
 railways, electric light, etc., are furnished 
 in abundance ; the brand-new Manitoba 
 Club, where the city magnates meet for 
 lunch, leaves nothing to be desired in 
 comfort and "elegance," while the store 
 set up by Eaton of Toronto occupies a 
 solid block, with a flat roof, on which 
 storey after storey will be added as required. 
 Though not so thickly " churched " as 
 Montreal, which boasts a place of worship 
 for every seven hundred persons, Winnipeg 
 is dotted freely with fifty-thousand dollar 
 churches, Anglican and Presbyterian taking 
 the lead — for the Scotsman is to the fore 
 here, as everywhere, in the making of 
 Canada. 
 
 The State University is as yet in its 
 infancy, composed of a union of colleges 
 —Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, 
 Baptist, Wesleyan — which form a joint- 
 board for studies, examinations, and the 
 conferring of degrees. The principal of 
 the Wesleyan College, Dr. Sparling, a 
 man of great local distinction, told me 
 this educational grouping of the Churches 
 worked fairly harmoniously, though just 
 now there is a little breeze on the question 
 of compulsory Latin ! The idea of com- 
 pelling the youthful Manitoban who seeks
 
 i6 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 culture to acquire the Latin tongue seems 
 strangely out of keeping with the general 
 tone of Winnipeg, but the Roman Church 
 here, as elsewhere in Canada, keeps a 
 stiff upper lip in all educational affairs. 
 
 Winnipeg is probably as cosmopolitan 
 as Chicago itself ; the street signs are a 
 veritable Babel, and as you get away 
 from the main streets you stumble into a 
 little Russia or a miniature Galicia. Ice- 
 landers are a sufficiently numerous body 
 to have churches of their own. Many of 
 the best scholars in the University are 
 young immigrants, who show a far keener 
 love of learning than the Cal®i^sts or 
 British settlers, who mostly T5?tTTg«*with 
 them one consuming passion which swallows 
 all their leisure time and energy, namely 
 sport. 
 
 Though there is a good newspaper 
 press, the Manitoba Free Press being 
 one of the ablest papers in the American 
 continent, it cannot be said that politics 
 or literature in any serious shape engage 
 the Winnipeger. " Things of the mind " 
 are not for him ; he is closely agrip with 
 the " real " in the shape of grain elevators, * 
 railroad branches, or the new " power " 
 association for developing a large local 
 supply of electric energy. 
 
 Everywhere things are moving visibly, 
 not decade by decade, but month by month.
 
 CANADA'S BOOM CITY 17 
 
 Faith in their future has led them to plan 
 out their city on a liberal scale. Main 
 Street and Portage Avenue, the two great 
 business thoroughfares, have no rivals for 
 breadth in any American city save Wash- 
 ington; while Broadway, leading to the 
 Parliament buildings, puts its New York 
 namesake to shame. Every Winnipeger 
 is afire with zeal and confidence, and 
 points out, with that marvellous quantita- 
 tive memory which all good Americans 
 possess, the detailed cost of the various 
 new buildings represented by the 
 10,000,000 dols. spent last year in city 
 structures. 
 
 As one would expect, magnificence and 
 meanness jostle one another everywhere : 
 handsome brick mansions are flanked on 
 either side by the wretched wooden 
 " shacks " of the early settlers ; from a 
 spell of handsome concrete pavement one 
 plunges suddenly into primitive cart- 
 tracks ; large gaping spaces of unkempt 
 wilderness lie within a few minutes of the 
 centre of the city, which is laid out with 
 such prodigality of space that its present 
 area of sparsely occupied land could easily 
 contain a population of half a million, as 
 much as to-day is contained within all 
 three North-West Provinces. 
 
 Among other distinctions of Winnipeg 
 is the fact that it is the centre of the
 
 i8 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 famous Hudson's Bay Company, which, 
 once merely a fur-trading body with a 
 vast territory, has now grown into a 
 general dealer, whose retail stores are 
 dotted over the entire north-west. It 
 still keeps up the fur business, and is in 
 addition beginning to reap large profits 
 from its lands, the two sections in every 
 township left to it when the Dominion 
 Government purchased from it the territory 
 which now forms Manitoba, Alberta, and 
 Saskatchewan. A great Hudson's Bay 
 general store occupies a prominent site 
 in Main Street. But the finest buildings 
 are banks, insurance offices, and land com- 
 pany premises ; for land speculation, of 
 course, lies thick in the air, now not so 
 much in city sites, because prices have 
 already been forced up so high, and central 
 sites are so tightly held that there is little 
 market. Bitter complaints are heard of 
 the holding back of unoccupied land for 
 a rise of values and the creation of an 
 artificial scarcity. I was told of a site in 
 Main Street which had recently changed 
 hands at 2000 dols. per foot of frontage. 
 The chief gamble, however, is in suburban 
 lands, with a prospective value, and in 
 the formation and manipulation of com- 
 panies for acquiring and developing blocks 
 of agricultural land in Alberta and Saskat- 
 chewan. Primarily Winnipeg is likely to
 
 CANADA'S BOOM CITY 19 
 
 remain the great collecting and trans- 
 mitting centre for agricultural produce^ a 
 great station and distributor of grain and 
 cattle. 
 
 Already the Canadian Pacific has no 
 fewer than 114 miles of track within the 
 city limits, and is said already (with what 
 degree of truth I know not) to handle 
 more wheat than the great Chicago itself. 
 Train after train pours in down the numer- 
 ous tracks which already pierce the grain 
 country, passes through Winnipeg to be 
 inspected and certified for grain contents 
 by an army of inspectors, and is dispatched 
 — some to Minneapolis, carrying grain for 
 the American millers ; some east, for 
 Canadian consumption ; most of it to Fort 
 Arthur, for temporary storage in the vast 
 elevators (one holding several million 
 bushels) until it can be shipped on Lake 
 Superior for its long journey to Great 
 Britain. 
 
 Thus regarded Winnipeg comes pretty 
 close home to our common English life : 
 a larger and larger proportion of our daily 
 bread passes through her portals, and if 
 the ordinary Winnipeger of to-day appears 
 a little swelled-headed at the glowing 
 prospects before him, we at any rate can 
 afford to pardon him in virtue of services 
 hereafter to be rendered.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 A CANADIAN IMPERIALIST 
 
 I HAVE just returned from imbibing a 
 deep draught of the purest Hiilk of Canadian 
 Imperiahsm and Protectionism from the 
 hps of the Premier of Manitoba. His facts 
 and arguments were given forth with so 
 much candour and such fervour of con- 
 viction that I cannot better acquaint 
 readers with this aspect of Colonial senti- 
 ment than by reproducing the substance 
 of his talk, filling it out with illustrations 
 drawn from other sources. 
 
 The Hon. R. P. Roblin, the statesman 
 in question, sat in his office in the Parlia- 
 ment buildings chewing his unlit cigar and 
 interrupting his conversation from time 
 to time to talk " company " business 
 through the 'phone, intervals which enabled 
 me the better to digest his politics. He 
 began, as is usual here, by informing me of 
 the magnitude of his country, how that it 
 stretched a thousand miles towards the 
 Rockies, with a width of some three to four
 
 A CANADIAN IMPERIALIST 21 
 
 hundred miles of rich grain and grazing 
 land which, he had calculated, could, as 
 soon as 200,000 farmers were settled in the 
 three provinces, raise all the food the 
 British nation would require. 
 
 A recent visit to England, where he had 
 received great personal attention, and had 
 consorted much with a Scottish lord, had 
 impressed him with the fact that British 
 public men were not alive to the dangers 
 of the near future, if the relations between 
 Canada and the Mother Country were left 
 to drift along as now. 
 
 What has served well enough in the past 
 will not serve in the future. Either the 
 connection with the Mother Country must 
 be made closer, or the time may soon 
 come, he pathetically hinted, when the old 
 attachment will yield to new aspirations 
 for independence. For what are the facts ? 
 Until quite recently the population of 
 Canada consisted of old settlers who were 
 loyal, either from inherited tradition, or 
 because, like most of the French, they 
 recognised the utility of the connection. 
 Inside of ten years this may be changed. 
 By that time there will be several hundred 
 thousand Americans, bringing over with 
 them not only republican sentiments, but 
 the feelings of strong antipathy to Great 
 Britain which Mr. Roblin asserted were 
 generally prevalent in the Western United
 
 22 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 States ; the bulk of the other population 
 would be foreigners, to whom the relation 
 with Great Britain was absolutely value- 
 less and unmeaning. 
 
 There was no danger of such a people 
 desiring annexation with the United States, 
 but it was extremely likely that they would 
 ask, " What is the use to Canada of the 
 British connection, and why shouldn't we 
 be an independent nation like our neigh- 
 bours across the border ? " These pro- 
 vinces will at no distant time have a 
 predominant voice in the Dominion govern- 
 ment, and their will must mould Canadian 
 destinies. 
 
 How to avert this lamentable catas- 
 trophe, how to keep Canada firm within 
 the Empire, was the issue Mr. Roblin 
 sought to expound. Did he desire some 
 Imperial Parliament, or Council of Colonies, 
 or other constitutional forms ? No ! 
 Neither he nor any other public man with 
 whom I have conversed is really favour- 
 able to any strengthening of the political 
 bonds with Great Britain. 
 
 All that was necessary was for Great 
 Britain to show that the Colonies were 
 something more to her than foreign coun- 
 tries — and this she could do by trade 
 Preference — a very simple thing, if she 
 really valued the Colonies ; just a little 
 tariff on foreign goods, letting in Colonial
 
 A CANADIAN IMPERIALIST 23 
 
 competing produce free. It wasn't so 
 much a question of the amount of the Pre- 
 ference, but the " Imperial sentiment " 
 which would be yielded by this formal 
 recognition of Imperial unity. A shilling 
 or two a quarter, any little sum would do : 
 the English consumer would not feel it, 
 for he would not pay it, as the registration 
 duty during the Boer War had proved — 
 and here I listened dumb while Mr. Roblin 
 briefly disposed of the delicate question 
 of the incidence of taxation. 
 
 I then gently probed him on the one- 
 sided Preference which Canada gives now. 
 In England this has always been repre- 
 sented as a free gift of loyal gratitude. 
 But Mr. Roblin (and many Liberals and 
 Conservatives here agree with him) thought 
 this Preference was a mistake ; the arrange- 
 ment should from the first have been a 
 mutual one, and I gathered from him, as 
 formerly from the French ex-Minister, 
 Mr. Tarte, another Protectionist Imperialist, 
 it would not last unless it were reciprocated. 
 
 Indeed I find a widespread conviction 
 that the Preference will be withdrawn 
 unless England gives what is deemed a 
 quid pro quo, the withdrawal being probably 
 concealed by a general rise of tariff on goods 
 when the Preference is efficacious. Mr. 
 Roblin admitted that there was already 
 much grumbling among the Canadian
 
 24 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 trades producing goods which came into 
 the country with Preferential rates, that 
 the wooUen industry in Canada was already 
 killed, that only last week a varnish mill 
 had been closed by the Preference, and 
 so on. 
 
 I asked him how it would help these ill- 
 used Canadian manufacturers if Great 
 Britain were to rise to her Imperial duties 
 and put a tax on foreign foods, admitting 
 Canadian free. He evaded the question, 
 saying that " these things must be made 
 matters of arrangement between the busi- 
 ness interests concerned. Let the Govern- 
 ment establish the general principle, but 
 leave the industries affected to work out 
 the details of the scheme — business men 
 work out these things better than states- 
 men." 
 
 I smiled as I reflected how the business 
 men of the United States " worked out " 
 these matters of tariff before the Committees 
 at Washington. 
 
 Remarking that the refusal of the British 
 people to give Colonial Preference was not, 
 as Mr. Roblin seemed to think, a proof of 
 indifference to the Colonies, but a reluct- 
 ance to depart from our long-tried fiscal 
 policy, I brought upon my head an unex- 
 pected shower of Protective " fact " and 
 " reasoning." The " fact " consisted largely 
 in pointing out, what he seemed to hold
 
 A CANADIAN IMPERIALIST 25 
 
 beyond dispute, that while Enghsh trade 
 was stagnant and her labouring classes 
 poverty-stricken and ill-fed, Germany and 
 France were advancing rapidly in industry 
 and w^ealth — all built up by their tariffs ! 
 Then he bade me look at the United States, 
 whose tariff enabled them to appropriate 
 to themselves the fruits of their rich 
 natural resources and energetic population, 
 absorbing their own products or dumping 
 their surplus upon countries which, like 
 England, were so foolish as to receive it. 
 
 But Canada herself was his great example. 
 Like almost every Canadian business man 
 with whom I have conversed, he was 
 positive that Protection can suck in capital 
 from outside. " Look," he said, " at what 
 the International Harvester Company did. 
 When they found themselves confronted 
 with a tariff of twenty per cent, on their 
 machines entering Canada, what they did 
 was to put up several million dollars' worth 
 of plant in Hamilton, Ontario, where they 
 now employ from 1200 to 1500 Canadian 
 workers, and support a large village full 
 of folk." 
 
 So firm was his faith that I had not the 
 heart to ask him why Canada should choose 
 to subsidise an American company out of 
 the pocket of the Canadian farmer, who 
 must pay higher for his home-made har- 
 vester than if it had been " dumped " on
 
 26 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 to the Canadian market as the surplus of 
 American output. Still less was I dis- 
 posed to enter on the deeper question 
 whether a tariff could really exercise any 
 influence to draw outside capital within a 
 Protected area, taking the industry of the 
 country as a whole. Any such diversion 
 of attention from " seen " to " unseen " 
 results is what Mr. Roblin would have 
 called " mere theory." 
 
 Like all Protective politicians, he is con- 
 vinced that the whole matter is quite 
 simple, and he cannot understand why a 
 people like the British, for whom he other- 
 wise entertains such admiration, should 
 persist in clinging to a theory exploded by 
 the experience both of new countries and 
 old.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE PACIFIC SLOPE 
 
 If there is anything in Canada more 
 impressive than the entrance at Quebec 
 it is the exit at Vancouver. After two 
 days and nights of ceaseless travel through 
 the bold, but barren, magnificence of the 
 Rockies and the Selkirks, it is a relief and 
 a delight to enter the beauty of the Pacific 
 coast, with its richly timbered lakeland, 
 its background of softened mountain 
 distances, and its quiet, sheltered sea. 
 Vancouver itself is not an imposing city. 
 Won from virgin forest, in little more than 
 twenty years, the creation of the Canadian 
 Pacific Railroad, it has none of the pre- 
 tensions of Winnipeg. 
 
 It is a purely business town, a thing of 
 stores and banks and meagre wooden 
 houses, with no public buildings of account ; 
 for, though the largest city of British 
 Columbia, Vancouver is not the capital. 
 Its business activities, however, were in 
 
 abeyance the day we struck it. The 
 
 27
 
 28 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Imperial Order of the Daughters of the 
 Empire had been at work : the illumina- 
 tions of Trafalgar Day shone among its 
 streets ; a patriotic parade, followed by a 
 concert, and loyal eloquence from the 
 Mayor and the veteran statesman, Sir 
 C. Tupper, were arousing the enthusiasm 
 of a people whose attachment to the 
 far - off Mother Country is kept alive 
 and fervent by their contiguity to the 
 great American Republic, towards which 
 an attitude of ostentatious animosity is 
 fostered by the politicians and the business 
 men. 
 
 Vancouver's career has been a chequered 
 one ; it was utterly destroyed by fire 
 nineteen years ago, and only within the 
 last five years has emerged from insignifi- 
 cance. Like all Canadian cities, it is 
 handsomely provided with electric power, 
 and its lighting and tramway services 
 give an exaggerated impression of its 
 development. Its only real claim to dis- 
 tinction is the possession of Stanley Park, 
 probably the most beautiful natural park 
 in the world. Here, as in Winnipeg, the 
 stranger is amazed by the profusion of 
 solid banking-houses ; it would almost 
 seem as if the inhabitants must be a race 
 of financiers, concerned purely with money 
 and stocks and shares. 
 
 And, in point of fact, this is a land of
 
 THE PACIFIC SLOPE 29 
 
 speculation, in mining properties, lumber 
 lands, fruit farms, and, above all, in city 
 lots, the pick of which has doubled in 
 value during the last two years. For 
 British Columbia not only catches some 
 of the breeze of prosperity from the north- 
 west, but enjoys hopes and aspirations 
 of her own. She is feeling big. Indeed, 
 big she is to anyone who adopts the late 
 Lord Salisbury's two-edged precept, and 
 studies large-scale maps, or who listens to 
 the British Columbian as he opens out in 
 the after-dinner hour upon the prodigious 
 resources of coal and iron, lumber, fruit 
 and fish his country is able to contribute 
 to the wealth of the world. 
 
 Coming from the brisk and bustling 
 atmosphere of Winnipeg and the north- 
 west, one is struck by a certain softness 
 and flaccidity as one descends to the 
 Pacific. There is the same newness and 
 crudeness with more leisure and less 
 strenuousness. This of course is largely 
 attributable to the climatic change, for in 
 temperature and moistness this coast re- 
 sembles very closely the South of England : 
 mild, damp, and misty in winter ; bright, 
 warm, but seldom sweltering in summer. 
 As Canada develops it will doubtless 
 become an important residential place for 
 winter visitors : even now one meets 
 there a good sprinkling of mining folk who
 
 30 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 have come down from the interior, or 
 from the more distant Klondike, to tide 
 over the four or five months whose fierce 
 cold tries the toughest constitution, and ! 
 when every sort of outdoor work is stopped 
 perforce. The Yukon is a sort of romantic 
 background for British Columbia, a 
 " Magnetic North " which challenges the 
 spirit of adventure in the boldest, and 
 the spirit of invention in the most menda- 
 cious, prospector-monger or yarn-spinner. 
 The terrors of the Klondike route, the 
 almost superhuman endurance of the first 
 gold-seekers belong, however, to the past, 
 albeit the near past ; the steamship and 
 the railroad carry you to-day from 
 Vancouver to Dawson City in complete 
 security and with " every modern con- 
 venience." 
 
 What's in a name ? A great deal of 
 confusion and some attendant incon- 
 venience in the name Vancouver, obstin- 
 ately or recklessly transferred from the 
 long island which lies forty miles away in 
 the ocean to this new upstart town upon 
 the mainland. That the capital of British 
 Columbia should be a city named Victoria, 
 situated on the island of Vancouver, would 
 have been an easily intelligible, though 
 for practical purposes a rather wasteful 
 fact ; but to take this word Vancouver 
 and fasten it on to a larger and a more
 
 THE PACIFIC SLOPE 31 
 
 important city in the same province is 
 sheer fooUshness. 
 
 That there is much jealousy between 
 the two cities goes without saying. No 
 European can appreciate the intensity of 
 the raw pride with which an American 
 regards the growth of the new city he 
 has helped to raise, and his hatred of a 
 near rival. Two neighbouring cities of ap- 
 proximately equal prospects are filled with 
 an insane competition. In the United 
 States, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Cleveland 
 and Buffalo, are leading cases ; in Canada 
 the Torontian hates the Montrealer with 
 a childish abandon of vituperation, and the 
 relations between Vancouver and Victoria 
 are those of incessant suspicion. For there 
 are many reasons why it would be con- 
 venient that the capital should be removed 
 to the larger mainland city, with a bigger 
 business and a brighter future, and the 
 horrible thought rankles in the Victorian 
 breast. For Victoria is proud of herself, 
 and not without reason : she has beauty, 
 and more pretensions to culture, or at 
 any rate settled luxury of living, than any 
 other city of the Canadian west ; she has 
 " antiquity," dating back to the gold rush 
 of ''the fifties," and all the dignity which 
 belongs to officialism and the higher arts 
 of Government. The pressure of British 
 " loyalty " and " patriotism " is probably
 
 32 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 stronger to the square inch in Victoria 
 than in any other spot in the Dominion : 
 perhaps it is not idle to suggest that the 
 name has contributed to that fact. The 
 claim, however, is not distinctively 
 political. It is upon their English ways 
 of living, their English society, mode of 
 speech, tone of voice, that the Victorians 
 pride themselves. It is certainly the case 
 that this older settlement, with its temperate 
 atmosphere and its beautiful surroundings 
 (there are few fairer scenes in the world 
 than that furnished by a summer sail 
 through the archipelago of islets that 
 skirt the eastern shore of Vancouver), has 
 impressedon its inhabitants gentler manners 
 and more quiet and dignity of bearing 
 than is elsewhere found. Probably this 
 is due chiefly to the fact that for a genera- 
 tion or more Victoria has been the chosen 
 place of residence and retirement for those 
 British Columbians who have made their 
 '' pile," or at any rate their " modest com- 
 petence," and have been tempted to with- 
 draw from the ruder hustle of the mining 
 and commercial centres. 
 
 Nowhere else in Canada is the labour 
 question so prominent, nowhere else is the 
 class sentiment of employer and employed 
 so much embittered. This is often lightly 
 imputed to the proximity to the socialistic- 
 labour movement on the Pacific coast of
 
 THE PACIFIC SLOPE 33 
 
 the United States, and to agitators who 
 come up from Washington State ; but the 
 true causes are deeper seated. For British 
 Columbia, lying 3000 miles from the 
 Atlantic, fails to draw its needed share of 
 European immigration : though a certain 
 number of British miners find their way, 
 the broader stream of foreigners is sucked 
 dry in transit. 
 
 On the other hand, the natural obstacle 
 prescribed in the west by the broad 
 Pacific Ocean has been strengthened by 
 the restrictive legislation against the one 
 great migratory race, the Chinese. Here 
 one touches the greatest issue in far- 
 western American politics, an issue which 
 recent happenings in the Far East are 
 ripening fast. If the trivial population 
 of this great province, some 200,000 all 
 told, is to grow into the millions required 
 to give body to its industrial ambitions, 
 this can only come by giving an open 
 door to Asia. For the Rocky Mountains, 
 stretching their broad back across the 
 country north and south, convert British 
 Columbia from what may be called by 
 courtesy the populated parts of Canada, into 
 a definitely Pacific country ; and if Nature 
 has her way, both commerce and popu- 
 lation must tend more and more to become 
 Asiatic, and, in fact, predominantly Chinese. 
 
 Native population there is none, if one 
 
 3
 
 34 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 except the few thousands of half-tamed 
 Indians, who do a httle fishing and lumber 
 work : most of the eastern Canadians and 
 Americans who come have no intention 
 to make a permanent settlement. A large 
 share of the actual work is already done 
 by Asiatics : the greatest industrial achieve- 
 ment of the province, the Canadian Pacific 
 Railroad, was chiefly built by Chinese 
 labour. 
 
 For manufactures, for roads, for fruit- 
 growing, and for domestic service, it is 
 natural that employers here should look 
 longingly to the East, and should feel 
 exasperation at the policy which shuts out 
 this illimitable fund of cheap labour. 
 Equally natural is it that the handful of 
 white wage-earners should jealously guard 
 the gates against this species of foreigner. 
 The barrier here takes the shape of an 
 entrance duty, which, starting in 1896 
 with 50 dols., was raised last year to the 
 prohibitive amount of 500 dols. per head. 
 Even under this burden a few find their 
 way in, while those who had gained an 
 earlier entrance, heati possidentes, seized 
 the occasion of the new law to demand a 
 considerable rise of wages. 
 
 This exclusion policy is usually ex- 
 plained as expressing the domination of 
 the wage-earners, but there is reason to 
 believe that the smaller traders of the
 
 THE PACIFIC SLOPE 35 
 
 towns, fearing the competition of the 
 Chinese merchants, lent assistance to the 
 passing of the law. Indeed, there is no 
 reason to give much credence to the talk 
 about the " tyranny of labour " or " the 
 menace of Socialism " which prevails 
 in managerial circles. Wages for white 
 men are undoubtedly high, as measured 
 in money. Here in Vancouver compositors 
 get 22 dols. a week for a 7 J hours' day, as 
 compared with 16.50 dols. for a nine hours' 
 day in Toronto ; and other skilled wages 
 for union men, though not so high as this, 
 exceed Eastern rates. But if wages are 
 high, so are prices ; and workmen complain 
 that they have no security of steady 
 employment. Season trades predominate : 
 now it is work in a lumber camp, now on 
 a farm, followed by precarious city occupa- 
 tion in winter, offering no settlement and 
 no home life. 
 
 Nowhere is the absurdity of Protection 
 more patent than here in British Columbia. 
 Every effort of the business men and their 
 Governments is directed towards keeping 
 down trade with the great city of Seattle 
 and the industrial towns of the United 
 States just across the border. Instead 
 of trying to develop close commercial 
 relations with their natural markets, they 
 seek to draw the foods and manufactured 
 articles they need from the far east of
 
 36 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Canada, at enormous expense of carriage 
 and long delays. The animosity against 
 America is a constant theme of their Press, 
 which never tires of girding at Seattle as 
 a " barbarian city," where crime and 
 every sort of disorder are rampant. But 
 geography is too powerful for political 
 artifice : trade along the line of the Pacific 
 coast grows apace, and labour at any rate 
 knows little distinction of Government. 
 If a rapid development of British Columbian 
 industries and commerce is desirable, two 
 reforms are clearly necessary — to throw 
 down the tariff barrier against the United 
 States, and an easy admission of Chinamen. 
 Here it is no question of " compounds " 
 or indentured labour : many thousands of 
 Chinese are already here, living a free and 
 orderly life in the towns ; Vancouver has its 
 Chinese quarter, quiet, clean, and respect- 
 able, with its own shops and restaurants. 
 
 That a huge country like this, with all 
 its vaunted possibilities, should be cramped 
 in its development by a dog-in-the-manger 
 policy is a monstrous exhibition of mono- 
 poly, whether it be cloaked under the 
 name of racial integrity, protection of 
 labour, or any other phrase.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CANADIAN PROTECTION 
 
 There exists no definitely organised Free 
 Trade party in Canada, and though 
 scattered here and there chiefly among 
 the farming classes and the educated 
 professional men plenty of Free Trade 
 sentiment is current, it finds little expres- 
 sion in the political arena. 
 
 The Conservative opposition, to which 
 most British Colonial manufacturers, 
 merchants, and other business men of 
 the developed parts of eastern Canada 
 adhere, is definitely, avowedly, and en- 
 thusiastically Protectionist, and is far more 
 firmly set upon a high-tariff scheme than 
 at any time since Sir J. Macdonald first 
 introduced his National Policy. As for 
 the Liberal Government, which, under 
 the attractive personality of Sir W. Laurier, 
 holds a large majority of the electorate, 
 and bids fair to possess a long term of 
 power, its old Free Trade professions have 
 evaporated ; its chiefs have relegated Free 
 
 37 
 
 431663
 
 38 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Trade to the position of a distant ideal, 
 and, by substituting low tariff with 
 bounties and preference, have virtually 
 sold themselves to Protection. 
 
 When Sir W. Laurier went to the country 
 in 1896 his addresses were full of eloquent 
 Free Trade passages, and his chief lieu- 
 tenants. Sir R. Cartwright and Mr. Fielding, 
 were pronounced enemies of all Protective 
 legislation. But the visit to England 
 during the Queen's Jubilee, the contact 
 then with Mr. Chamberlain, and the rising 
 tide of Imperialism, coincident with the 
 growing power of the Canadian manu- 
 facturers and the demands of increased 
 expenditure on militia and other services, 
 drove Sir Wilfrid along the line of com- 
 promise represented by his tariff of 1897. 
 The preference to Great Britain, while a 
 fulfilment more apparent than real of his 
 pledges for a substantial reduction of 
 tariff, took the wind out of the sails of 
 his Imperialist opponents, while administer- 
 ing a rebuff to the United States which 
 was popular in all Canadian circles. A 
 more astute stroke of party politics has 
 never been devised ; but it meant, as is 
 now apparent, the betrayal of the Free 
 Trade future of Canada. Any doubts were 
 soon dispelled by the further concession of 
 the Government to the demand for export 
 bounties on iron and steel. Though it is
 
 CANADIAN PROTECTION 39 
 
 still claimed that tariff for revenue is the 
 goal of the Liberal party, conversation 
 with several of its leaders affords me 
 little hope of its attainment. 
 
 Moreover, even among Liberals, the 
 contiguity of the United States, with her 
 vexatious tariff, breeds a belief in retalia- 
 tion which is most demoralising in its 
 effects. Even Sir R. Cartwright, Minister 
 of Commerce and Labour, often spoken of 
 as " the last of the old Free Traders," 
 I found possessed by a curious notion 
 that the United States could be brought 
 to her knees by a judiciously planted 
 blow of retaliation by Great Britain. His 
 argument ran thus : The movement in- 
 side the Republican party of America 
 towards reciprocity with Canada and a 
 general reduction of tariff is futile so 
 long as it is virtually confined to a demand 
 for cheap materials by New England and 
 other manufacturers. The only way of 
 breaking the dominion of the Trusts and 
 big corporations in the Republican party 
 is by a revolt of the American farmer. 
 In order to revolt he must be made to 
 feel the pinch. Now, if Great Britain 
 would, as a merely temporary expedient, 
 put a 5c. duty on American wheat, letting 
 in Canadian free, the howl of indignation 
 from the American farmer would force 
 the stronghold of high tariff and drive
 
 40 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 the United States to a more considerate 
 treatment both of Great Britain and of 
 Canada. The British consumer would not 
 feel it unless it were kept on, and Sir 
 R. Cartwright feels confident that, as its 
 efficacy would be immediate, it could 
 then be withdrawn. Liberals and Con- 
 servatives alike I find everywhere infected 
 by deep distrust of the policy of the United 
 States. 
 
 After their defeat upon this issue in 
 the election of 1892 the Canadian Liberals 
 have no desire to commit themselves to 
 any scheme of reciprocity with their 
 neighbour. The new spirit of national 
 confidence induces Canadians to think that 
 they can stand alone as a self-sufficing 
 industrial community, raising their own 
 food and raw materials and manufactur- 
 ing in their own country : they do not 
 need to trade with the United States, 
 and if the latter want closer commercial 
 relations it is for them to make an offer. 
 Few Canadians believe that America is 
 prepared to make any offer favourable 
 to Canada. Though they would consider, 
 and doubtless favourably, a proposal from 
 the States for reciprocal free imports of 
 foodstuffs and raw materials, they profess 
 no keenness in the matter, alleging that 
 America needs their raw produce more 
 than they do the produce of America ;
 
 CANADIAN PROTECTION 41 
 
 that the Northern States must buy, and 
 are buying, the coal, wheat, lumber, etc., 
 they need from Canada, in spite of the 
 tariff. 
 
 As for any reciprocity treaty securing 
 for America any reduction of duty on 
 manufactures there is a strong feeling, 
 not confined to Canadian manufacturers, 
 that this would be disastrous. The position 
 adopted was first clearly set forth by 
 Mr. Edward Blake, after the 1891 election, 
 in a letter which made a strong mark 
 on national opinion. If Free Trade 
 between Canada and the United States 
 of America in manufactured articles was 
 arranged, the former could only develop 
 her factories and other productive industries 
 upon the scale of maximum economy, 
 provided she remained secure of access 
 to the newly enlarged American market ; 
 but a treaty which might be abrogated 
 at any time under the pressure of American 
 manufacturers would afford Canada no 
 such security : there would be the initial 
 difficulty of starting young manufactures 
 to compete with the large strongly set 
 factories of the States, and if this difficulty 
 were overcome, the peril attending a with- 
 drawal from the compact would remain. 
 This rooted distrust of the fair intentions 
 of the United States is generally prevalent 
 in Canada, and is driven home by the con-
 
 42 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 duct of the former in cancelling the reci- 
 procity which existed between 1854 and 
 1866. 
 
 It is evident that^ in her present mood, 
 and with her present confidence in her 
 own resources, Canada will make no move 
 towards a new commercial treaty with 
 the States. Moreover, she has no belief in 
 the early probability of an offer worth her 
 entertaining. Indeed, the new tariff which 
 will be introduced next session as the 
 fruits of the Commission which has been 
 taking evidence, seems likely to widen 
 the breach with the United States. For 
 I have it on good official information 
 that Mr. Fielding will propose a triple 
 tariff, consisting of a maximum scale, higher 
 than the present, directed particularly 
 at the United States and Germany, a 
 minimum applicable to other low-tariff 
 States, and a Preferential scale for England 
 and those British Colonies and foreign 
 States, if any, which extend Preference 
 to her. A tariff passed in such a form 
 would probably be higher in its general 
 incidence than the existing one, and would 
 mark another step on the part of a Liberal 
 Government away from the practical policy 
 of Free Trade. 
 
 In talking with politicians, business men, 
 and officials, I have been struck by an 
 utter disregard of the interest of the
 
 CANADIAN PROTECTION 43 
 
 consumer, and a general tendency to 
 regard his grievances as irrelevant to trade 
 policy. 
 
 A rise of expenditure within twelve years 
 from 36,000,000 dols. to 63,000,000 dols. 
 is straining the resources of Canada, even 
 in her growing prosperity. There are two 
 great classes whose immediate interests 
 ought to range them round the Free 
 Trade flag — the wage-earners and the 
 farmers. But while there is much grum- 
 bling about high prices there is no effective 
 political organisation. The Dominion 
 Trade and Labour Congress meeting last 
 summer at Toronto repudiated the state- 
 ment of the Canadian manufacturers that 
 Canada unanimously approved Mr. Cham- 
 berlain's project, and passed a resolution 
 endorsing in general terms the platform 
 of the British Trade Union Congress. 
 But it would be quite unwarranted to 
 assume that the majority of the Canadian 
 workmen were Free Traders. Farmers 
 grumble — when do they not ? — the Western 
 farmer in particular will often represent 
 the tariff as a dodge of Eastern manu- 
 facturers to plunder him. But except 
 to some slight extent in Ontario, farmers 
 are not organised for political action, 
 and in Manitoba and the new provinces 
 the tariff plays no real part as a present 
 issue, being crow^ded out by more pressing
 
 44 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 interests in land, finance, and even 
 education. 
 
 At present the business men are stimulat- 
 ing the Commission to build up a scientific 
 tariff in the old familiar way. A. wants 
 " a readjustment of the Government Act 
 for encouragement to shipbuilding" ; B., a 
 soap manufacturer, seeks " the free ad- 
 mission of certain oils essential in his 
 branch of industry, in order to make 
 the Australian trade a possible capture " ; 
 C. petitions for a continuation of the 
 bounty in pig-iron produced in British 
 Columbia, " explaining that such continu- 
 ance would result in immense blast-furnaces 
 being built on Vancouver Island, to utilise 
 native hematite and gagnetite, which other- 
 wise would be established on the American 
 side, though drawing their raw materials 
 from British Columbia mines " ; D. wants 
 " the augmentation of the duty on raw 
 leaf - tobacco, with the object of induc- 
 ing British Columbia to grow the 
 plant"; E. asks that "eastern oysters 
 be placed upon the free list when 
 imported for transplantation only, it 
 being possible then to build up an im- 
 portant industry, now monopolised by 
 CaUfornia." 
 
 Here are a few samples of practical 
 tariff-making drawn from a single day's 
 report of the proceedings of the Com-
 
 CANADIAN PROTECTION 45 
 
 mission. The " science " of a tariff so 
 built up is simplicity itself. 
 
 The recent Commission found alike in 
 town and country a strong feeling in favour 
 of tariff reduction. The example of the 
 United States, with its tariff-fed Trusts 
 controlling the prices of food and most of 
 the prime necessaries and conveniences, 
 the lowering of the standard of comfort 
 for the mass of workers which has resulted 
 from the Dingley Tariff, the corruption 
 of legislatures and of law courts, has made 
 no small impression on reflecting persons 
 in Canada. Similar fruits of Protection 
 were exposed in Canada during the inves- 
 tigations of the Commission : Trusts of a 
 most rigorous type were seen to be operative 
 in certain trades, exercising a complete 
 control over markets, and raising prices 
 to the consumer. In Toronto, the head- 
 quarters of Canadian Protection, no fewer 
 than seventy combines were unearthed 
 by the Crown Prosecutor last year, mostly 
 offshoots of some large United States 
 corporation : metal goods, textiles, and 
 groceries in various branches, are favoured 
 subjects of combination. 
 
 But though these discoveries doubtless 
 had their effect in causing a postpone- 
 ment of the further means of Protection 
 to which the manufacturing interests were 
 pushing the Government, it is unlikely
 
 46 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 that the course of fiscal events will be 
 materially altered. Though some arrange- 
 ment with the United States for the 
 admission of raw materials, especially coal 
 and pig-iron, would be advantageous to 
 the rising manufactures and the transport 
 industries, it is exceedingly unlikely that 
 the hold which the Ontario manufacturers 
 have got over the Government will be 
 seriously shaken, either by the protests 
 of ill-organised farmers, or by the general 
 body of consumers. The pressure of well- 
 organised vested interests, co-operating 
 with the growing financial needs of a 
 Government which dare not risk unpopu- 
 larity by proposals of direct taxation, seems 
 likely to prevail here as in other new 
 countries : the democracy of Canada may 
 prove as unable to safeguard the true 
 interests of the body of consumers as in 
 the United States. 
 
 At any rate it is evident that Canada is 
 going through a long era of Protection, 
 moulded in the usual fashion by industrial 
 greed and political cowardice. Whether 
 the tillers of the soil and the workers in 
 mills, mines, stores, and on railroads, who 
 form the immense majority of the popu- 
 lation, will have the intelligence and the 
 power to rescue themselves from the coils 
 of this Protective serpent, is a great question 
 for the future. It arouses little interest
 
 CANADIAN PROTECTION 47 
 
 at present. When the workers of Canada 
 wake up they will find that Protection is 
 only one among the several economic 
 fangs fastened in their " corpus vile " by 
 the little group of railroad men, bankers, 
 lumber men, and manufacturing mono- 
 polists who own their country.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE AMERICANISATION OF CANADA 
 
 In the St. James's Club, at Montreal, 
 or the Rideau, at Ottawa, and still more 
 prevalent in Toronto, you find a sort of 
 Canadian who prides himself upon being 
 conspicuously British, and is loud in his 
 denunciation of the United States, her 
 politics, her commercial methods, and her 
 ways of life. This, indeed, may be 
 described as the distinctive attitude of the 
 well-to-do Canadian, who seems every- 
 where to think himself more English than 
 American. In point of fact, the very club 
 in which he thus descants is a typically 
 American product : its foods, cooking, and 
 modes of service are American ; the ante- 
 prandial cocktail, the absence of alcohol 
 from table, the literature in the reading- 
 room, the talk of sport and stocks and 
 industrial development, the very tone of 
 voice, are not English, but American. No 
 one familiar with the States can fail in all
 
 AMERICANISATION OF CANADA 49 
 
 the details of life to detect the common 
 character. 
 
 Great Britain is, of course, somewhat 
 more in evidence here than in the Republic : 
 the cocktail habit, for instance, is conjoined 
 with that use of whisky-and-soda which 
 prevails throughout the Empire ; English 
 books and magazines compete in fairly 
 equal terms with American ; Punch, the 
 Spectator, the chief illustrated weeklies, 
 and occasionally the Times, are found in 
 clubs and libraries, though the New York 
 journals, and such periodicals as Munsey's 
 and Everybody' s Magazine are far more 
 widely read. Some particular attention 
 is given to English sporting matters : I 
 found a great " sw^eepstakes " on the 
 Cambridgeshire widely advertised in Van- 
 couver, while in the chief bookstall of this 
 far-distant city a pile of the SportingTimes 
 was the most conspicuous representative 
 of English literature. 
 
 The main body of the reading of the 
 people, of course, consists of the local 
 newspapers, which in such cities as Montreal, 
 Toronto, Ottawa, and Winnipeg are for 
 the most part superior in intelligence and 
 sobriety to the Press of cities of corre- 
 sponding size in the States. Biit even 
 there the superior development of American 
 commercialism undermines Canadian inde- 
 pendence. Until quite recently the entire 
 
 4
 
 50 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 body of cable news came into Canada 
 through American sources, and selected 
 and doctored for American tastes ; and 
 though attempts are now made to place 
 Canada in direct cable relations with 
 Great Britain, it is not easy to resist the 
 economy of dealing with affairs of Europe 
 through the American Press agencies. So 
 too the Canadian Press buys in the same 
 quarter much of its general reading matter 
 to fill in the great Sunday editions which 
 spread like a disease over the whole American 
 continent : the " patent insides " are all 
 American. 
 
 This commercial pressure of the larger 
 population on the smaller, in spite of 
 political barriers, is of course inevitable. 
 The material and moral pabulum of the 
 Canadian and the American will assimilate 
 more and more as the essential community 
 of needs gets freer play. 
 
 Turning from the well-to-do habitues 
 of clubs and hotels to the ordinary man 
 in the street and woman in the home, 
 he and she are American through and 
 through, though with modifying circum- 
 stances, which I will indicate presently. 
 Take the life of the street, the store signs, 
 the dressing of the windows, the plate- 
 glass publicity of the hotels, the palaces 
 where one sits upon a gilded throne, 
 coram populo, to have one's shoes
 
 AMERICANISATION OF CANADA 51 
 
 blacked for ten cents ; the omnipresent 
 candy-store, and its sympathetic drug- 
 store ; the ill-made streets, with the pre- 
 valence of plank paths ; the promiscuous 
 levee of the hotel-hall ; the highly heated 
 rooms and cars ; the waiter, who openly 
 peruses as he stands by your table the 
 newspaper you have just laid down ; the 
 conductor and the brakeman, who sit down 
 at your table in the dining-car and treat 
 your feeble attempts at conversation with 
 the brusque superiority of their order — 
 all this is distinctively American. 
 
 The differences are mostly of degree ; 
 the superb self-confidence of the average 
 American woman as she walks abroad, 
 the licensed obtrusiveness of children, 
 the perpetual degeneracy of conversation 
 into story-telling — these characteristics are 
 less marked in Canada than in the States. 
 In fact, Canada presents as yet a sub- 
 American variety of civilisation, though 
 in some ways rapidly assimilating to the 
 States. 
 
 Physically, the Canadian seems to be 
 a sturdier stock, of heavier build, slower 
 moving, and less nervous than the Ameri- 
 can. This is particularly applicable to 
 the women, whose movements and con- 
 versation are quieter, and who are without 
 the hunted look in the eyes which marks 
 so many Americans. The colder climate
 
 52 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 may exercise some moderating influence, 
 but probably the chief explanation of 
 these differences lies in the fact that most 
 Canadians are country born and bred ; 
 there are few large cities, and even the 
 dwellers in these cities keep up a more 
 constant contact with country life. No- 
 where in Canadian cities does one see the 
 profusion of luxury and waste visible 
 in New York or Chicago ; though most 
 persons seem to live in fair comfort, there 
 is no class of millionaires dominating 
 " society " and making the form and pace 
 for servile imitation among the less wealthy 
 classes. Hunting (in the American sense 
 of shooting) and fishing, with their ac- 
 companiments of camping out, play a 
 large part in the national life, sport not 
 having degenerated into the merely gam- 
 bling and spectatorial habits. Altogether 
 the Canadian lives a healthier life ; even 
 busy cities like Toronto and Montreal 
 conduct their business life more quietly 
 than cities of corresponding calibre in the 
 United States. 
 
 At the same time it is evident that 
 Canadian life is approximating more and 
 more to that of her powerful neighbour, 
 and if the rapid manufacturing growth 
 which she anticipates takes place, the 
 qualities and defects, industrial and 
 political, of the United States will also
 
 AMERICANISATION OF CANADA 53 
 
 be those of Canada. For it is not merely 
 a case of imitation and of common needs 
 and growth ; if Canada is really destined 
 to quick development it will be achieved 
 by a large influx of American capital and 
 labour, inventive and organising energy. 
 What is already happening makes this 
 manifest. Of the flow of American 
 farmers into the Canadian north-west 
 I shall write later ; into the new manu- 
 factures of Ontario and Quebec the 
 French Canadians, who hitherto had 
 sought wage labour in the mills of New 
 England, are steadily moving back, and 
 not a little skihed American labour is 
 following. 
 
 But far more important is the flow 
 into the Dominion of American capital 
 and business enterprise. Some of the most 
 powerful American Trusts and other big 
 manufacturers have already set up large 
 works inside Canada, such as the Inter- 
 national Harvester Company, the American 
 Locomotive Works, the Singer Manu- 
 facturing Company, the Rand Drill Com- 
 pany, the Dominion Car Company, and a 
 large number of other firms, connected 
 with transport, electric apparatus, and 
 industrial machinery. Indeed, it is one 
 of the frequent boasts of the Canadian 
 Protectionist that his tariff sucks in 
 American capital, forcing the great Trusts
 
 54 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 to set up inside Canada^ with Canadian 
 labour, instead of exporting goods from 
 their American mills, though in the next 
 breath the same Protectionist, in his 
 capacity of British Imperialist, expresses 
 his regret that British capital will not come 
 into Canadian " industrials." A large 
 proportion of the big manufacturers and 
 railroad men are American born, and 
 the training and business ideas they bring 
 are imported from the States. 
 
 Though railroad officials insist that their 
 capital, at any rate, is chiefly British, 
 there is every reason to suppose that 
 Americans are investing freely in Canadian 
 railroad stock, and alike in Ontario, Mani- 
 toba, and British Columbia, American 
 railroads are everywhere planning and 
 executing northern connections. The 
 great lumber, pulp, and paper mills at 
 Ottawa I found equipped almost entirely 
 with machinery from Connecticut, Dela- 
 ware, and other American States, and 
 the same is true of many other advanced 
 manufactures. It would, indeed, be strange 
 if this were not so ; until the last few 
 years Canadian energies were almost 
 wholly agricultural, and even to-day born 
 Canadians who have come to the front 
 in business, have generally passed a long 
 apprenticeship across the border, imbibing 
 the alertness, audacity, and fertility of
 
 AMERICANISATION OF CANADA 55 
 
 resource which distinguish the American 
 business man. 
 
 Canada is a generation behind the United 
 States in most Hnes of industrial develop- 
 ment, and the latter, with their huge 
 preponderance of wealth and population, 
 are bound to play a paramount part in 
 the economics of Canada, and possibly 
 in her politics, when Canadian capital has 
 passed through its embryonic stage, and 
 has formed a fuller '* national policy " 
 of exploitation than that initiated eighteen 
 years ago by Sir John Macdonald.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FRENCH IN CANADA 
 
 The rush of new, raw American energy 
 in Canadian development is tempered by 
 the presence of another older element. 
 The old French stock, with its persistent 
 clinging to the language, the laws, the 
 religion, the agriculture, and the village 
 life of a bygone epoch in the life of France, 
 gives a distinct flavour of romance to 
 the older provinces. The long period of 
 French rule, in which monarchy wielded 
 absolute government through feudal seig- 
 neurs, has left its mark even on the politics 
 of to-day. Accustomed to regard the State 
 as a power above, an arbitrary dispenser 
 or withholder of favours, the French 
 Canadian peasant is still too much disposed 
 to regard " poHtics " as a method of 
 extracting laws and public money for 
 the improvement of his local interests. 
 His politics, his religion, and even his 
 mode of speech belong rather to pre- 
 revolutionary France than to the France 
 
 56
 
 THE FRENCH IN CANADA 57 
 
 of to-day. To the habitant of Quebec, 
 Great Britain still remains a foreign country, 
 and so far as a sense of " nationality " 
 is present to him, it is French rather than 
 American nationalism that affects his 
 mind. Not that there is any strong sym- 
 pathy with the democratic secularism of 
 the modern French republic, or any desire 
 for a reversion to political relations with 
 the old country from which their blood, 
 their laws, and their culture are derived. 
 There is no disloyalty, active or latent, 
 to the British Empire, no present sym- 
 pathy with the conception of independent 
 Canadian nationalism, still less with the 
 notion of a political merger with the 
 United States. So far as such feelings 
 can be gauged at all, it seems as if the 
 body of the French in the old provinces 
 cherish a half-conscious desire that Quebec 
 and Ontario, old Canada, could stand 
 aloof from the larger opening life of the 
 Dominion, so that the French, by virtue 
 of population, racial solidarity and habits, 
 might have their own way in the govern- 
 ment of the districts to which they are 
 attached. Such a hope, once seriously 
 entertained, is, however, now being re- 
 luctantly abandoned. For though the 
 separateness between French and British 
 Canadians in the more intimate relations 
 of life remains strongly marked, the modern
 
 58 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 industrial career upon which the country 
 is entering is beginning to make itself 
 felt even in the backwoods of Quebec. 
 The contagion of the States has now 
 for a generation been operating on the 
 young Canadians, who have poured into 
 the New England mills : their reflux into 
 the old provinces, under the pressure of the 
 new developments, brings new ideas and 
 ways of life. Raiload development, the 
 working of great lumber reserves, and 
 the utilisation of water power, are break- 
 ing down the old isolation. The lingering 
 feudalism is yielding to the same forces. 
 " The Noblesse and Seigneurs have almost 
 dwindled into the common mass of the 
 vulgar ; and their estates and Seigneuries 
 have been divided among their children, 
 or have fallen into the hands of opulent 
 British merchants." 
 
 A few of the dying generation may still 
 entertain the notion which Mr. Goldwin 
 Smith expressed fifteen years ago when 
 he wrote, " Quebec, at the present day, 
 though kindly enough in its feelings towards 
 Great Britain, is not a British colony, 
 but a little French nation." But it is 
 not alone the invasion of American in- 
 dustrialism that sweeps away this old order. 
 Canadian unity is visibly swelling ; rail- 
 ways are binding ever closer the diverse 
 provinces,' and community of interest is
 
 THE FRENCH IN CANADA 59 
 
 represented in a strengthening of the 
 federal government. 
 
 The growth of the new north-west 
 is the death-blow to the old French aspira- 
 tions. For the real basis of French domina- 
 tion in Canadian affairs lay in the pre- 
 ponderant growth of the population. 
 Nowhere in the British Empire is the 
 fecundity of population anything like as 
 great to-day as in Quebec, where the 
 birth-rate at the last census was 36.83 
 per thousand as compared with 28.80 
 for the whole country. Though the mor- 
 tality in the French villages was always 
 high, the size of their families yielded a 
 large overflow, which has annexed large 
 sections of Ontario and bids fair in time 
 to dominate the politics of that province. 
 But the rate of immigration from Europe 
 and the United States into Manitoba 
 and the north-west has turned the scale : 
 the Canadian nation of the future cannot 
 be pre-eminently French, though this 
 leaven will remain important ; it will 
 be a blend of all the European peoples, 
 resembling that of the great Republic, 
 except that the peoples of southern Europe 
 will be less prominently represented. 
 
 At present the French fuse very Httle 
 with^the British, nor do they take any 
 part? proportionate to their numbers in 
 the westward movement. They are
 
 6o CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 peasant-farmers or lumber-men in the 
 country districts, and in the rising industrial 
 cities of Ontario are the hewers of wood 
 and drawers of water for the prosperous 
 Scotch or Irish-Americans who run the 
 manufactures and the commerce. 
 
 Forming nearly two-thirds of the popula- 
 tion of Montreal, they are seldom found at 
 the head of any considerable business, 
 though not a few achieve success in 
 the professions, especially in law, for which 
 they possess great natural aptitude. But 
 though nearly all the big bankers, railway 
 men, manufacturers, and traders are 
 British, there are signs that the French 
 are beginning to encroach. Entering more 
 largely into town life, they are coming to 
 the front in engineering and other pursuits 
 where science plays a controlling part in 
 business. 
 
 The ordinary British attitude towards 
 the French Canadian is one not of personal 
 dislike but of some contempt mitigated by 
 suspicion, in essence the same attitude as 
 that which the Ulsterman adopts towards 
 the uneconomic Irishman, the smart 
 Johannesburger towards the unprogressive 
 Boer. The solidarity of the French 
 Canadian, based on religion, speech, and 
 attachment to the soil, prevents all vital 
 understanding between the two races. The 
 ordinary British theory imposed upon
 
 THE FRENCH IN CANADA 6i 
 
 the visitor to Toronto or Montreal is that 
 the French are a slow, dull people, content 
 to struggle along in poverty and to hand 
 over the chief control of their lives, with all 
 their spare cash, to the priests, who are 
 their real local rulers. But a little cross- 
 examination will often disclose the fact 
 that your informant has never been on 
 visiting terms with any single French 
 family, that his knowledge is confined to 
 purely economic relations with French 
 workmen, and that his large general judg- 
 ments are mere caught-up phrases from 
 newspapers or platforms. It is a reall}^ 
 astonishing thing how two races can live 
 side by side and know so little of one 
 another. In Quebec, where the French 
 are in an overwhelming majority, and where 
 a considerable well-to-do class exists, the 
 few British families get into some touch 
 with them ; but in Montreal there is no 
 social intercourse between the races, who 
 occupy different neighbourhoods and 
 rarely meet in any sort of common enter- 
 prise. Even where a common bond of 
 religion exists, as in the case of the Irish, 
 it does not suffice to bridge the chasm: 
 and attempts to utilise the same places of 
 worship and to co-operate in other religious 
 services have usually failed. 
 
 Probably between Irish and French, 
 both furnishing large quantities of manual
 
 62 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 labour, economic conflicts neutralise 
 religious sympathy. 
 
 The few British who have been in close 
 sympathetic touch with the French are 
 disposed to think the talk about priestly 
 tyranny exaggerated. It is quite true, 
 they say, that in the past the Church has 
 sucked great wealth from this nation of 
 staunch believers, and has undertaken the 
 practical control of their politics, but this 
 power is shaken. The habitants of the 
 most remote parts are affected by the 
 new manners brought in by the easier 
 access to cities ; industrialism is making 
 its way, the old-fashioned implements of 
 agriculture are yielding to the products 
 of the Harvester Trust, new comforts are 
 coming into the standard of living ; most 
 of the families have some member in the 
 United States or in one of the rising 
 Canadian cities. All these things are 
 stirring up the old-world routine com- 
 placency of life ; with economic changes 
 come new ideas regarding politics and 
 religion. The priests are beginning to 
 recognise that their flocks are no longer 
 their obedient children ; wrangling over 
 church dues comes to play an ever larger 
 part in village life, and the spread of reading 
 has undermined the power of the pulpit. 
 That the people of Quebec should have 
 thrown over the authority of the Bishops
 
 THE FRENCH IN CANADA 63 
 
 in the famous issue of the Manitoba Schools 
 at the bidding of Mr. Laurier and his friends 
 was a revelation of new forces at work in 
 the world of Catholic Canada. 
 
 But the cohesiveness of the French 
 Canadian people makes these changes slow. 
 Home still means more for them than for 
 any of the other races that have settled 
 in Canada ; if they break away it is generally 
 to return. Such migration as takes place 
 is more or less wholesale, as when in the 
 early days of Manitoba an attempt, 
 favoured by the Church, was made to 
 plant French Catholic influence in the 
 new north-west. " There was to be a 
 new French nation, stretching from the 
 Red River to the Rockies, possibly under 
 the British flag, and tolerating no doubt 
 the presence of Anglo-Saxons, but domin- 
 ated by priests and bishops." ^ This 
 dream is dissipated, and it is well that it 
 is so. 
 
 ^ Bradley, Canada in the Twentieth Century, 255.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 COLONIAL PREFERENCE 
 
 The preferential arrangement in the 
 
 Canadian tariff of 1897 giving Great Britain 
 
 a reduction of 33 1-3 per cent, upon import 
 
 duties cannot seriously be regarded as 
 
 the beginning of an enduring fiscal policy, 
 
 still less as the foundation-stone of an 
 
 Imperial system of preferential trade. It 
 
 was in origin a stroke of party politics. 
 
 It is tolerably certain that before the 
 
 elections of 1896 Sir W. Laurier gave 
 
 the manufacturing interests clearly to 
 
 understand that if he were placed in 
 
 power he would not disturb in any serious 
 
 way the protective system ; this pledge, 
 
 or understanding, served to draw the fangs 
 
 of commercial opposition, and helped to 
 
 give him his large majority. 
 
 As a political move this holding out 
 
 of hands to the Mother Country has so 
 
 far been successful, and Mr. Fielding, the 
 
 astute agent of the policy, is probably 
 
 correct in claiming that " practically the 
 
 64
 
 COLONIAL PREFERENCE 65 
 
 two great political parties in Canada are 
 a unit ,to-day in favour of the principle of 
 Preferential trade." But so far as this 
 is true, it is a testimony not to the magni- 
 tude but to the insignificance of the results 
 of Preference. Among politicians of all 
 grades there is a good deal of lip-homage 
 given to something that is called Im- 
 perialism, and Preference ranks as an 
 item in this vaguely-conceived policy of 
 a closely-linked British Empire. Most 
 business men approve Preference because 
 they would, other things equal, rather 
 deal with England than with the United 
 States or Germany. But the ordinary 
 Canadian neither knows nor cares about 
 the Preference. 
 
 First, it must be remembered that 42 
 per cent, of imported merchandise enters 
 Canada free. Next, of the dutiable imports 
 a very large proportion consists of food- 
 stuffs, raw materials, and certain sorts 
 of manufacture, such as woods and oil, 
 which Great Britain cannot produce for 
 export. Here the United States, our great 
 competitor, holds an enormous and a 
 permanent advantage. 
 
 Though Preference has had some ap- 
 parent influence in checking the rate of 
 the decline in growth of British as compared 
 with American imports into Canada, it 
 does not prevent that decline from con- 
 5
 
 66 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 tinuing. Ever since 1870 there has been 
 a continual clecUne in the proportion of 
 imports taken from Great Britain and 
 a continual increase in the proportion 
 taken from the United vStates. This move- 
 ment, though retarded, is not stopped by 
 the Preference. In the first year of the 
 Preference, 1899, Canada drew 24.72 per 
 cent, of her imports from Great Britain, 
 59.24 per cent, from the United States ; 
 in T905 she draws 23.98 per cent, from 
 Great Britain, 60.58 per cent, from the 
 United States. 
 
 If we exclude the articles we cannot 
 export, and confine ourselves exclusively 
 to those in which we compete directly 
 with the United States, the result remains 
 just about the same — the latter is slowly 
 gaining upon us. It cannot, therefore, 
 even be claimed for the Canadian Preference 
 that it has stayed the relative decline of 
 British imports. That it has assisted certain 
 British manufacturers to hold and even 
 to improve their competitive position is 
 obvious, for every cause must have an 
 effect. But the proved gains are with 
 one exception small, and are all precarious. 
 The following British manufactures re- 
 ceived some benefit : — wool, cotton, linen, 
 flax, leather, glass, carpets, curtains, 
 cordage, jams, confectioner}^ and earthen- 
 ware. Now it will be observed in the
 
 COLONIAL PREFERENCE 67 
 
 first place that almost all those of any 
 consequence belong to the textile group. 
 Only three of these, viz. wool, cotton, 
 flax, show a trade in dutiable imports 
 amounting to a million dollars value, 
 and of these three only one — wool — can 
 be described as a really considerable trade, 
 amounting, in fact, to a value of over 
 thirteen mihions. Moreover, the recently 
 published figures for 1905 indicate that 
 in most of these benefited trades the 
 Hmit of gain is reached : in cotton, curtains, 
 cordage, flax and linen, earthenware, an 
 actual decline of dutiable values is re- 
 gistered, and in the most considerable of 
 these, viz. cotton, the decline of British 
 is accompanied by a considerable expansion 
 of American imports. The only British 
 trade which has quite clearly made a 
 considerable benefit from the Preference 
 is the woollen trade. 
 
 Now, economic critics who have pointed 
 out the inherent inconsistency between 
 Protective and Preferential duties are 
 commonly derided as " mere theorists." 
 But recent happenings in the woollen 
 trade of Canada fully justify this criticism. 
 The Preferential duty on woollen goods 
 made itself felt at once in its influence 
 on the " infant " industry of Canada. 
 Most of the Canadian woollen mills have 
 collapsed before Yorkshire competition ;
 
 68 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 in woollen cloths, in carpets, and in 
 worsteds, they find themselves quite un- 
 equal to the struggle ; in blankets alone 
 they seem able to hold their own. 
 
 Directty this effect of Preference was 
 felt, the Canadian manufacturers began 
 their pressure on the Government, and in 
 his Budget speech of 1904 Mr. Fielding 
 announced a '' modification " of the Pre- 
 ference in the case of two classes of goods, 
 viz. woollen cloths and twine and 
 cordage, where British manufacturers were 
 competing successfully with Canadian. 
 Under the 33 1-3 per cent. Preference the 
 duty on British goods had fallen to 23 1-3 
 per cent, ad valorem. Now, at the demand 
 of the Canadian trade, a minimum tariff 
 of 30 per cent, was set upon these goods. 
 Similarly, in the case of twine and cordage, 
 the Preferential duty was raised from 16 2-3 
 to 20 per cent. These changes were ad- 
 mittedly made to protect the Canadian 
 manufacturer against British competition, 
 and signify a withdrawal of Preference so 
 far as Preference conflicts with the Pro- 
 tective policy to which the Laurier Govern- 
 ment is now committed. 
 
 The case of the Canadian woollen trade 
 is crucial ; the manufacturers are not satis- 
 fied with the modification of 1904, and 
 demand further concessions to Protection. 
 What holds of the woollen trade will hold
 
 COLONIAL PREFERENCE 69 
 
 of every other British trade which com- 
 petes with a Canadian industry. 
 
 Canadian business men and poUticians 
 sincerely desire that Great Britain rather 
 than the United States or Germany should 
 supply the manufactured goods which they 
 must import. But the attempt to give 
 efficacy to this desire by means of Prefer- 
 ential duties is impracticable. So far as 
 the greater part of the field of imports is 
 concerned, Great Britain cannot compete. 
 No possible amount of Preference will enable 
 her to displace the United States in large 
 classes of trade directed to supply those 
 needs or tastes which are distinctly 
 American, such as drugs, perfumery, books, 
 paints and colours, mineral waters : the 
 hold which the United States has got in 
 some branches of the metal trades, such as 
 brass and copper goods, machine tools, 
 electrical apparatus, and in certain sorts 
 of wood, cotton and leather manufactures, 
 cannot successfully be challenged by British 
 producers. One of the most significant 
 facts shown by Canadian trade statistics 
 is the failure of the Preference to enable 
 British metal manufacturers to compete 
 with the United States. Not merely in 
 American specialities, but in most of the 
 staple branches of the iron, steel, and 
 machinery manufactures, the United States 
 is advancing fast.
 
 70 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 This single group represents a far larger 
 aggregate of values than the whole of the 
 British trades which have gained through 
 the Preference, and well illustrates the 
 impotence of small artificial devices to 
 reverse the natural course of trade. 
 
 The notion of a " schedule of forbidden 
 industries/' any shackle on the future 
 possible development of Canadian in- 
 dustries, is too absurd for discussion. If 
 any group of Canadian capitalists thinks 
 the time has come when they can success- 
 fully establish an industry to produce any 
 class of goods hitherto imported from Great 
 Britain, they will demand from Mr. 
 Fielding, or any other Minister of Finance, 
 the withdrawal of the Preference, or, what 
 amounts to the samie thing, the increase of 
 the duty on which the Preference is based, 
 and they will get it.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 BRITISH SLACKNESS 
 
 I HAVE already pointed out how trivial is 
 the benefit conferred on British trade by 
 the Preferential treatment accorded by 
 Canada to our imports, and how precarious 
 such trade must be, resting as it does upon 
 a policy at variance with the general Pro- 
 tective system which is now firmly planted 
 in the Dominion. Every artificial stimulus 
 slackens the incentive to honest enterprise. 
 If English manufacturers think that they 
 can beat American and German com- 
 petitors by this favourable handicap, they 
 will naturally neglect sound business 
 methods. This is what notoriously occurs 
 in Canada. So little trouble is taken by 
 English manufacturers and exporters to 
 study the requirements of Canadian con- 
 sumers and to push their wares by legitimate 
 trade methods that scores of little trades 
 are securely held by foreigners which 
 English firms could share if they cared 
 to recommend their wares to Canadian 
 buyers. 
 
 71
 
 72 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 It ispartly a slacknessof private enterprise. 
 Our competitors in the United States keep 
 a constant stream of commercial travellers 
 flowing through the towns of Canada ; there 
 are at least a hundred Americans " on the 
 road " for every Englishman. An Enghsh 
 firm will send out a representative to make 
 a market. His first tour will be unpro- 
 ductive, he will make an unfavourable 
 report, and the matter will be dropped. 
 An American firm will send again and again, 
 tempting the retail store until an order is 
 procured, and having once got his wedge 
 in, will drive it home. Of course, the 
 American enjoys a considerable advantage 
 from propinquity ; he can communicate 
 with his house and get an answer in three 
 or four days, whereas, unless the order is 
 big enough to justify the use of the cable, 
 an English agent consumes several weeks 
 in fixing terms of sale ; and there is a 
 similar advantage to the American in the 
 execution of orders. 
 
 Then, again, there is the question of 
 advertising. Not only do American firms 
 spend more freely than British, but in 
 Canada they enjoy a practical monopoly 
 of the best instruments of advertisement, 
 the periodical literature. Going the other 
 day into a drug store in a considerable 
 Canadian town, I asked for drugs patented 
 in England under several universally known
 
 BRITISH SLACKNESS 73 
 
 titles. The druggist had never even heard 
 the name of any of them, and instead 
 offered me a choice of American articles. 
 This is a quite common experience, and 
 must be attributed largely to the fact that 
 the magazines and other popular literature 
 circulating throughout Canada are American, 
 not English. This is not wholly a matter 
 of taste ; many English publications would 
 find a fair market here, if the postage were 
 not regarded as prohibitive. Many of the 
 showy, popular American magazines, of 
 the Miinsey type, are delivered to the 
 reader at a dollar a year, whereas reading 
 pabulum of the same calibre from England 
 is loaded with a postage of another dollar. 
 
 It is quite true that the Canadian gets 
 his English magazine by post as cheaply as 
 the English do themselves, but the recent 
 cheapening of all reading matter in America 
 has made the charge for postage relatively 
 higher, and nearly always turns the scale. 
 All the trade advertisements which meet 
 the Canadian eve are thus American, not 
 British ; even those magazines of British 
 origin, such as the Strand, which do enjoy 
 a wide vogue, are American editions, con- 
 taining exclusively American trade adver- 
 tisements. 
 
 Thus it comes about that the Canadian 
 retailer and consumer are familiarised with 
 American goods, have their names and
 
 74 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 shapes and qualities continually flaunted 
 before their eyes, while English goods as 
 excellent in character and cheaper in price 
 are utterly unknown to them. 
 
 But the lack of machinery connecting 
 English manufacturers with Canadian 
 importers and wholesale dealers is still 
 more injurious to British trade with Canada. 
 Here we come across a most extraordinary 
 delinquency on the part of our Colonial 
 Ofhce. Some years ago, in response to 
 repeated probing, Lord Salisbury stirred 
 up the British Consulate to do some element- 
 ary work in the nature of supplying com- 
 mercial intelligence for the use of British 
 business firms. These Consular Reports, 
 often made by men ignorant of commerce, 
 are usually crude performances, appearing 
 at long intervals, and ill-circulated, but 
 they contain some organised authentic 
 information serviceable to our exporters. 
 In the most insignificant South American 
 State we possess some official whose duty 
 it is to keep himself in touch with com- 
 mercial opportunities for British trade. 
 
 But in the Dominion of Canada, as in 
 our other Colonies, we retain no single repre- 
 sentative who acts as commercial agent 
 or information bureau for facilitating 
 British commerce. English manufacturers 
 and contractors are thus hopelessly handi- 
 capped in the seizure of opportunities for
 
 BRITISH SLACKNESS 75 
 
 profitable trade as compared not only with 
 the United States but with every other 
 civilised country in the world. The United 
 States possesses alert trade agents in every 
 city of Canada, great or small. 
 
 She has no fewer than eighty-nine men 
 whose business it is to look after the interests 
 of American export trade, keen commercial 
 men watching every sort of business oppor- 
 tunity, and sparing neither time nor trouble 
 in scenting new markets and profitable 
 contracts. A constant stream of detailed 
 information pours in through these channels 
 to the Department of Commerce at Washing- 
 ton, is digested, and flows out in a daily 
 Trade Circular, distributed far and wide 
 over the whole business world. What the 
 United States does, every other European 
 Government does, though less thoroughly. 
 
 Nations like Belgium, Switzerland, even 
 Portugal, have paid far more public atten- 
 tion to Canadian markets than Great 
 Britain has. There are no fewer than 
 eleven Belgian agents diligently pushing 
 the wares of their countrymen. Canada 
 herself has nearly a score of commercial 
 representatives in Great Britain, the 
 British Colonies, and in the chief European 
 States, looking out for opportunities of 
 Canadian export trade. It is simply 
 idiotic to prate about the necessity of 
 cultivating inter - imperial trade while
 
 76 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 neglecting the most obvious means of 
 bringing together British seUers and 
 Colonial buyers. A single instance will 
 serve to indicate the working of the neglect. 
 Some new public work is in contemplation 
 — say the making of a new bridge at 
 Ottawa. Directly it is determined to 
 undertake the work and to invite contracts, 
 the American agent, who is on the spot, 
 hears of it, and wires full information to 
 Washington, which is brought to the notice 
 of all the great contracting firms in the 
 country through next day's Trade Circular. 
 There is no security that any British 
 firm will ever hear of the opportunity ; 
 there is no man at Ottawa or anywhere 
 in Canada whose duty it is to give informa- 
 tion to any other man in Great Britain who 
 shall make it known to British contractors. 
 The Trade and Commerce Department 
 at Ottawa, in its careful weekly and 
 monthly Reports, issued for the informa- 
 tion of Canadian manufacturers and mer- 
 chants, performs in an eleemosynary way 
 some of the work neglected by Great 
 Britain. It receives a considerable number 
 of inquiries from British firms seeking to 
 establish business connections and to get 
 markets in Canada, and acting as informal 
 middle-man, seeks to bring the inquirers 
 into touch with Canadian purchasers. I 
 take the following examples from a recent
 
 BRITISH SLACKNESS 77 
 
 weekly Report : — " A North of England 
 cement manufacturer desires to appoint 
 an agent in Canada for the sale of Portland 
 cement." " A Yorkshire worsted spinner 
 desires to get into communication with 
 Canadian manufacturers requiring worsted 
 yarns, warp and weft, either in tubes, in 
 hanks, or bundles." " A Huh, Eng., 
 manufacturer of binder twine, hemp sack- 
 ings, and hemp yarn of every description, 
 desires communication with Canadian 
 buyers, and will appoint an agent in 
 Canada." During the first nine months 
 of last year upwards of 2000 trade inquiries 
 of this sort have been received by the 
 Ottawa Department. Of course, all this 
 most properly falls within the function of 
 British officials. 
 
 The appointment of a really competent 
 trade agent in Ottawa, with a couple of 
 clerks, and with carefully chosen corre- 
 spondents in Halifax, St. John, Quebec, 
 Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Van- 
 couver, could do vastly more for British 
 export trade with Canada than any Pre- 
 ferential tariff terms which Canada is 
 capable of giving. The gross and palpable 
 neglect of public duty here described has 
 been the object of pertinacious representa- 
 tions to the Colonial Office for some years, 
 but no attention is paid, and^ nothing is 
 done.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE WHEATFIELDS 
 
 Winnipeg stands at the entrance of what 
 is perhaps destined to be the greatest 
 wheatfield in the world. As you leave 
 that city travelling west you plunge at 
 once into the four hundred miles of almost 
 unbroken wheat cultivation, extending 
 beyond Regina, the capital of the new 
 province of Saskatchewan. 
 
 Nearly all the great wheat lands lie 
 near the railroads. All the grain had 
 been cut when I passed through; much 
 of it, however, was still lying in loose 
 hillocks waiting for the thresher. The 
 land mostly lay in thick yellow stubble, 
 though some farmers were already busy 
 ploughing up the black soil so as to make 
 all ready for the spring sowing when the 
 long winter shall yield to the April sun. 
 Every now and then along the horizon 
 rose the smoke of the steam thresher at 
 work upon a stack of wheat or barley, 
 
 sucking it in, extracting the grain, cleaning 
 
 78
 
 THE WHEATFIELDS 79 
 
 it, depositing it in boxes ready for transport, 
 and registering the exact quantity threshed. 
 The bigger farmers often own a thresher, 
 but most wait their turn for one of the 
 machines which the threshing gangs take 
 round from farm to farm. The threshing 
 is the hvehest and most important process 
 in the year's work, and forms a lucrative 
 occupation for thousands of men. 
 
 The straw is left lying in mounds in 
 the fields, valueless, and at night the 
 gloom is broken at intervals by frequent 
 fires lighted to consume it. As soon as 
 the threshing is over, the farmer, at his 
 earliest convenience, hauls his wheat to the 
 nearest elevator, the large, ugly granary, 
 some hundreds of which stand at the 
 stations along the railroads, conspicuous 
 objects everywhere in West Canada. 
 The elevator (so called because it lifts 
 the grain from the carts before throwing 
 it into the great storage bins) is a very 
 important link in the process of marketing 
 the wheat. One of these elevators at 
 Fort Wilham holds 3,000,000 bushels, but 
 so rapid has been the recent expansion of 
 the wheat supply that a shortage of elevator 
 space is one of the gravest troubles in the 
 agricultural situation. Upwards of 90 per 
 cent, of the farmers sell their wheat out- 
 right to the elevator companies ; the rest 
 leave it on deposit, graded and stored,
 
 8o CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 waiting for a favourable price to sell. They 
 do not, however, lie out of their money, 
 for the elevators give certificates up to 
 80 per cent, of the value, which are accepted 
 as a basis of bank credit. 
 
 When the wheat is stored, the struggle 
 for " cars " to carry it to Fort Arthur or 
 other point of water-carriage begins. The 
 present rail accommodation from Winnipeg, 
 where the grain trains gather on their way 
 to the Lake Superior ports, is now wholly 
 inadequate for quick safe transport. Until 
 the Grand Trunk and other roads are 
 available this will be a growing difficulty. 
 Once got afloat at Fort William or Arthur, 
 the wheat passes through the canal at 
 Sault St. Marie, connecting Lake Huron 
 with Lake Superior, and is mostly landed 
 at some port on LIuron or Georgian Bay, 
 or else is carried by the St. Clair River to 
 Lake Erie, where it is landed at Buffalo, 
 or in some instances keeps water through 
 the Welland Canal until it reaches Kingston, 
 or even Montreal. But practically all 
 the wheat must be transferred after its 
 lake passage to the railroad to be carried 
 to the port — Montreal, Quebec, Halifax, 
 in summer ; Portland, Maine, Boston, or 
 New York, in winter — from which it is 
 borne across the Atlantic. In moving 
 the wheat the crux of course lies in the 
 fact that lake navigation practically
 
 THE WHEATFIELDS 8i 
 
 closes with November, so that, if the 
 expensive overland route to an open port 
 in the United States is to be avoided, the 
 wheat must be rushed along the routes 
 above described daring October and 
 November. It is true that wheat will 
 keep ; but storage costs half a cent per 
 bushel each month, and, allowing for 
 insurance and shrinkage, there is a loss 
 amounting to about 7^- cents a bushel in 
 holding the wheat over till next spring. 
 Of course, higher spring prices sometimes 
 (as last year) justify the holding over, 
 but the present defective machinery for 
 rapid carriage is an injurious element. 
 
 Various plans for easing the situation 
 are eagerly canvassed throughout Canada. 
 One of the most obvious is to develop 
 flour mills in Canada, and to export, 
 instead of wheat, the flour, which will 
 bear the heavier cost of land transport. 
 A few well-equipped rolling mills already 
 exist at Winnipeg, Ratportage, Montreal, 
 and elsewhere, and it seems likely that 
 the first-named city will be a great milling 
 centre. But this will offer no sufficient 
 solution for the main problem, which is 
 one of multiplying the railroad accommoda- 
 tion during the period of open water- 
 carriage. Canada undoubtedly has the 
 wheat lands, and if the present rate of 
 growth of immigration continues she will 
 6
 
 82 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 have the farmers, and can grow the wheat ; 
 but unless a prodigious increase of railroad 
 development takes place, she will be 
 frustrated in her desire to furnish the 
 bulk of the wheat supply for the British 
 consumer. 
 
 The Grand Trunk transcontinental 
 scheme now afoot, and the proposed 
 extension of the Canadian Northern and 
 other Canadian and American roads may 
 in time make adequate provision, but a 
 dearth of railways must retard the growth 
 of wheat cultivation during the next ten 
 years. Among other railroad plans, that 
 of a line from Winnipeg to Fort Churchill, 
 or some other point on Hudson's Bay, is 
 canvassed, a plausible enough scheme on 
 paper. The road would not be a long 
 one — some 700 miles — and the distance to 
 Liverpool by this northern sea route would 
 be shortened by the same number of miles. 
 But the difficulties of utilising such a 
 route are probably insuperable. The sea 
 passage through Hudson's Straits would 
 be open only for July, August, and 
 September, so could not handle any 
 quantity of this year's wheat, and even in 
 summer the navigation is dangerous. Such 
 defects and difficulties do not, however, 
 prevent the confident Canadian from 
 prophesying that Canada will be able in a 
 few years' time to send England all the
 
 THE WHEATFIELDS 83 
 
 wheat she will need for her teeming 
 population. 
 
 The critical report upon wheat pro- 
 duction for export, made last summer 
 by Professor Mavor of Toronto to the 
 British Board of Trade, has been a subject 
 of acrimonious attack by the Press and 
 politicians of Canada, because it throws 
 doubts upon the possibility of so rapid 
 a development of wheat production. As 
 usual in such cases, the issue turns upon 
 the widely divergent evidence of experts, 
 who differ on every essential matter, the 
 annual area cultivable in wheat, the esti- 
 mated aggregate yield, the quantity to 
 be retained for home consumption, and 
 so the net amount available for export. 
 The most conservative authority places 
 this last at 169,250,000 bushels, the most 
 liberal at no less than 612,000,000, much 
 more than enough to supply the require- 
 ments of the British market. 
 
 Professor Mavor inclines towards the 
 more conservative estimate, supported by 
 elaborate evidence, which his critics usually 
 have not read. One of the leading members 
 of the Ottawa Government, who spoke 
 to me in scathing terms of the folly 
 of the Mavor report, naively volunteered 
 the information that he had only read 
 the final summary. The gist of Professor 
 Mavor's important argument is that " Very
 
 84 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 great improvements in the productive 
 power of the country, and a very consider- 
 able increase in the effective population, 
 as well as a more exclusive regard to 
 wheat cultivation, would have to take 
 place before the north-west could be 
 regarded as being in a position to be 
 relied upon as producing for export to 
 Great Britain a quantity of wheat nearly 
 sufficient for the growing requirements 
 of that country." 
 
 The main considerations upon which 
 he relies are that the United States will 
 in a few years' time probably become a 
 considerable purchaser of Canadian wheat, 
 that the growth of the agricultural popula- 
 tion in the north - west is unlikely to 
 expand at the pace of the growth of 
 immigration during the last three 3/ears, 
 and that even if an adequate amount of 
 land were available as wheat land, the 
 settlement of immigrants on small farms 
 will not favour so exclusive a production 
 of wheat as is sometimes supposed. In- 
 flation and depression are incidents in 
 the history of every new country, fat 
 years are followed by lean, and to generalise 
 for the future of north - west agriculture 
 on the basis of three or four " bumper " 
 crops would be an obvious act of folly. 
 
 While such reflections do not recom- 
 mend themselves to " boomsters/' they
 
 THE WHEATFIELDS 85 
 
 are exercising a sobering effect upon the 
 minds of the more thoughtful Canadians 
 who are not speculating in land companies 
 and railroad stock, and who recognise 
 that a slower and more steady develop- 
 ment of the really rich resources of the 
 north-west will favour the future pros- 
 perity of the country far more than an 
 artificially fabricated rush, followed by 
 a panic and collapse such as occurred 
 in the early Manitoba da3^s.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Canada's new blood 
 
 The most important industry of Canada 
 is the manufacture of raw human material 
 from Europe into Canadian farmers and 
 citizens. The best point of survey for 
 this great work is the immigration office 
 at Winnipeg, which is under the charge 
 of an admirably humane and versatile 
 officer, Mr. Obed Smith. Stagnant for 
 many years after the short spurt of the 
 early eighties, the stream of imxmigration 
 into Canada has been swelling rapidly 
 in the last few years. During the nineties 
 farmers from Ontario and the nearer States 
 of the Union had explored the rich agri- 
 cultural resources of the north-west, but 
 not until the last five years did the flow 
 of settlers assume great dimensions and 
 European immigrants play any large part. 
 The significant growth of the last few 
 years may be best displayed by the follow- 
 ing condensed table : — 
 
 86
 
 CANADA'S NEW BLOOD 
 
 87 
 
 
 1899 
 
 1900 
 
 1901 * 
 
 1902 
 
 1903 
 
 1904 
 
 190S 
 
 British . 
 
 European Con- 
 tinentals 
 
 United States . 
 
 Other Nation- 
 alities . 
 
 10,700 
 
 16,749 
 11.945 
 
 5,169 
 
 5.141 
 
 8,270 
 8,543 
 
 1,941 
 
 11,810 
 
 10,428 
 17,987 
 
 8,924 
 
 17.259 
 
 15.830 
 26,388 
 
 7,902 
 
 41,792 
 
 28,947 
 49,473 
 
 8,152 
 
 5°.374 
 
 29,056 
 45.229 
 
 5.672 
 
 65.359 
 
 35.319 
 43.543 
 
 2,045 
 
 Total . 
 
 44.563 
 
 23.895 
 
 49,149 
 
 67.379 
 
 128,364 
 
 130,331 
 
 146,266 
 
 * Ending June 30. 
 
 About three-quarters of these new-comers 
 settle in the north-west, most of the re- 
 mainder in British Cohimbia and Ontario. 
 There is also a large and growing drift 
 of Canadians from Ontario and the Mari- 
 time Provinces into Manitoba and the 
 new west. It seems pretty clear that 
 this is destined to become the most mixed 
 population of the modern world. The 
 Europeans and " other nationahties " that 
 pass through Mr. Obed Smith's hands 
 tax to the utmost the resources of his 
 interpreters. A great and growing number 
 come from Austro-Hungary, with its 
 numerous races and languages ; Russia 
 contributes several thousands per annum, 
 so do the Scandinavian countries ; from 
 Germany, Poland, and Italy there is a 
 considerable flow, while handfuls of Syrians, 
 Armenians, Greeks, and Turks, to say 
 nothing of a rapidly increasing number 
 of Russian Jews, find their way in.
 
 88 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 When these immigrants reach Winnipeg 
 they have to be sifted, sorted, and dis- 
 patched to their proper destination, if 
 they have one. Those who have friends 
 akeady in the country require advice 
 and assistance in reaching them. Those 
 who have none are taken care of by Mr. 
 Smith, who houses and feeds them until 
 some temporary job can be found for 
 them, or until they can be drafted off 
 to some part of the country where settle- 
 ments of their fellow-countrymen already 
 exist. Large numbers arrive in penury, 
 often with a wife and young family, 
 raked in from some distant Galician or 
 Hungarian village by some enterprising 
 agent, utterly helpless strangers in this 
 huge, lone land. The detailed personal 
 care required to handle this bewildered 
 mass of raw humanity, mostly drawn 
 straight from some mid-European village 
 life, may be imagined. Many of them 
 must be sheltered on the Government 
 premises for weeks before they can be 
 got upon the land. When, as is more 
 usual, the man comes first, leaving his 
 family to follow later, it is easier to deal 
 with him, for every able-bodied manual 
 worker can get employment, either in 
 the towns or on the railroad or as a tem- 
 porary hand upon a farm, where he learns 
 something of the country, and can save
 
 CANADA'S NEW BLOOD 89 
 
 money to work a homestead claim on his 
 own account. 
 
 Among the European arrivals, everyone 
 agrees in assessing most highly the Scandi- 
 navians, and in particular the Icelanders, 
 several thousands of whom are scattered 
 about the north-west, both on the land 
 and in the towns, adapting themselves 
 quickly and successfully to the conditions 
 of their new home, learning the English 
 language, and becoming almost at once 
 good Canadian citizens. Russia has, from 
 the first opening of the north-west, been 
 a large contributor, several thousands of 
 Mennonites from Ekaterinoslav being 
 among the early settlers in the seventies. 
 Since 1898 large settlements of Doukhobors 
 have taken place in these districts, between 
 eight and nine thousand persons occupying 
 altogether no less than 350,000 acres. 
 In spite of two or three outbreaks of 
 religious fanaticism, with naked pilgrimages 
 to find Jesus in the north, these sturdy 
 Russian Protestants are prospering. Joined 
 by their hereditary leader, Mr. Peter 
 Verezin, they have adopted a tolerably 
 complete communism in most of their 
 villages, refusing to take advantage of 
 the homestead law, occupying and working 
 their land in common, and providing for 
 the wants of all the villagers from a general 
 village fund.
 
 go CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 The life is otherwise almost wholly 
 self-contained. " They grind the wheat 
 grown by themselves in their own mills ; 
 they grind their flax also in their own mills, 
 and press linseed oil. They grow flax 
 for yarn, and spin and weave it into 
 linen. They spin and weave wool into 
 woollen cloth, and as a rule make their 
 own garments, although, when they are 
 working externally, the men buy ready- 
 made clothes. Their threshing machinery, 
 flour and flax mills, and their sawmills, 
 are all driven by steam power." " It 
 is proposed to erect an elevator in anticipa- 
 tion of extensive wheat production, and, 
 perhaps, to connect the villages by tele- 
 phone and also by a narrow-gauge railway." 
 How far the simple spirit of the village 
 communism brought from Russia will sur- 
 vive in the midst of modern mechanical 
 improvements, and the material prosperity 
 they bring, is a matter for interesting 
 speculation. But, so far, the best authori- 
 ties agree that, in spite of some refractory 
 behaviour, the Doukhobors have proved 
 " good stuff " for the Canadian north-west. 
 
 The same judgment, in general, is passed 
 on the other Europeans from mid-Europe. 
 Practically all these folk are drawn from 
 the agricultural centres of Europe, bringing 
 with them the habit of hard work and 
 of simple living, and, so soon as they are
 
 CANADA'S NEW BLOOD 91 
 
 in a position to work for themselves 
 a homestead grant of 160 acres, and 
 perhaps to purchase a second quarter- 
 section, they become possessed of a pros- 
 perity beyond their earlier dreams. 
 
 A glance at the table of statistics shows 
 that the foreign-speaking immigration from 
 Europe is considerably outnumbered by 
 two other influxes. During the last three 
 years the flow of British has increased 
 so rapidly that last year it approached 
 the proportion of one-half of the total 
 immigration. Now, regarding this influx, 
 I found the mind of Canadians divided. 
 From a political and sentimental stand- 
 point they were inclined to rejoice that 
 the Briton, who hitherto had neglected 
 Canada for the United States, should 
 now prefer to come and settle under the 
 flag, and help to build up the Empire in 
 Canada. On the other hand, those practi- 
 cally acquainted with the sort of British 
 who enter Canada are less enthusiastic. 
 Though English farmers or farm-labourers 
 are welcomed as a valuable accession 
 to Canadian life, and are able to do well 
 for themselves and for the country, it 
 is sorrowfully recognised that England 
 has not many such to spare. 
 
 Scotsmen who come out, whether to 
 settle on the land, or in city industries, 
 which are so largely in their hands, com-
 
 92 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 monly do well. But it is idle to shirk 
 the truth — unpalatable as it is — that a 
 very large proportion of English immigrants 
 do not contain the physical, industrial, 
 and moral qualities fitting them for success 
 in a new country, where hard work and 
 a hard life are demanded. It may be 
 doubted whether a majority of the 49,000 
 (or, at any rate, of the adults among 
 them) who last year entered Canada as 
 settlers are well fitted for settlement in 
 such a country. 
 
 It is urgent that politicians and philan- 
 thropists, seized with the notion of assisted 
 emigration from Great Britain into the 
 boundless north-west, should try to get 
 some elementary grasp of the facts of 
 the situation. If they would ask, not 
 what is theoretically desirable, but what is 
 practicable, and would study the effects 
 of past experiments along the line of 
 their proposals, they would save much 
 money and some misplaced sentiment. 
 They would, for instance, recognise as 
 a quite certain fact that if a body of 
 Southern Britons be taken either from 
 the slums of cities or from village life 
 and planted at great expense in an excellent 
 patch of wheat land in Alberta some forty 
 or fifty miles from the smallest town, not 
 more than a trifling fraction of these men 
 and their families will stay. Even the
 
 CANADA'S NEW BLOOD 93 
 
 rural labourer of England, able - bodied 
 and capable of standing the climate, will 
 generally drift into the town in preference 
 to earning a better material livelihood upon 
 the land. We have, however, no able-bodied 
 rural labourers to spare in England, and 
 to take a heterogeneous collection of un- 
 employed or discontented people — com- 
 mercial travellers, clerks, shopmen, even 
 artisans — and put them on the land 200 
 miles from a railroad station, as was 
 the case with the famous Barr Colony, 
 is manifestly to court failure. Professor 
 Mavor, visiting this colony last summer, 
 " found that many had left it to settle 
 in other parts of the country, and that 
 very few of those who remained had been 
 able to make much progress in establishing 
 themselves, owing to ignorance of the 
 rudiments of agriculture, and to their 
 want of experience of rural conditions." 
 
 This judgment, which may be taken 
 as typical, does not signify that no English- 
 man except a farmer or a farm labourer can 
 succeed as a Canadian settler. On the 
 contrary, I found most experienced men 
 agree that an able-bodied English towns- 
 man willing to do hard work, and able 
 to rough it for a while as a helper on a farm, 
 so as to learn something of the country, 
 was often capable of making an excellent 
 farmer either in wheat-growing or ranching.
 
 94 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 But the notion that the problem of the 
 unemployed can be solved, or even miti- 
 gated appreciably, by assisting men to 
 emigrate who cannot make a living in 
 English town life, the notion of dumping 
 in Canada the " failures " of our economic 
 system, is as foolish from the standpoint 
 of society as it is cruel from that of the 
 individual victims. 
 
 All this applies with peculiar force to 
 the young men of the well-to-do classes 
 who, failing to make their way at home 
 in a profession, from idleness or irregularity 
 of life, are encouraged by their friends 
 to remove themselves to a more distant 
 field of action. Not one in ten of this sort 
 will be straightened by Canadian life or 
 stimulated into self-sufficiency ; the rest 
 are too feeble-charactered to work out 
 their redemption in the way their friends 
 fondly imagine. 
 
 Finally, there is the current of immi- 
 gration from the United States. Of all 
 the new stock, this is by far the most 
 valuable ; for the forty thousand odd farm- 
 ing folk who now yearly come up from 
 Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, are 
 not only experienced in the same agri- 
 cultural life, but they bring with them 
 considerable capital, take up larger tracts 
 of land than the European, and work it 
 with all the skill and enterprise with which
 
 CANADA'S NEW BLOOD 95 
 
 American life has endowed them. Not 
 a few are Americans of the older stock, 
 who have sold their farms for good prices, 
 and are moving across the frontier to 
 take up better land bought from the 
 Canadian Pacific Railway or some land 
 company at a few dollars an acre. The 
 average value of the movable property 
 these immigrants bring with them is about 
 1200 dols. per man, not to mention his 
 bank account ; most of them, therefore, 
 settle with every prospect of success. 
 
 These men mostly accept Canadian 
 nationahty, and are likely to play a most 
 influential part in the political and economic 
 future of the country. 
 
 Those who hear for the first time of 
 this American invasion of Canada are 
 sometimes seized with alarm lest it should 
 in process of time cause a gravitation of 
 these North- West Provinces into the poHti- 
 cal system of the United States. " These 
 American settlers will bring with them 
 their attachment to repubhcan institutions, 
 their love for the star-spangled banner. 
 In case of any future trouble between 
 Canada and the United States they would 
 form a class of ' Copper-heads ' (to borrow 
 the old expressive term from the Civil 
 War), or in any case would constitute 
 an element of doubt and division in the 
 councils of the Canadian nation." It is
 
 96 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 not unnatural that British visitors, im- 
 pressed by the glowing and highly vocable 
 patriotism which greets them wherever 
 they travel in the States, should entertain 
 some such suspicions regarding the future 
 political effect of this strong American 
 infusion. There seems, however, no 
 ground for any such alarm. In the first 
 place, most of these American settlers 
 do not belong to the old Anglo-Saxon 
 stock ; the bulk of them are recent comers, 
 of the first or second generation, from 
 Europe, in race and habits very much 
 resembling the European immigration from 
 Germany and Scandinavia which is still 
 going on, a little liberated and somewhat 
 elevated in standard of life and modes of 
 agriculture, but easily accommodating 
 themselves in Alberta or Saskatchewan 
 to conditions so ver}^ similar to those of 
 Dakota or Nevada which they have left. 
 It is too early to possess reliable statistics 
 regarding the proportion of immigrants 
 from the United States who become 
 Canadian citizens. But there is reason to 
 believe that most of them seek naturalisa- 
 tion, and will become good Canadians 
 without any hankering after the somewhat 
 unsavoury political fleshpots of the country 
 they have quitted. In point of fact, the 
 change of residence and work from a middle- 
 western state of the Union to the Canadian
 
 CANADA'S NEW BLOOD 97 
 
 north-west^ whether considered economic- 
 ally, politically, or socially, is not very 
 great, and what change there is must be 
 considered as advantageous. A Canadian 
 province is as effectively democratic and 
 almost as independent for domestic purposes 
 of government as an American State : 
 politics are a little cleaner and taxes (in- 
 clusive of tariff) somewhat lighter — that 
 is all. 
 
 Canadians everywhere welcome this 
 influx of American farmers, and hope it 
 will continue and increase. For Canada, 
 like most civilised countries old or new, 
 is confronted by the serious problem of 
 a tendency of population to drift more 
 and more into town life. This fact is 
 strikingly illustrated by the result of the 
 1901 Census, which showed that while 
 the urban population of the Dominion 
 increased during the past decade by more 
 than 30 per cent., the rural population 
 increased by less than 2 per cent. It is a 
 curious fact that the province showing 
 the largest proportion of urban population 
 is British Columbia, where more than 
 half the population are resident in towns. 
 
 Though the immigration returns of the 
 last few years are so satisfactory, it must 
 be remembered that Canada has large 
 arrears to make up. For right up to the 
 close of the nineteenth century the dis- 
 7
 
 98 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 charge of her population into the United 
 States exceeded her total immigration from 
 all sources. So far Canada has had 
 practically to live upon the natural in- 
 crease of her own stock, and now she is 
 subjected to that new condition manifested 
 among all highly civilised peoples, the 
 lowering of the birth-rate. In spite of 
 the large families of the French peasants 
 in Quebec, the general birth-rate is declin- 
 ing ; and so Canada, like the United States, 
 becomes more and more dependent upon 
 the outside world for the most precious 
 of her resources.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CANADA'S DESTINY 
 
 Many of the business men and politicians 
 of Ontario and of Montreal are vociferous 
 " Imperialists," and lend an eager ear to 
 political and economic schemes for unifying 
 the Empire. But it would not be possible 
 to devise, even in general terms, any 
 scheme of Imperial federation to which 
 the most pro-British group of Canadians 
 would assent when they understood what 
 it implied. For, just as they will admit 
 no fiscal Preference which loses them a 
 single dollar of Canadian trade, so they 
 will enter no federal scheme which either 
 abates one jot of the power of self-govern- 
 ment they possess already, or shuts them 
 off from any further degree of independence 
 to which they may aspire in the future. 
 
 Now any scheme of Imperial federation 
 implies some interference with some powers 
 which Canada exercises now. If she is to 
 enter into a common fiscal or other political 
 engagement, she must yield to her Imperial 
 
 99
 
 100 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 partners some liberty which she enjoys at 
 present. Sir Frederick Pollock and Mr. 
 Drage last autumn made a tour of Canada 
 with the object of awakening interest in the 
 scheme of an Imperial Advisory Council — 
 a most guarded and tentative proposal. 
 But, unless I am misinformed, they have 
 received very little encouragement, and, 
 even were certain Imperialists in Toronto 
 and elsewhere disposed to nibble at the 
 notion, when it was materialised they 
 would drop it like a hot cake. 
 
 For, either an Imperial Council would 
 be an amiable farce, or it would be a real 
 political body, capable of committing the 
 peoples of the Colonies to some course of 
 action, involving pecuniary and military 
 obligations, and directing, at any rate, 
 their foreign policy. Now, the idea that 
 a democratic country like Canada would 
 hand over any real powers of direction 
 to some Committee of the Privy Council 
 is preposterous. 
 
 Among the few who have the leisure or 
 the inclination to think about the political 
 future most would probably prefer that 
 things should stay as they are now. But 
 it is pretty evident that this cannot be. 
 Every visitor to Canada is powerfully 
 impressed by a growing conscious spirit 
 of nationality, which, though not at present 
 feeling any bonds in the Imperial con-
 
 CANADA'S DESTINY loi 
 
 nection, is certain to find expression in 
 demands for even larger liberty than is 
 enjoyed now. There are matters of 
 dignity, of constitutional reform, of 
 economic liberty, and of executive govern- 
 ment in which Canada is likely more and 
 more to chafe a^aiiist'\ .ihe jemnants of 
 Imperial control.', Tlip,.fQllpwing passage 
 from an address ;of^an:*eriiih^iit: 'Canadian 
 Constitutional lawyer will serve to illustrate 
 the sort of restrictions upon national 
 liberty which still remain : — 
 
 " If Canada wished to have biennial, 
 instead of triennial. Parliaments, she could 
 not so enact. If she wished to take her 
 census every twelve years, instead of ten, 
 she would be powerless to make the 
 changes. If the Maritime Provinces wished 
 to unite and become one province, they 
 would be advised that it was impossible. 
 If Canada desired to increase the member- 
 ship of her Senate, or to decrease the 
 qualifications for it, or even to change the 
 quorum of the House of Commons, her 
 power would be found to be inadequate. 
 The right to make her own coins is for- 
 bidden by express statute. And such a 
 necessary change of the capital city from 
 Ottawa to Winnipeg cannot be accom- 
 plished by the unanimous vote of our 
 Parliament, our Legislatures, and all our 
 peoples. Westminster can do these
 
 102 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 things for us. We cannot do them for 
 ourselves." 
 
 It is not pretended that these restrictions 
 cause much resentment, but they exempHfy 
 a subordination which may at any time 
 generate real grievances. Canada is 
 growing more and ^ more sensitive every 
 year on matters either of.. her honour or 
 her inteXe^.t'.. . Both 'of . these she considers 
 to have been sacrificed by the action of 
 the British Government in the Alaskan 
 Arbitration. 
 
 Canada practically insists upon all 
 future negotiations affecting her political 
 or commercial interests being managed by 
 herself, or at any rate being submitted 
 for final approval to her Government. 
 " It is im.portant," said Sir W. Laurier, 
 " that we should ask the British Parlia- 
 ment for more extensive treaty powers, 
 so that, if ever we have to deal with 
 matters of a similar nature again, we 
 shall deal with them in our own fashion 
 and according to the best light we have." 
 Canadians even claim that any Anglo- 
 American treaty, affecting, as it must, 
 Canada more vitaUy than any other part 
 of the Empire, shaU be ratified by Canada. 
 They do not clearly realise that such a 
 claim implies the severance of the last 
 bond of Imperial control — direction of 
 foreign policy — but they make it. Canada
 
 CANADA'S DESTINY 103 
 
 is not staying as she was : both in senti- 
 ment and in practical policy she is moving 
 along the road towards national inde- 
 pendence, either within or outside the 
 Empire. The legislative veto possessed 
 by the Governor-General virtually dis- 
 appeared some time ago, and though 
 Downing Street occasionally disallows Acts 
 passed at Ottawa, sometimes vexatiously, 
 as in the case of the Canadian Copyright 
 Act, such instances are rarer and more 
 deeply resented when they occur. The 
 executive powers of the Governor-General 
 are scrutinised most jealously, and the 
 recent full assumption of the control of the 
 Militia and the Naval Stations at Halifax 
 and Vancouver illustrates the progress 
 towards independence. Though the im- 
 partiality of the Judicial Committee of 
 the Privy Council as a final Judicial Court 
 is never questioned, those who best under- 
 stand the important part taken by judicial 
 decisions in the development of institutions 
 feel that it is an injury that Canada " should 
 be forced to develop according to the 
 ideas of a body of men out of touch and 
 sympathy with Canadians, instead of being 
 expanded according to the genius and the 
 wishes of Canadians themselves." 
 
 This feeling will grow with the growth 
 of the sentiment of nationality. So long 
 as Canada, poor and ill-populated, was
 
 104 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 over - shadowed by the strength and 
 prosperity of the great Repubhc, she 
 leaned on Great Britain. Now, as she 
 feels her rising strength, and looks to a 
 great population and developed industries 
 of her own, she can stand alone. There 
 is no active, conscious desire to weaken 
 the British connection. Indeed, among 
 the British colonists of Ontario there 
 exists a genuine sentimental attachment 
 to the historic England ; its institutions, 
 its great men, its literature, are food for 
 pride and admiration ; but this would 
 not furnish an effective bulwark against 
 the rush of popular passion aroused by 
 some single high-handed act of the British 
 Government. The new hopes of population 
 and industrial prosperity are not yet finding 
 full expression in politics, but when they 
 do they will make for tolerably rapid 
 changes. If these changes are not met 
 by resistance on the part of Great Britain, 
 Canada is likely to remain a powerful 
 Sister-Kingdom, rather than a Colony, 
 under the British Crown, for some long 
 period of time. This new relation is thus 
 described by Mr. Ewart : — "Canada's 
 Parliament should be as omnipotent as 
 that at Westminster. The King's Canadian 
 Ministers should advise him upon all 
 things Canadian, with the same constitu- 
 tional authority as British Ministers advise
 
 CANADA'S DESTINY 105 
 
 their Sovereign upon all things British ; 
 our own men should decide on our lawsuits, 
 and command our own forces ; and our 
 own money should provide for our own 
 defences, and for such mutual aid as we 
 ourselves may approve." In a word, 
 Canada must be the free equal of Great 
 Britain, under the same Crown. 
 
 There is no remnant left of the once 
 strong leaning towards annexation to the 
 United States. Not only British Ontario, 
 but French Quebec and cosmopolitan 
 Manitoba, would to-day unanimously and 
 with indignation repudiate the possibility 
 of such a consummation. Dr. Goldwin 
 Smith to-day stands almost alone in urging 
 the inevitability of such a fate for Canada. 
 
 At present the movement is towards a 
 Kingdom of Canada under the British 
 Crown.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE FUTURE OF CANADA 
 
 Since the surrender of Free Trade policy 
 by the Liberals of Canada under Sir W. 
 Laurier, no issue of principle divides the 
 political parties of Canada. The struggle 
 over the schools question in the Constitution 
 of the new North-West Provinces which 
 for awhile inflamed the religious and racial 
 cleavages underlying party allegiance has 
 been settled by what seems to be a lasting 
 compromise, Sir W. Laurier winning over 
 the Catholics of Quebec by his personal 
 influence, aided by the good offices of a 
 Papal Envoy, and securing Nova Scotia by 
 the cruder tactics of a railroad bribe. 
 
 The compromise is based on the Manitoba 
 plan ; the majority in each district of the 
 new provinces provides and controls the 
 schools and the teaching, with the proviso 
 that the minority in any place may have 
 a separate publicly supported school if 
 numerous enough to find children to 
 attend it. 
 
 io6
 
 THE FUTURE OF CANADA 107 
 
 Remnants of the difference between 
 Liberal and Conservative doubtless survive 
 — the United Empire League, the Ulster 
 Irish, and the great ruling Scottish race in 
 Ontario furnish a stouter type of Imperial- 
 ism and of Protectionism, and their 
 hereditary hate of Catholicism tinges all 
 their politics. The Americanised French- 
 Canadian, the Irish-American, and the 
 new influx from the United States repre- 
 sent pushful modern democracy. But 
 between them lies the large inert mass of 
 French-Canadians of the old stock, pre- 
 revolutionary in their social as well as 
 their religious notions, still clinging to 
 the obsolescent notion of Canada as a 
 French nation and having little in common 
 with any of the new factors in Canadian 
 nationality. Even Roman Catholics in 
 Canada cannot pull together The Irish 
 in Montreal have their separate churches 
 and clubs, live in a different quarter from 
 the French, and have very little social 
 intercourse with them. 
 
 Provincialism is really the most effective 
 force in politics to-day. Under the forms 
 of the Dominion actual unity is most 
 imperfectly developed. Ontario and 
 Quebec have little sympathy with or 
 understanding of one another, the Maritime 
 Provinces have important economic and 
 political interests of their own, so has
 
 io8 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Manitoba, so has British Columbia. Each 
 province, for example, has its own quali- 
 fications for the legal and medical pro- 
 fessions, refusing to adopt a comm.on 
 system. While nationality is doubtless a 
 growing sentiment, provincialism remains 
 a solid fact. 
 
 The example of the United States in 
 lavishing her rich natural resources upon 
 importunate companies and private ad- 
 venturers has been imitated by Canada. 
 The " cream " of the countr}^ has been 
 handed over to the Canadian Pacific Rail- 
 road in land grants, some 20,000,000 acres, 
 of which 12,000,000 in the north-west are 
 now offered for sale at prices varying 
 from 3.50 dols. to 10 dols. an acre. The 
 entire land grants to railroads amount to 
 over 30,000,000 acres. Nor are railroads 
 the only beneficiaries. One-twentieth of 
 the entire north-west was assigned to the 
 Hudson Bay Company in extinction of its 
 claims when the Dominion took over the 
 North- West Territories. Most of the rich 
 mining lands, especially coal, have been 
 given away, or sold for a mere song, to a 
 few big capitalists. The best coal lands in 
 Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have 
 gone ; the rich deposits of Vancouver 
 Island are chiefly under the control of the 
 Dunsmuirs ; the Dominion Coal Company 
 and the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Com-
 
 THE FUTURE OF CANADA 109 
 
 pany own virtually the whole of the vSydney 
 coal fields ; the best coal lands in Alberta 
 belong to the C.P.R. 
 
 A perhaps still graver menace to the 
 future independence of the Canadian people 
 is the alienation of the valuable water 
 powers which she possesses in such great 
 abundance. In the electric age on which 
 we are entering this water power may 
 become the chief factor in the industrial 
 development of Canada, and its owners 
 may control the destinies of the nation. 
 For lighting, transport, and for certain 
 industrial uses in Canadian cities, water 
 power is already largely used. The 
 province of Quebec has already committed 
 the folly of selling outright, mostly to 
 Americans, her best powers, and though 
 Ontario is now awakening to a wiser state 
 of mind, much has been already lost. 
 
 The case of the Ottawa waters, lying 
 between Quebec and Ontario, is typical : 
 a few great pulp-mills, electric power, and 
 street railroad companies have secured 
 by free charters virtually the whole water 
 power, so much so that even the city 
 waterworks are in danger of being denuded 
 of their pum.ping power by dams and chan- 
 nels made by these companies. The forests 
 of Canada are, of course, one of her greatest 
 assets. In Quebec alone the public forest 
 domain extends over 74,000,000 acres.
 
 no CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Nevertheless, concessions of valuable forest 
 lands, amounting to several thousands 
 of square miles, are held by great firms, 
 who buy up huge tracts with the same 
 avidity which English landlords displayed 
 in the " good old days " of the Corn Laws. 
 
 This widespread reckless alienation of 
 lands, mines, forests, and water powers 
 has virtually handed over the control of 
 the future of Canada to a group of economic 
 potentates similar to those who to-day 
 rule the destinies of the great American 
 Republic. The same triangle of capitalist 
 forces is seen — railroads, financial com- 
 panies, industrial trusts — and the greatest 
 of these is the railroads. It requires little 
 study of the map of Canada to perceive 
 that the railroad is there a more potent 
 ruler than in any other country of the 
 world. The whole of Canada to-day is 
 a thin trickle of population and of industry 
 along a long-drawn-out railroad. The 
 Canadian Pacific Railroad is by far the 
 greatest institution in the country. It is 
 rightly known as " the government on 
 wheels." In one sense it deserves the 
 power it wields. Its investors had the 
 courage and the faith to stake their money 
 on the future of the country at a time 
 when the Government quailed before the 
 risk and the expense. For this lack of 
 courage and of faith the people of Canada
 
 THE FUTURE OF CANADA iii 
 
 will pay a heavy price — the price of their 
 economic liberty. 
 
 The C.P.R. is not merely the only road 
 from east to west, but it is b\^ far the 
 richest landowner in the country. It 
 advertises for sale " 12,000,000 acres of 
 choice lands in Manitoba, Assiniboia, 
 Saskatchewan, and Alberta " ; the chief 
 telegraphic system of Canada is its property, 
 so is the carrying trade of the Dominion 
 Express Company ; its fleets of steamers 
 across the Atlantic ply between Mont- 
 real and Liverpool, while their fast service 
 on the Pacific forms the shortest and best 
 route for Japan and China, another line 
 connecting with Australia ; they own a 
 score of the finest hotels in Canada. In 
 order to live conveniently in Canada you 
 must continually buy permissions from 
 the C.P.R. 
 
 At present the C.P.R. is an amiable 
 despot ; its interests dictate a certain 
 generosity ; it must facilitate and 
 encourage immigration, settlement, and 
 industrial development. Not until the 
 major part of its lands are sold, and 
 thriving cities have sprung up along its 
 lines, involving a great carrying trade, will 
 the real menace of the greatest railroad 
 monopoly in the world emerge. It is 
 true that by that time there will be other 
 transcontinental roads, the Grand Trunk
 
 112 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 (which, though failing to extort the huge 
 land grants given to its precursor, has 
 entrenched itself behind immensely valu- 
 able public subsidies), and possibly two other 
 companies. But even if these systems 
 remain separate as financial units, their 
 competition, save at certain points, must 
 remain utterly ineffective. 
 
 The owners and controllers of these 
 railroads will be the masters of Canada ; 
 the real government of the country, so 
 far as the prime welfare of the people is 
 concerned, will be theirs ; whenever they 
 need the assistance of the State instruments 
 these will be at their disposal. Has the 
 people any real security that the interests 
 of profit-seeking railroads shall continue 
 to be the interests of the great mass of 
 working and consuming citizens, that any 
 sufficient " natural harmony " exists 
 between the production of railroad divi- 
 dends and the progress of the welfare of a 
 nation ?
 
 PART II 
 
 8
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 
 
 In considering the probable future com- 
 mercial policy of Canada as guided by 
 intelligent self-interest, it is well to begin 
 by a statement of the actual course of 
 her external trade with the two nations, 
 Great Britain and the United States, 
 which between them absorb more than 
 four-fifths of her import trade, and nearly 
 nine-tenths of her export trade. 
 
 The following tables from the Report i 
 of the Department of Trade and Com- 
 merce, Ottawa, give the percentages of 
 the value of Canadian imports and exports 
 to and from Great Britain and the United 
 States, beginning with 1868, the year 
 following the abrogation of the Reciprocity 
 Treaty between Canada and the United 
 States. In the case of the import trade 
 into Canada, the proportions of dutiable 
 and free goods are likewise given. 
 
 Now, confining our attention first to 
 the period antecedent to the Preferential 
 treatment accorded to British imports, 
 
 ^ Monthly Report, June 1905. 
 
 "5
 
 
 Percentages ( 
 
 DF Exports to 
 
 
 
 Great Britain. 
 
 United States. 
 
 « <ij 
 
 4) (U 
 
 
 . . 
 
 <U QJ 
 
 <0 <n* 
 
 y 
 
 . . 
 
 oduc 
 
 tal 
 
 oduc 
 
 rodu 
 
 tal 
 
 rodu 
 
 port; 
 
 tain 
 
 ;port 
 
 oduc 
 
 tal 
 
 oduc 
 
 Todu 
 
 tal 
 
 rodu 
 
 port 
 ates 
 ;port 
 
 Years. 
 
 d o JJ 
 
 Oh OCH 
 
 d^ d 
 
 .—1 ,4_» .^ 
 
 tal Ex 
 at Bri 
 tal Ex 
 
 ime Pr 
 
 to To 
 
 me Pr 
 
 eign P 
 
 to To 
 
 sign P: 
 
 tal Ex 
 ted St 
 tal Ex 
 
 
 3 o 
 
 u ^ 
 
 <u 
 
 ° 
 
 U. ^H 
 
 Q-d 
 
 
 K ffi 
 
 
 
 Hc^H 
 
 X ffi 
 
 
 
 H;§H 
 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 
 39-31 
 
 
 
 49-15 
 
 
 
 1868 
 
 41-53 
 
 
 
 47.92 
 
 
 
 1869 
 
 40.14 
 
 t 
 
 t 
 
 48.85 
 
 t 
 
 t 
 
 1870 
 
 39-38 
 
 
 
 48.41 
 
 
 
 1871 
 
 40.07 
 
 
 
 47-63 
 
 
 
 1872 
 
 42.87 
 
 77.15 
 
 46.77 
 
 45.62 
 
 16.13 
 
 42.27 
 
 1873 
 
 48.38 
 
 85.78 
 
 S3-08 
 
 41.09 
 
 1 1 . 1 5 
 
 37-33 
 
 1874 
 
 50.67 
 
 81.02 
 
 53.57 
 
 38.05 
 
 14.29 
 
 35.78 
 
 1875 
 
 49.21 
 
 87.12 
 
 52.76 
 
 39.29 
 
 9.03 
 
 36.45 
 
 1876 
 
 53.88 
 
 84.87 
 
 56.90 
 
 33.64 
 
 10.66 
 
 31.40 
 
 1877 
 
 54-55 
 
 90.07 
 
 59.70 
 
 33-66 
 
 6.44 
 
 29.71 
 
 1878 
 
 48.91 
 
 82.26 
 
 52.98 
 
 38.52 
 
 12.05 
 
 35-29 
 
 1879 
 
 50.22 
 
 80.10 
 
 54-97 
 
 38.18 
 
 15-43 
 
 34-56 
 
 1880 
 
 52.69 
 
 83.06 
 
 56.99 
 
 38.32 
 
 13-93 
 
 34-86 
 
 1881 
 
 44.21 
 
 71.53 
 
 46.35 
 
 46.29 
 
 23.43 
 
 44.51 
 
 1882 
 
 46.90 
 
 76.63 
 
 49-99 
 
 42.82 
 
 17.00 
 
 40.15 
 
 1883 
 
 48.50 
 
 67-36 
 
 50.54 
 
 41.09 
 
 24.75 
 
 9-24 
 
 1884 
 
 47.88 
 
 66.74 
 
 49-69 
 
 42.81 
 
 26.79 
 
 41.27 
 
 1885 
 
 48.94 
 
 65.15 
 
 50.40 
 
 42.01 
 
 30.17 
 
 40.94 
 
 1886 
 
 49.65 
 
 68.50 
 
 51.51 
 
 41-39 
 
 27.89 
 
 40.06 
 
 1887 
 
 42.97 
 
 73-11 
 
 46.02 
 
 47-67 
 
 24.38 
 
 45-31 
 
 1888 
 
 43-39 
 
 66.06 
 
 45-27 
 
 47.21 
 
 29.41 
 
 45-73 
 
 1889 
 
 50.40 
 
 75-72 
 
 52.91 
 
 40.43 
 
 20.65 
 
 38.47 
 
 1890 
 
 50.42 
 
 68.61 
 
 52.12 
 
 40.61 
 
 27.81; 
 
 .39.43 
 
 1891 
 
 57-42 
 
 75.80 
 
 59-65 
 
 32.73 
 
 19.15 
 
 31.09 
 
 1892 
 
 57.26 
 
 63.41 
 
 57.76 
 
 33.15 
 
 27.88 
 
 32.73 
 
 1893 
 
 60.53 
 
 64.73 
 
 60.96 
 
 29.13 
 
 11.89 
 
 27.31 
 
 1894 
 
 58.18 
 
 60.96 
 
 58-35 
 
 32.46 
 
 28.69 
 
 32.22 
 
 1895 
 
 58-95 
 
 60.11 
 
 59.02 
 
 32-39 
 
 29.67 
 
 32.23 
 
 1896 
 
 58.09 
 
 71.07 
 
 59-17 
 
 33-19 
 
 20.47 
 
 32.13 
 
 1897 
 
 66.51 
 
 79.66 
 
 67-78 
 
 24.56 
 
 13.96 
 
 23-53 
 
 1898 
 
 64.09 
 
 79.76 
 
 65.92 
 
 26.18 
 
 10.25 
 
 24.32 
 
 1899 
 
 59.06 
 
 78.32 
 
 60.60 
 
 32-13 
 
 13-78 
 
 30.66 
 
 1900 
 
 52.33 
 
 73-03 
 
 54.15 
 
 38-32 
 
 14.19 
 
 36.20 
 
 1901 
 
 55-78 
 
 57-13 
 
 55-87 
 
 33-95 
 
 21.47 
 
 33-13 
 
 1902 
 
 58.39 
 
 55-43 
 
 58.25 
 
 31.60 
 
 31.80 
 
 31.61 
 
 1903 
 
 55-50 
 
 59.10 
 
 55-71 
 
 33-70 
 
 30.50 
 
 33-50 
 
 1904 
 
 50.89 
 
 45.62 
 
 50.61 
 
 36.90 
 
 48.38 
 
 37-51 
 
 + 1905 
 
 •)■ Figures not available. 
 
 116 
 
 f Unrevised.
 
 Percentages of Imports from 
 
 Years. 
 
 Great Britain. 
 
 United States. 
 
 a; 
 03 
 
 
 
 ports 
 1 to 
 orts. 
 
 
 13 
 
 
 
 ports 
 ! to 
 orts. 
 
 (D • -< 
 
 H 6 
 
 E-d 9^ 
 
 0-^_ 
 
 H a; 
 
 B ^ Ph 
 
 
 3 "5 
 
 «o 
 H 
 
 0^ 
 u 
 
 Total I 
 G. Brits 
 Total Im 
 
 Dutiab 
 Total Du 
 
 ii 
 
 Total I 
 U. Stat 
 Total Im 
 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 p.c. 
 
 
 64.78 
 
 39.82 
 
 56.06 
 
 22.93 
 
 53-96 
 
 33-77 
 
 1868 
 
 69-35 
 
 31-75 
 
 56.20 
 
 18.97 
 
 62.04 
 
 34-03 
 
 1869 
 
 66.52 
 
 34-50 
 
 56.10 
 
 19.27 
 
 59.69 
 
 32-43 
 
 1870 
 
 66.25 
 
 35-99 
 
 57-58 
 
 23-43 
 
 54.31 
 
 32.28 
 
 1871 
 
 70.59 
 
 38.20 
 
 59-27 
 
 19-43 
 
 55-81 
 
 32.14 
 
 1872 
 
 66.63 
 
 38.55 
 
 54.61 
 
 23-42 
 
 53-47 
 
 36.29 
 
 1873 
 
 62.69 
 
 29.03 
 
 49-87 
 
 27.67 
 
 65.19 
 
 41.97 
 
 1874 
 
 62.64 
 
 28.16 
 
 51. II 
 
 28.5s 
 
 67-78 
 
 41.66 
 
 1875 
 
 53-76 
 
 25.08 
 
 43-75 
 
 35-41 
 
 70.53 
 
 47.67 
 
 1876 
 
 54-03 
 
 19-31 
 
 41.78 
 
 38.59 
 
 77.88 
 
 52.45 
 
 1877 
 
 53-76 
 
 16.69 
 
 41.21 
 
 39-25 
 
 80.13 
 
 53.10 
 
 1878 
 
 48.84 
 
 16.72 
 
 39-34 
 
 42.95 
 
 78.91 
 
 53-57 
 
 1879 
 
 51-74 
 
 36-43 
 
 48.30 
 
 36.11 
 
 54.88 
 
 40.33 
 
 1880 
 
 50.06 
 
 37-23 
 
 47-39 
 
 35.78 
 
 56.74 
 
 40.15 
 
 1881 
 
 48.34 
 
 35-04 
 
 45-30 
 
 38.41 
 
 55-58 
 
 42.33 
 
 1882 
 
 44-47 
 
 36.16 
 
 42.40 
 
 42.20 
 
 54-48 
 
 45-25 
 
 1883 
 
 41.02 
 
 35-03 
 
 39.56 
 
 44-74 
 
 53-88 
 
 46-97 
 
 1884 
 
 41.90 
 
 35-22 
 
 40.12 
 
 42.62 
 
 54.12 
 
 45.68 
 
 1885 
 
 43.00 
 
 34-13 
 
 40.66 
 
 41-97 
 
 51.94 
 
 44.60 
 
 1886 
 
 45-78 
 
 33-25 
 
 42.56 
 
 39-13 
 
 '52.71 
 
 42.61 
 
 1887 
 
 44.29 
 
 26.81 
 
 38.90 
 
 38.90 
 
 62.34 
 
 46.13 
 
 1888 
 
 43.26 
 
 28.97 
 
 38.73 
 
 38.91 
 
 60.79 
 
 45.86 
 
 1889 
 
 43-15 
 
 28.95 
 
 38.75 
 
 39.65 
 
 60.13 
 
 45-99 
 
 1890 
 
 42.19 
 
 28.57 
 
 37-67 
 
 39-97 
 
 60.12 
 
 46.65 
 
 1891 
 
 44-58 
 
 22.24 
 
 35-66 
 
 42.66 
 
 48.34 
 
 44.90 
 
 1892 
 
 45.61 
 
 23-53 
 
 36.92 
 
 40.88 
 
 52.49 
 
 45-44 
 
 1893 
 
 43-79 
 
 20.61 
 
 33-96 
 
 41-13 
 
 53-84 
 
 46.52 
 
 1894 
 
 39-81 
 
 18.39 
 
 30.85 
 
 44.05 
 
 57-79 
 
 49.84 
 
 1895 
 
 36.24 
 
 22.19 
 
 31-15 
 
 43.28 
 
 64.07 
 
 50.80 
 
 1896 
 
 30-53 
 
 22.73 
 
 27.58 
 
 46.03 
 
 65-69 
 
 53-48 
 
 1897 
 
 30.23 
 
 18.35 
 
 25.36 
 
 51.00 
 
 71-13 
 
 59.24 
 
 1898 
 
 30.77 
 
 15.70 
 
 24.72 
 
 49-73 
 
 73-43 
 
 59-24 
 
 1899 
 
 30.25 
 
 18.66 
 
 25.66 
 
 51.65 
 
 70.69 
 
 59-17 
 
 1900 
 
 29.92 
 
 15.50 
 
 24.10 
 
 50.58 
 
 74.66 
 
 60.30 
 
 1 901 
 
 29.54 
 
 17-94 
 
 24.95 
 
 50.72 
 
 70.11 
 
 58.40 
 
 1902 
 
 30.85 
 
 18.84 
 
 26.15 
 
 50.10 
 
 68.46 
 
 57-29 
 
 1903 
 
 30.18 
 
 17-73 
 
 25-34 
 
 52.07 
 
 69.14 
 
 58.71 
 
 1904 
 
 29.87 
 
 15.14 
 
 23.98 
 
 52.21 
 
 73-13 
 
 60.58 
 
 J1905 
 
 X Unrevised. 
 117
 
 ii8 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 the period 1868 to 1897, we perceive 
 in the Canadian import trade a large 
 and tolerably regular decline in the per- 
 centage of British imports throughout the 
 period, and a corresponding increase in the 
 percentage of American imports. Whereas 
 Great Britain began the period with 56.06 
 and ended it with 27.58, the United States 
 began with 33.77 and ended with 53.48. 
 
 Interpreted in dollars, these percentages 
 imply a diminution in value of British 
 trade from 37,617,325 dols. in 1868, to 
 29,401,188 dols. in 1897, and an increase in 
 value of American trade from 22,660,132 
 dols. in 1868 to 57,023,342 dols. in 1897. 
 
 In April 1897 a Preference amounting 
 to a reduction of 12 J per cent, on tariff 
 rates was accorded to Great Britain,taking 
 effect in the fiscal year 1898 : this per- 
 centage was increased to 25 per cent, 
 in August 1898, and to 33J in July 1900. 
 A partial withdrawal of the Preference 
 on certain textile goods took effect in 
 1905, as a result of changes in the Budget 
 of 1904. 
 
 In considering the general effect of the 
 Preference as influencing proportions of 
 imports of British goods, we must take 
 1898 as the first year of its operation, and 
 1900 as exhibiting the beginning of its full 
 influence. 
 
 A close comparison of the percentages
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 119 
 
 of British and American import trade 
 from the last year before Preference, 1897, 
 to 1905, should enable us to form some 
 prima facie estimate of the value of the 
 Preference to British trade. 
 
 
 British. 
 
 American. 
 
 Duti- 
 able. 
 
 Free. I Total. 
 
 Duti- 
 able. 
 
 Free. 
 
 Total. 
 
 1897 . • 
 
 1898 . . 
 
 1899 . . 
 
 1900 . . 
 
 1901 . . 
 
 1902 . . 
 
 1903 • • 
 
 1904 . . 
 
 1905 . . 
 
 30.53 
 30.23 
 
 30-77 
 30.25 
 29.92 
 
 29-54 
 30.85 
 30.18 
 29.87 
 
 22.73 
 
 18.35 
 15-70 
 18.66 
 15-50 
 
 17-94 
 18.84 
 
 17-73 
 15.14 
 
 27-58 
 25-36 
 24.72 
 25-66 
 24.10 
 
 24-95 
 26.15 
 
 25-34 
 23-98 
 
 46.03 
 51.00 
 49-73 
 51-65 
 50.58 
 50.72 
 50.10 
 i 52.07 
 1 52.21 
 
 65.69 
 71-13 
 
 73-43 
 70.69 
 74.66 
 
 70. XI 
 
 68-46 
 69.14 
 73-13 
 
 53-48 
 
 59-24 
 59.24 
 
 59-17 
 60.30 
 55-40 
 
 57-29 
 58.71 
 60.58 
 
 From this table it is evident — 
 
 1. That the Canadian Preference has 
 not stopped the decline in percentage 
 of total British imports, though it may 
 have caused the abatement in the pace 
 of the decline which has taken place. 
 
 2. That the Preference has checked to 
 some considerable extent the pace of decline 
 in importation of dutiable British goods. 
 
 3. That during the operation of the 
 Preference American total imports show 
 as large a growth as during the nine 
 years prior to 1897, and that the same
 
 120 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 is true of the dutiable imports exposed 
 to competition of British goods with a 
 Preference. 
 
 Notwithstanding the Preference, dutiable 
 goods from Great Britain into Canada 
 are declining in the proportion they bear 
 to the total of dutiable imports, standing 
 in 1905 at the lowest percentage ever 
 reached, viz. 29.87 per cent. Dutiable 
 goods from the United States into Canada 
 are increasing during this same period, 
 standing in 1905 at the highest percentage 
 ever reached, viz. 52.21 per cent. 
 
 During this same period, 1897-1905, 
 the percentage of exports from Canada 
 to Great Britain fell from 59.17 in 1897 
 to 50.61 in 1905, a fall still more remark- 
 able in view of the fact that from the 
 earliest year of record, 1873, there had 
 been a general tendency to a rise. The 
 proportion of exports to Great Britain 
 is seen to be lower in 1905 than for any 
 year since 1899. On the other hand, 
 Canadian exports to the United States, 
 which had been steadily falling in per- 
 centage since 1889, have effected a con- 
 spicuous recovery during the last few 
 years, attaining in 1905 the highest figure 
 since 1891. 
 
 The general course of Canadian trade 
 is thus seen to flow ever more strongly 
 towards the United States, in spite of
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 121 
 
 the Preferential tariff rate on imports 
 from Great Britain, and the development 
 of a railroad and other policy favourable 
 to increased export trade with Great 
 Britain. 
 
 Dutiable goods in which Great Britain 
 cannot compete with U.S.A. and in regard 
 to which no Preference can materially 
 assist us to compete, are the following : — 
 
 Animals, baking powder, breadstuffs, 
 bricks, tiles, etc., brooms, carts and 
 carriages, coal, coffee, fertilisers, fish pro- 
 ducts, fruits (fresh), grease, marble, oils, 
 provisions, seeds, sugar molasses, turpen- 
 tine, vegetables, wood and wooden manu- 
 factures. In nearly all these cases the 
 United States has virtually a monopoly 
 of the import trade, the articles either 
 being raw materials or manufactures in 
 which the supply of raw materials forms 
 the chief factor in the value. 
 
 But in addition to these, there remains 
 a considerable class of imports in which 
 the special needs or tastes of Canadian 
 consumers can only be met by products 
 from the United States, or in which the 
 proximity of the latter, or the special 
 development of certain industries, has 
 virtually secured for her trade a monopoly 
 too strong to be materially affected by 
 a Preference in the tariff. Such articles 
 are books, prints, etc., electrical apparatus,
 
 122 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 clocks and watches, jewellery, mineral 
 waters, packages, and certain kinds of agri- 
 cultural and other machinery and tools. 
 Some slight diversion of this trade from the 
 United States to Great Britain might be 
 effected by an extension of the Preference, 
 but the existing Preference appears to 
 exercise no appreciable influence. 
 
 The writer of a careful article published 
 in the Times (Oct. 1905) named the 
 following group of dutiable manufactures, 
 in which other countries (in almost every 
 instance the United States) have made 
 greater progress than Great Britain in 
 spite of the Preference. Silks, gloves and 
 mitts, perfumery, brass and copper 
 goods, electrical apparatus, optical, photo- 
 graphical, and mathematical instruments, 
 clocks, musical instruments, paints, colours, 
 varnishes, aerated and mineral waters. 
 
 Reserving the great textile and metal 
 manufactures for separate analysis, we may 
 next turn to a miscellaneous group of 
 manufactured goods in which Great Britain 
 competes with U.S.A. in the Canadian 
 trade — for instance, earthenware, furs, skins 
 and manufactures, glass, gutta percha, etc., 
 hats, leather trades, paper. 
 
 The following is the course of these 
 trades as between Great Britain, United 
 States, and other countries, from 1897 
 onwards, expressed in values.
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 123 
 
 Earthenware and China. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 • 
 
 386,780 
 
 62,662 
 
 146,380 
 
 1898 . 
 
 
 454,062 
 
 77.059 
 
 144.753 
 
 1899 . 
 
 
 577,290 
 
 136,256 
 
 203,181 
 
 1900 . 
 
 
 563.931 
 
 188,495 
 
 207,100 
 
 I90I . 
 
 
 687,158 
 
 161,805 
 
 265,714 
 
 1902 . 
 
 
 723,557 
 
 242,055 
 
 309,481 
 
 1903 . 
 
 
 806,140 
 
 258,767 
 
 341.703 
 
 1904 . 
 
 
 961,806 
 
 235.857 
 
 413,693 
 
 I90S . 
 
 
 960,317 
 
 243.776 
 
 432,121 
 
 Furs, Skins, and Manufactures 
 
 . 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 s 
 
 1897 • 
 
 185,724 
 
 38.516 
 
 172.258 
 
 1S98 . 
 
 
 185,038 
 
 56,951 
 
 199,386 
 
 1899 . 
 
 
 275,130 
 
 99-357 
 
 311,284 
 
 1900 . 
 
 
 260,739 
 
 109,787 
 
 388,699 
 
 1901 . 
 
 
 378,331 
 
 148,691 
 
 438,369 
 
 1902 . 
 
 
 341,802 
 
 178,579 
 
 540,140 
 
 1903 . 
 
 
 326,252 
 
 228,668 
 
 493,958 
 
 1904 . 
 
 
 340,072 
 
 247,157 
 
 408,493 
 
 1905 . 
 
 
 444,921 
 
 324.953 
 
 535.326 
 
 Glass and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 $ 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 S 
 
 1897 . 
 
 187,888 
 
 433.729 
 
 518,147 
 
 1898 
 
 
 
 228,643 
 
 363.523 
 
 432,540 
 
 1899 
 
 
 
 289,049 
 
 484,210 
 
 569,799 
 
 1900 
 
 
 
 367.115 
 
 535.735 
 
 755,844 
 
 1901 
 
 
 
 352,204 
 
 538,692 
 
 684,723 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 387,883 
 
 526,134 
 
 1,024,791 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 461,235 
 
 591.256 
 
 1,031,960 
 
 1904 
 
 
 
 506,759 
 
 589,072 
 
 887.950 
 
 1905 
 
 
 
 5x0,005 
 
 576,730 
 
 839,869
 
 124 
 
 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 GUTTA PeRCHA, etc. 
 
 1897 
 1898 
 1899 
 1900 
 1 90 1 
 1902 
 1903 
 1904 
 1905 
 
 G.B. 
 
 90,274 
 
 127.034 
 120,681 
 116,840 
 
 155.445 
 217,477 
 
 393.321 
 361,666 
 174,281 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 $ 
 207,273 
 
 255.435 
 355.951 
 399.738 
 432.649 
 
 521,963 
 571,687 
 606,756 
 616,435 
 
 Others. 
 
 s 
 
 20,428 
 20,762 
 
 15.497 
 19.493 
 
 21,797 
 31.986 
 
 25.054 
 25.740 
 26,071 
 
 Drugs, Dyes, Chemicals. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 . 
 
 228,350 
 
 553.990 
 
 343.380 
 
 1898 . 
 
 
 300,548 
 
 616,294 
 
 381,985 
 
 1899 . 
 
 
 415.155 
 
 757,240 
 
 356,337 
 
 1900 . 
 
 
 551,908 
 
 771,119 
 
 260,030 
 
 I90I . 
 
 
 714.336 
 
 765,109 
 
 356.152 
 
 1902 . 
 
 
 560,397 
 
 772,87s 
 
 469,007 
 
 1903 . 
 
 
 672,817 
 
 876,333 
 
 331.562 
 
 1904 . 
 
 
 601,091 
 
 958,206 
 
 455.727 
 
 1905 . 
 
 
 717,776 
 
 936.929 
 
 417.539 
 
 Hats, Caps, etc. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 $ 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 . 
 
 694,342 
 
 479,438 
 
 17,624 
 
 1898 
 
 
 
 
 730,706 
 
 651,281 
 
 20,534 
 
 1899 
 
 
 
 
 794,338 
 
 702,687 
 
 17,384 
 
 1900 
 
 
 
 
 878,891 
 
 736,106 
 
 22,425 
 
 I90I 
 
 
 
 
 893,501 
 
 738.708 
 
 29.554 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 
 844,290 
 
 858,964 
 
 27.469 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 
 733,909 
 
 1,032,910 
 
 38.764 
 
 1904 
 
 
 
 
 951,492 
 
 1,189,181 
 
 42,501 
 
 1905 
 
 
 
 
 1,022,502 
 
 1,138,694 
 
 60,465
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 125 
 
 Leather and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 . 
 
 101,246 
 
 I. 193.730 
 
 82,569 
 
 1898 
 
 
 
 146,494 
 
 1,447,396 
 
 64-387 
 
 1899 
 
 
 
 200,794 
 
 1. 43 1. 149 
 
 63,168 
 
 1900 
 
 
 
 222,1^64 
 
 1,610,096 
 
 46,679 
 
 I90I 
 
 
 
 207,788 
 
 1,450,889 
 
 69,372 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 261,231 
 
 1,468,882 
 
 80,198 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 319,702 
 
 1,529,043 
 
 64,057 
 
 1904 
 
 
 
 368,717 
 
 1,742,156 
 
 93.127 
 
 1905 
 
 
 
 407,717 
 
 2,145,261 
 
 89.459 
 
 Paper and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 . 
 
 229,368 
 
 686,172 
 
 86,318 
 
 1898 . 
 
 
 
 230,345 
 
 822,983 
 
 82,576 
 
 1899 . 
 
 
 
 248,745 
 
 911.876 
 
 102,723 
 
 1900 . 
 
 
 
 259,762 
 
 1,042,504 
 
 105,235 
 
 I90I . 
 
 
 
 382,018 
 
 1,320.869 
 
 101,037 
 
 1902 . 
 
 
 
 361,692 
 
 1.471.779 
 
 112,315 
 
 1903 . 
 
 
 
 403.127 
 
 1,564,808 
 
 142,429 
 
 1904 . 
 
 
 
 503,143 
 
 1.953. 132 
 
 159,758 
 
 1 90s . 
 
 
 
 569.799 
 
 2,195,646 
 
 185.913 
 
 Of the trades in this group, three — glass, 
 leather, drugs and chemicals — show a rate 
 of increase for British trade faster than 
 for American; in the others the United 
 States has made a far larger relative 
 advance. Let us now turn to the 
 main branches of the textile and metal 
 trades.
 
 126 
 
 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Cotton and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 . 
 
 2,693,114 
 
 1,119,147 
 
 239,100 
 
 1898 
 
 
 
 3,086,068 
 
 1,332,533 
 
 292,193 
 
 1899 
 
 
 , 
 
 3,906,676 
 
 1.679,428 
 
 398,084 
 
 1900 
 
 
 , 
 
 4,474,687 
 
 1,509,312 
 
 522.570 
 
 1 90 1 
 
 
 , 
 
 4,869 909 
 
 1,463,686 
 
 584.347 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 5,108,513 
 
 1,608,369 
 
 734,877 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 5,539,129 
 
 1,760,695 
 
 819,902 
 
 1904 
 
 
 , 
 
 6,016,783 
 
 1,827,438 
 
 704,757 
 
 1 90s 
 
 
 • 
 
 5,780.041 
 
 1,862,784 
 
 707,836 
 
 Flax and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 . 
 
 1,159,126 
 
 58,597 
 
 49,750 
 
 1898 
 
 
 
 
 1,280,829 
 
 55,321 
 
 76,186 
 
 1899 
 
 
 
 
 1,610,210 
 
 69.395 
 
 74.958 
 
 1900 
 
 
 
 
 1,660,270 
 
 63,348 
 
 107,269 
 
 I90I 
 
 
 
 
 1,749.294 
 
 74.864 
 
 90,912 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 
 1,783.730 
 
 84,265 
 
 113.876 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 
 1,925.381 
 
 98,835 
 
 161,226 
 
 1904 
 
 
 
 
 2,160,410 
 
 81,210 
 
 175,620 
 
 1905 . 
 
 
 
 2,112,093 
 
 98,048 
 
 297,362 
 
 Silk and Manufactures. 
 
 1897 
 1898 
 1899 
 1900 
 1 901 
 1902 
 1903 
 1904 
 1905 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 $ 
 
 1,044,292 
 
 1,231,154 
 1,566,380 
 1,795,011 
 1,730,920 
 1.946,708 
 1,970,205 
 1,788,046 
 2,018,518 
 
 $ 
 
 112,223 
 152,700 
 211,221 
 231,672 
 221,598 
 206,330 
 
 213.275 
 203,775 
 294,871 
 
 Others. 
 
 $ 
 
 329.553 
 616,673 
 
 1,154.950 
 1.158,686 
 1,156,308 
 1,277,150 
 1,609,634 
 1,723,216 
 2,066,012
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 127 
 
 Wool and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 s 
 
 1897 . 
 
 5.576,859 
 
 218,396 
 
 1.330,493 
 
 1898 
 
 
 
 6,221,836 
 
 252,242 
 
 1,511.788 
 
 1899 
 
 
 
 7.686,366 
 
 428,631 
 
 1,688,206 
 
 1900 
 
 
 
 7.787,929 
 
 359,986 
 
 1,653,650 
 
 I90I 
 
 
 
 8,061,459 
 
 370,453 
 
 1,512,193 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 8,860,393 
 
 354,598 
 
 1,731,865 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 11,105,487 
 
 394,379 
 
 2,061,549 
 
 1904 
 
 
 
 12,707,715 
 
 491,328 
 
 1,920,340 
 
 1905 . . ■. 
 
 13.137.525 
 
 519,948 
 
 1,915.438 
 
 In setting out the statistics for the 
 metal trades we will take first the most 
 general table for all metals and their 
 manufactures^ then the table for iron 
 and steel, which compose more than nine- 
 tenths of the whole trade, and finally 
 trace, so far as the official figures allow, 
 the chief machine trades. 
 
 Metal and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 . 
 
 2.102,530 
 
 7,588,096 
 
 462,318 
 
 1808 
 
 
 
 
 2,230,567 
 
 12,006,521 
 
 446,336 
 
 1899 
 
 
 
 
 2,748,187 
 
 14,706,314 
 
 514,424 
 
 1900 
 
 
 
 
 4,705,470 
 
 19,443,423 
 
 662,867 
 
 I90I 
 
 
 
 
 2,965,153 
 
 17,768,502 
 
 598,371 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 
 5,124,011 
 
 19,913,810 
 
 1,704,756 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 
 7.739,373 
 
 23,582,528 
 
 2,608,661 
 
 1904 
 
 
 
 
 6.750,503 
 
 26,576,274 
 
 2,128,119 
 
 1905 . 
 
 6,273,171 
 
 27.273.171 
 
 1,415,061
 
 128 
 
 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Iron and Steel and Manufactures. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 $ 
 
 1897 , 
 
 1,848,937 
 
 6,580,029 
 
 352,497 
 
 1898 . 
 
 
 
 1,924,763 
 
 10,653,373 
 
 323.338 
 
 1899 . 
 
 
 
 2,335.821 
 
 13. 173. 175 
 
 369,708 
 
 1900 . 
 
 
 
 4,304,869 
 
 17.663,325 
 
 505,575 
 
 I90I . 
 
 
 
 2,617,124 
 
 16,054,867 
 
 421,101 
 
 1902 . 
 
 
 
 4,754,860 
 
 18,066,592 
 
 1,512,840 
 
 1903 . 
 
 
 
 7.348,621 
 
 21,375.077 
 
 2,403,940 
 
 1904 . 
 
 
 
 6,227,973 
 
 24,252,940 
 
 1.913.153 
 
 1905 . 
 
 
 
 5.437,435 
 
 24,849,709 
 
 1,177.100 
 
 Though the Statistical Reports for Canada 
 do not afford the opportunity of a full com- 
 parison in various classes of metals for the 
 complete period 1897-1905, the following 
 figures of values during the years 1903- 
 1905 will serve to indicate the proportion 
 of the trade in the hands of Great Britain 
 and the United States. 
 
 Agricultural Implements. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 1903 . 
 
 1904 . 
 
 1905 . 
 
 $ 
 
 23.570 
 23,186 
 21,259 
 
 $ 
 3.147.468 
 
 *2, 615, 211 
 1,571,056 
 
 $ 
 
 779 
 953 
 986 
 
 * The Harvester Trust here began to put the products 
 of its Canadian works on the home market.
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 129 
 
 Iron or Steel Sheets, etc. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 1 
 
 Others. 
 
 1903 . 
 
 1904 . 
 
 1905 . 
 
 $ 
 
 1,727.877 
 1,397,010 
 1,518,116 
 
 $ 
 441.365 
 507.535 
 710,898 
 
 $ 
 28,303 
 29,885 
 22,748 
 
 Machinery and Machines. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 1903 . 
 
 1904 . 
 
 1905 . 
 
 295.595 
 339.739 
 354.406 
 
 $ 1 
 ;, 821, 173 
 6,885,752 
 5,768,677 
 
 $ 
 56,195 
 105,577 
 165,407 
 
 TooL'=; AND Implements. 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 1903 . 
 
 1904 . 
 
 1905 . 
 
 $ 
 70,526 
 62,220 
 64,898 
 
 $ 
 1,016,041 
 1,109,780 
 1.085,97s 
 
 $ 
 54.566 
 66,043 
 50,925 
 
 Stee 
 
 L Rails (imported free). 
 
 
 
 G.B. 
 
 1 
 
 U.S.A. 
 
 Others. 
 
 1903 • 
 
 1904 . 
 
 1905 . 
 
 i 1,861,780 
 
 '' 1,830,834 
 
 461,339 
 
 $ 
 
 ! 1.470,787 
 1,261,480 
 4.S17.486 
 
 $ 
 
 923,497 
 1,237,049 
 
 72,937 
 
 /
 
 130 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Now^ taking the textile groups, we find 
 that, while the increase in the absolute 
 values of our cotton and woollen imports 
 into Canada has been very large, the 
 pace of growth in the woollen trade is not 
 greater than that of the United States, 
 while it is considerably smaller than that 
 of other countries ; while in cotton, though 
 British trade grows considerably faster than 
 American, it also is outstripped by that 
 of other countries. In the two smaller 
 manufactures, flax and silk, the comparison 
 is still more favourable to America, for 
 in the former she shows a proportionate 
 increase as large, in the latter much larger, 
 than that of Great Britain : in each case 
 the trade of other countries advances at 
 a far faster pace than either. 
 
 But while the Preference has not pre- 
 vented American and other foreign textiles 
 from keeping full pace with British trade 
 in textiles, some of the actually large 
 growth in the value of British cotton 
 and woollen imports may reasonably be 
 imputed to the Preferences, supplemented as 
 regards comparison with '^ other countries " 
 by the sur-tax on German goods which 
 took effect in 1904. 
 
 When we turn to the still larger import 
 trade in metals we find that the American 
 not only possesses a predominance larger 
 than that possessed by Great Britain
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 131 
 
 in the textiles, but that the growth of 
 her general trade in metals since the 
 Preference has been actually more rapid 
 than that of Great Britain. Roughly 
 speaking, since 1897 the United States 
 have increased their trade nearly four- 
 fold as compared with a British growth of 
 three-fold. Nor are the statistics of other 
 countries less significant. Prior to the 
 sur-tax on Germany the growth of metal im- 
 ports from '' other countries " was far faster 
 than that of Great Britain in its proportion. 
 The figures for 1905 in particular make 
 it evident that the United States maintain 
 in the staple branches of the metal trades 
 an advantage over Great Britain as great 
 as that which the latter possesses in the 
 volume of her woollen trade. 
 
 The nature of this advantage appears 
 by reference to the specific classes of 
 metals. In agricultural machinery, general 
 machinery, tools and implements, the 
 trade of Great Britain is trivial as com- 
 pared with that of the United States, 
 and the latest figures indicate that the 
 latter can out-compete Great Britain in 
 steel rails for delivery in Canada. 
 
 If therefore we take rate of growth in 
 the value of the several trades as a test 
 or indication of the efficacy of the Prefer- 
 ence, we are driven to conclude that its 
 efficacy is confined to a few trades of the
 
 132 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 second rank, viz. leather, glass, drugs and 
 chemicals, supplemented by a few others 
 of the third rank, in which are included 
 certain subordinate branches of textile 
 trades (such as curtains, carpets, and 
 cordage), jams and pickles. 
 
 So far as the great textile and metal 
 trades are concerned, the growth of the 
 main woollen manufactures has evidently 
 been stimulated by the Preference, but 
 the other textile trades and the metal 
 trades, individually and in the aggregate, 
 have shown no power to hold their own 
 against the growing competition either 
 of the United States or of the continental 
 European countries. 
 
 So far as the trade of the United States 
 in the staple textile and metal trades 
 is concerned, the inefficacy of the existing 
 or an increased Preference is pretty 
 evident. The entire value of textile im- 
 ports (dutiable) for the United States 
 does not exceed 3J million dollars, while 
 their rapidly advancing metal trade is 
 worth 27 J million dollars. But while 
 Preference appears to have some influence 
 in determining the former in our favour, 
 it seems impotent to affect the course 
 of the latter and much more profitable 
 trade. The advantage of the Preference 
 is easily offset by the proximity of the 
 United States, with its greater faciUties in
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 133 
 
 securing orders, in executing them cheaply 
 and quickly, and its cheapness of carriage. 
 
 It may indeed be suggested that an 
 increased Preference, which is favoured 
 in some Canadian quarters, would throw 
 the balance of advantage, not only in 
 the metal trades but in certain other 
 American trades, so heavily on the side 
 of the Mother Country as to secure for 
 her a large proportion of those imports 
 now taken from the United States. 
 
 When we confine our attention to the 
 general figures of Canadian import trade, 
 and mark how out of the 252 million dollars' 
 worth of imports into Canada Great 
 Britain contributes only 60:}; millions, it 
 appears as if a favouring arrangement 
 with Canada might be of immense service. 
 
 But the closer we analyse the general 
 figures the more the possible gain from such 
 a source is seen to dwindle. 
 
 In the first place, it is perceived that a 
 far larger proportion of American and of 
 other foreign imports into Canada consists 
 of non-dutiable goods, as indicated by the 
 returns for 1905. 
 
 
 Dutiable. 
 
 Free. 
 
 Great Britain 
 
 U.S.A 
 
 Others .... 
 
 $ 
 45,085,408 
 78,797,440 
 27,031,820 
 
 ^ 
 
 15,243,182 
 
 83.941. 131 
 11,812,454
 
 134 
 
 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 Non-dutiable goods are of course un- 
 affected by the Preference. 
 
 Of dutiable goods from the United 
 States we have seen that a very large 
 proportion consists of foodstuffs, raw 
 materials of manufacture, and of certain 
 wood and certain special manufactures 
 in which we do not and cannot seriously 
 compete with the United States. 
 
 Such, for instance, are — 
 
 
 
 
 Value of Dutiable 
 
 Imports, 1905. 
 
 Animals . . . . . • $1,037,277 
 
 Books, periodicals . 
 
 
 
 1,224,218 
 
 Breadstuffs 
 
 
 
 2,466,831 
 
 Carriages and carts . 
 
 
 
 1,463,214 
 
 Coal, coke, etc. 
 
 
 
 8,271,850 
 
 Fish and products . 
 
 
 
 537.955 
 
 Fruits 
 
 
 
 2,404,54s 
 
 Hardware (builders') 
 
 
 
 587,405 
 
 Tools and implements 
 
 
 
 1,085,975 
 
 Mineral oils 
 
 
 
 1,041,825 
 
 Provisions 
 
 
 
 1,440,774 
 
 Seeds, etc. 
 
 
 
 417.632 
 
 Turpentine, spirits of 
 
 
 
 456,443 
 
 Vegetables 
 
 
 
 804,208 
 
 Wood and manufactures 
 
 
 
 2,251,091 
 
 
 $25,491,243 
 
 If we knock off these virtually non- 
 competitive imports the American trade 
 remaining open for our competition 
 amounts to 53,000,000 dols. More than half 
 of this, as we have seen, consists of metals 
 in which the United States possess advan- 
 tages which are not appreciably affected 
 by the existing Preference, and the bulk
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 135 
 
 of which we could not secure by any 
 amount of Preference short of exclusion. 
 Many other classes of articles are so in- 
 timately related to specialised American 
 needs and tastes as to be virtually hors de 
 concours. 
 
 The most liberal computation of the 
 existing American trade which could be 
 directed into British channels by increased 
 Preference would not exceed 30,000,000 
 dols. The entire value of the " boon " 
 which Canada can offer us by diverting to 
 our shores this trade and the portion of 
 her other dutiable foreign trade which lies 
 within our power of supply, cannot be 
 estimated at more than the profits upon 
 £6,000,000, or, taking 10 per cent, as the 
 margin of profit, a net sum of £600,000 
 per annum. 
 
 Even this gain, however, is based on the 
 assumption that Canada is going to abstain 
 from further development of her own 
 manufactures, and will continue to import 
 the sort of goods that British manufac- 
 turers are able to supply. 
 
 If, on the contrary, Canada looks not 
 merely to a natural development of her 
 own manufactures with her own or im- 
 ported materials and her own power, but 
 intends to quicken this process by a rising 
 tariff system, it is quite evident that what 
 she seems to give to Great Britain with
 
 136 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 one hand will be taken away with the 
 other. In the history of the rise of modern 
 tariffs it is everywhere seen that the well- 
 developed and strongly organised branches 
 of the staple manufactures, especially in 
 the textile and metal trades, secure the 
 lion's share of Protection, and that the 
 tariff policies are moulded in their interests 
 to secure for them a virtual monopoly of 
 the domestic market. 
 
 What is true of European countries and 
 of the United States is also true of Canada, 
 which appears to have committed herself 
 quite definitely to a Protective career. 
 The inherent antagonism between Pro- 
 tection and Preference has already shown 
 itself. The trade in which British imports 
 have made the greatest advance in actual 
 volume, and in which the Preference has 
 been generally regarded as most effectual, 
 is the woollen. What happened may best 
 be stated in the words of the Hon. W. S. 
 Fielding in his Budget speech, June 1904 : — 
 
 " The complaint is made very largely 
 by our woollen manufacturers, and by 
 various public men who sympathise with 
 them, that, although on the better grades 
 of goods they can fairly compete with all 
 persons, even the British manufacturers, 
 a very large proportion of the imports of 
 British woollen goods coming into Canada 
 is really shoddy, goods of an inferior
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 137 
 
 character, against which we ought to 
 legislate ; and it is alleged that any increase 
 which we might make in the woollen duties 
 would have the effect of shutting out, not 
 the pure woollen goods, but the shoddy 
 goods. — We propose to deal with the 
 matter in this way. Our present duty on 
 the class of goods which I may describe 
 as cloths, tweeds, overcoatings, wearing 
 apparel, and goods of that character, is 
 35 per cent., subject to the Preference,which 
 brings the duty on British goods down 
 to 23;^ per cent. We do not propose to 
 increase the general tariff, but we propose 
 to put a limit to the extent to which 
 the Preference shall apply to these goods. 
 We propose to fix a minimum tariff of 
 30 per cent, on this class of goods coming 
 in under the Preferential tariff." 
 
 The same treatment is accorded to 
 twine and cordage subject to a 25 per cent, 
 tariff which the British Preference brought 
 down to i6f per cent. 
 
 " This," says Mr. Fielding, " is a lower " 
 rate of duty than even the most moderate 
 tariff man usually is willing to impose, 
 and we propose to fix a minimum duty, 
 of 20 per cent, ad valorem on that class of 
 goods coming in under the British Pre- 
 ference." 
 
 Thus we perceive that the Canadian 
 woollen trade, finding that it is " suffering
 
 138 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 severely from (British) competition," in- 
 duces the Canadian Government to a 
 practical withdrawal of the Preference. 
 The special plea with reference to " shoddy 
 goods " may be dismissed as irrelevant, 
 for in the reduction of the Preference from 
 33 J to 5 per cent, no attempt is made to 
 discriminate inferior from superior goods. 
 Nor is it in fact true that the British com- 
 petition which pressed most severely on 
 Canadian producers was confined to shoddy 
 goods. British woollens have taken the 
 best as well as the worst trade in the 
 Canadian market. 
 
 It is quite evident that the withdrawal 
 of the bulk of the Preference on these 
 woollen goods, as also admittedly in the 
 case of twine and cordage, is simply based 
 upon the doctrine that Canadian manu- 
 factures must be adequately protected 
 against British imports. 
 
 Although the recent investigations of 
 the Tariff Commission in Canada have 
 exhibited a strong Free Trade feeling among 
 the farmers, while the revelations of abuses 
 of power by tariff-created trusts and com- 
 bines have brought some temporary dis- 
 credit upon the Protective scheme of the 
 Manufacturers' Association, it is likely 
 that the superior organisation of the pro- 
 tected manufactures will secure for them 
 a predominance in fiscal policy similar
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 139 
 
 to that held by the great manufacturing 
 interests in the United States. 
 
 Their position is quite clearly defined. 
 They have no objection to the Canadian 
 consumer paying to British manufacturers 
 a slightly higher price for goods which 
 could be bought cheaper from the United 
 States or Germany so long as these goods 
 cannot be supplied by Canadian makers. 
 They favour the maintenance of a Pre- 
 ferential tariff on such goods. If, however, 
 the manufactured goods in question, 
 though not competing with Canadian goods, 
 should form an important cost of pro- 
 duction in some Canadian manufacture, 
 they will not be willing to maintain a 
 Preference which keeps up this cost. Still 
 less will they consent to admit British 
 goods which compete with their own 
 products. Here, of course, comes the tug 
 of war between the Protective motive and 
 the revenue motive. The Government is 
 continually disposed to let in competitive 
 goods at a moderate tariff designed 
 for revenue purposes : the manufacturing 
 interests continually strive to raise the 
 tariff to the point of prohibition so as to 
 exclude all competition. 
 
 Now, as we have seen. Great Britain 
 can supply very few classes of goods which 
 lie outside the present or prospective 
 range of Canadian production. Canada's
 
 140 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 present ambition is to become, like the 
 United States, as far as possible a self- 
 sufficing economic State, and whatever 
 may be the size of the immediate con- 
 cessions to British exports there is no 
 probability that such a policy can last, 
 still less that it can grow and form a stable 
 element in any Imperial arrangement. 
 
 Canada has within her borders all the 
 chief natural sources of supply required 
 for a full manufacturing career, and the 
 energetic development of this career will 
 be the first concern of those capitalists 
 who appear likely here, as in the United 
 States, to control in all essential matters 
 the fiscal policy of the nation. 
 
 The quite genuine desire of the body 
 of the Canadian people to cultivate strong 
 commercial relations with Great Britain 
 must be thwarted by the inevitable pressure 
 of concrete interests tending, first to release 
 Canada from her present dependence upon 
 the Mother Country for large classes of 
 manufactured goods, secondly to impel 
 Canada to closer commercial relations with 
 the United States. The former pressure 
 has been sufficiently explained ; the latter, 
 though less fully evident, is quite as certain 
 in its operation. 
 
 The political and sentimental hostility 
 which, following the dissolution of the 
 Reciprocity Treaty in 1866, has been fed
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 141 
 
 by various incidents within the last forty 
 years, already shows signs of yielding to 
 the plain dictates of common sense. 
 
 There are two reasons why Canada and 
 the United States must draw into ever 
 closer commercial relations. Each has to 
 sell many commodities the other wants 
 to buy. This of course is in a sense true 
 also of England and Canada, so far as the 
 buying of individual consumers is con- 
 cerned. But Canadians have large supplies 
 of raw materials which American manu- 
 facturers want to buy and will want with 
 an increasing pressure of desire : Americans 
 have other raw materials, or the same 
 raw materials at other points along the 
 frontier, which Canadian manufacturers 
 and railroads want to buy. While the 
 interests of unrelated unorganised con- 
 sumers may be ignored, not so those of 
 organised producers, factory owners who 
 want coal or grain or lumber. All four 
 populated and developed districts along 
 the Canadian frontier adjoin States of the 
 Republic which, from paucity of natural 
 resources or from growth of population, 
 cannot supply themselves with all the 
 foods and materials they require : strong 
 capitalist businesses see a clear gain in 
 freedom of exchange for such materials. 
 In IlHnois and other middle-western States, 
 still more strongly in Massachusetts and
 
 142 CANADA TO-DAY 
 
 other New England States, is this pressure 
 growing. Thwarted at present by a com- 
 bination of pohtical circumstances, it bides 
 its time to force forward on the American 
 side proposals of reciprocity which Canada 
 cannot and will not reject, and which, once 
 put into force, will grow into an ever 
 stronger economic bond between the two 
 great American nations. 
 
 It is idle to ignore the fact that this 
 policy must cut across and even reverse 
 the present Preferential policy. Canada 
 will of course not secure that great neigh- 
 bouring market which will be so profitable 
 for her unless she gives the manufactures 
 of the United States at least an equal 
 chance with those of Great Britain. 
 
 Again, this rapprochement will be ac- 
 celerated by the community of capitalist 
 interests in the two American nations. 
 The Canadian tariff has probably not 
 drawn into Canada any more American 
 capital than would otherwise have entered, 
 but it has caused American capital to 
 flow almost exclusively into strongly 
 organised enterprises. The invasion of 
 Canada by the great American corporations, 
 such as the Harvester Company, the 
 American Locomotive Works, the Singer 
 Manufacturing Co.,theRandDrill Company, 
 and quite recently by the Steel Trust, 
 implies a great growing consolidation of
 
 CANADA'S FISCAL FUTURE 143 
 
 capitalist interests which cannot fail to 
 exert an influence upon fiscal policy on 
 both sides of the line. It pays the 
 Harvester Trust and other trusts to set up 
 works inside Canada rather than to manu- 
 facture for the Canadian market machines 
 upon which they must pay a large import 
 duty. But the larger the Canadian 
 market becomes, and the greater the 
 stake they hold in that country, the more 
 irksome and wasteful will the double 
 interference of two sets of tariffs, cutting 
 the economic unity of their business in 
 two, appear to them. No single force 
 makes so obviously for the economic unity 
 of the two countries as this. 
 
 Community of interests between two 
 nations of consumers making for reciprocity 
 and Free Trade is politically feeble as 
 compared with this growing community 
 of capitalist interests.
 
 Printed by 
 
 Morrison & Gibb Limited 
 
 Edinburgh
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 MAV ' 
 
 
 
 IVUG 2 7 1957 
 
 
 
 NOV ^ 1952 
 
 
 
 It, . -:.i'i*Vi 
 
 
 
 -J. A 
 
 
 • 
 
 t^F^B 2 6 1973 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 Form L9-25/ii-9,'47(A5618)4 
 
 144 
 
 
 l^i - SITY of CALIFORiVlA 
 
 AT 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 LIBRARY
 
 IINlfninm Hiiin'''°^ library facility 
 AA 000 591 391 8