Delphi complete works of.., p.413
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 413
So what I mean to say is, that’s all that ultimately came of this bogey of Annexation that frightened two generations in their sleep. It ended in a banquet and a laugh. And now all that’s left of it is that our local societies along the border annex pieces of the United States; the Rotarians of Buffalo annex St. Catharine’s for a day — see the Stars and Stripes all over the place, “Welcome Rotarians!” The Girl Guides of Windsor annex Detroit (Union Jacks everywhere and “Welcome Girl Guides!”). As I write these lines, the American Hotel Men have annexed Montreal in such numbers that we’re short of flags. Indeed, if any one wants to understand our relations with one another better than history can tell or statistics teach, let him go and stand anywhere along the Niagara-Buffalo frontier at holiday time — fourth of July or first of July, either one — they’re all one to us. Here are the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jacks all mixed up together and the tourists pouring back and forward over the International Bridge; immigration men trying in vain to sort them out; Niagara mingling its American and Canadian waters and its honeymoon couples.... Or go to the Detroit-Windsor frontier and move back and forward with the flood of commuters, of Americans sampling ale in Windsor and Canadians sampling lager in Detroit ... or come here to Montreal and meet the Dartmouth boys playing hockey against McGill ... or if that sounds too cold, come to Lake Memphremagog in July and go out bass fishing and hook up the International Boundary itself.
But all of such fraternization is only all the more fraternal because we know that we are satisfied on each side of the line to keep our political systems different. Annexation in the old bygone sense has vanished out of the picture. And in the other sense of a union of friendship that needs neither constitution nor compacts, we have it now and mean to keep it. Just once indeed — last spring, you remember — it looked almost the other way around, when we nearly annexed your republic; in fact, we did annex it (and you with it, Mr. Roosevelt) for three days during the visit of the King and Queen. I believe we had to remind you that we saw them first and wanted them back.
What a wonderful visit it is to look back upon now, like a break of open sky and sunshine in the gathering clouds. Up and down through Canada we dragged the King and the Queen by the hand, like children anxious to show our treasures — the apple blossoms of Annapolis and the peach-bloom of Niagara and the flowers among the ripening wheat of the prairies. “Take this, and this, and this,” in handfuls and, “if ever England wants anything — .” And now England has sent over, not for the flowers of the gardens or the plains, but for the hard metal, nickel and copper and steel, from the rocks of our northern desolation. These are the grim blossoms that go out as the harvest from Canada, gathered for its army. Under the tramp of the marching feet of those that carry it, our ears can catch the undertone of music — like the subdued refrains of the theatres, half-heard, half-lost in the other sounds — can catch the refrain of fifty years ago:
“for they’re sol-diers of the Queen, my lads —
the Queen — my lads...”
till it fades and dies on the ear as the footsteps pass into distance.
I spoke of migration. But the shift of population back and forward that binds us most has not meant the mass movement of any special exodus or influx, but the steady and continued outgoing of individuals, seeking their fortunes back and forward across the line. From this has grown the unity of our professions — the law that follows the English common law in forty-seven states and in eight provinces — with two honourable exceptions to remind us of the bygone claims of France; the profession of medicine that sends its students and its professors and its practitioners indifferently across a continent; the engineers, the teachers, the artists, the architects. No one has ever counted, no statistics have ever shown, the volume of this export of brains across the line: or measured up the “unfavourable balance” of any community that dares trade in this with Nova Scotia. But the common experience of those of us whose lot it has been to come and go across the line among the colleges can bear witness to what an incalculable influence it must have had. I speak here of what I know. I “migrated” to the United States, to Chicago, forty years ago, as a wave all by myself, so penurious and friendless that even the thugs wouldn’t murder me. Of such single threads, insignificant in themselves, has our common garment been woven.
To the student, who represents the export of brains, we add the tourist, who represents the import of wonder. The habit of leaving home is one of the latest phases of our rapid civilization — as the wheel spins, people fly off from the centrifugal force of it. Arizona marvels at Alberta; Alberta at Arizona. The sound psychological principle of “tourism” is that anywhere is better than home, and if you don’t buy a car you can’t go anywhere and if you do buy a car you must go somewhere. From which springs the enormous economic phenomenon of “tourism” as a part of international trade. Our latest figures show that American visitors crossing the frontier spend in our country nearly $300,000,000 a year, and our return visitors spend about $100,000,000 a year in the States. Who wins out on this, only Professor Quiz of the Radio could tell, but at least it means that friendly little signs of “tourists,” “cabins,” and “fresh eggs” voice a welcome from every highway. Even in some lost corner in the broken bush where there is but a falling barn, a tumbled house, and a melancholy, a pathetic handmade sign, there passes to the whispering corn that rustles in the corn patch the word of hope, “tourists.” Better this, than the “keep out,” “keep off,” “military zone” of Europe. Our “demarcation” where the forests still front civilization has as its Siegfried Line the sign, “Fresh Eggs.”
That brings me easily enough to talk, as I said above I wished to, about money — you remember — about that dime? After all, you know, in your country as in ours money talks: and when it doesn’t talk it whispers. So when I ask you about letting us have that loose dime, I am sure you won’t think — that is, that you would fully understand — well, let the dime talk.
What I mean is this. In a sense, we don’t need any material aid. The war is going to make our fortune. It is an ill wind that blows no one luck, and the storms of death and disaster let loose to blow over Europe will cast up on our shores as a part of their wreckage a golden harvest of opportunity, a marvellous development of our latent resources. Thus have the sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America. Bygone tyranny sent you the Pilgrim Fathers. Scotland sent you its Highlanders after the Forty-Five. Famine in Ireland gave New York its police force, and hard times in Scandinavia redeemed themselves in Minnesota. Even Germany weeded out for you its best, its refugee Karl Schurzes and its Joseph Pulitzers. Every European cycle of hard times, famine or depression, has washed its waves of newcomers to our plains and forests, and raised up in our sunshine a newer generation of hope that would have faded in the European shadow.
Now shall come the greatest of all, the vast migration out of Europe when this war, as yet unnamed, shall end. And this is ours first of all, this is Canada’s. We can and will take in half a million British a year, and still feel our country empty for a generation yet. French, too, if they will come: but scarcely likely: once back on the leafy boulevards with a vin rouge and a fifth edition of an evening paper, they stay there till the next war. They ask no other consummation than just to get back to their consommation.
But the British! Once the example was made of evacuating the children out of London the pace was set. Children who started life by “evacuating” will migrate all over the Empire. What’s the Atlantic to a family that has been all the way to Devon?
But long before the tide, comes the ground swell: and that will be in the call for our resources — men and material, matter and metal, to pass over for our defence on the European front. This, in spite of taxes, in spite of disruptions and dislocations, in spite of the inevitable but brief post-war slump, will make the material future of our country, as the Napoleonic War made yours. We can’t help it. We’re going to be just as modest about it as we can. But it’s there. And, of course, if you people like to come in on it, why, there’s lots for all of us. But if not, it’s all right anyway.
Take first our gold. From being nothing and nobody in the gold business fifty years ago, we are now the world’s second in it, and if you count in the other stuff that comes out with the gold, we are the world’s first. Just before the Great War (1911), the world had a total gold stock in hand of about $10,000,000,000 (meaning by a dollar, the twentieth part of an ounce) and a yearly production of $462,000,000. Canada only produced $9,000,000 and only held a negligible stock in its banks for glory’s sake. It coined no gold. Most people living in Canada never saw a gold coin. There had been the British Columbia mines and then the Klondike (1898), but their glory passed. Then came the discovery of gold all round Hudson’s Bay — God’s desolation that shore had seemed — and changed all the face of our country. By the close of the Great War (1919), Canada produced $15,000,000 of a world’s output of $350,000,000; and just before the fall of the gold standard altered the calculation from hard money to soft paper (1931), Canada produced $58,000,000 of a world’s total of $460,000,000. Now, reckoning the ounce of gold at 35 paper dollars, Canada in the last fully reported year produced $165,000,000 worth of gold.
So that’s our interest in gold: and as our government buys all the output of the Canadian mines in terms of U. S. paper, the fall of our currency — now at 10 per cent discount — doesn’t affect this part of the economic problem....
Now every time that war comes back to the world, gold comes back to its own. When the war is over, the economists begin to explain, as regularly as a chorus at sunset, that the world doesn’t need gold. They say that everything that gold does for commerce could be done without it; that as a measure of value you can hardly rely on it from one century to another. At the time of the Norman Conquest, a dollar and a half in gold would buy a cow! Where is that cow now? When King Richard III (not mechanized) shouted, “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” he could have had a good one for five dollars. And now his kingdom is mortgaged for forty billions, and carries it easily.... That sort of economics worries the business world about as much as the astronomers do when they tell us that the sun is losing time — half a second every thousand years — and that the North Pole star has shifted twenty minutes (or is it seconds?) since the Egyptians looked at it. The economists told us after the last war that gold was as “antiquated as the stagecoach,” that instead of it we could use “index numbers” and “ratios” and “curves of demand and supply.” But with war, back comes gold as the only means of payment for people too ignorant or stubborn to accept a couple of curves in return for army mules or crude oil. A Turk won’t take an Index Number and will look a gift ratio in the mouth.
So when gold comes back, all the warring nations want it and must have it, and all the nations that have mines must make the best of them. If one price (in the paper dollars of the minute) won’t get the gold out of the mines, then the price in paper dollars has got to go up. The thing is as logical as a hydraulic pump. In the old days of free coinage, the pump worked of itself: you dug up a dollar ($20.67 per oz.) and you got a dollar, a stamped one with a milled edge, but really just what you dug up. But it comes to much the same thing now: if there’s need enough for gold, the paper price has got to go up till the gold is forthcoming.
But here is the oddness of it. Economically, gold is in reverse gear. In hard times, with low wages and low cost for materials and powers, gold beats out its momentary paper price, and mining flourishes best when everything else flourishes worst. This at first sight looks like “Public Enemy No. 1,” but it isn’t. In fact, it’s more likely the other way; it acts like the big flywheel in a machine that helps it to run when the running is hard, and helps slack it up when it needs it. “Compensatory action” is the engineer’s phrase, isn’t it? If not, they can have it.
So, inevitably, the first effect of war is to raise all prices of labour and materials and machinery, and for the moment knock the profit out of mining. Indeed the very anticipation of this is enough to knock down the stock exchange valuation of the mining shares, as it has done right now. But you can no more hold them down for good than you can sit on a safety valve. The gold is needed, the paper price rises, and up they come! This is happening right now, as easy to predict as sunshine in California. Any one who wants to can make a lot of money out of it. Only be sure to pick the right mines. There are three kinds in Canada — established mines, prospective mines and flapdoodle. The established mines are the ones that are actually producing gold, lots of it, with lots more in sight (that means, technically, gold that you don’t see) and in some of them gold is piled up, as in the Egyptian pyramids of the Rameses family, so much of it that the directors can hand down a dividend off the shelf as they hand down raisins in a country store, unless they fall asleep and forget to.
By the prospective mines, I mean the ones that later are going to be, or were going to be, but for the war, established mines. The gold is there for certain, and, apart from changes of transport and conditions and taxes and charges, prospective mines would have turned into established mines as properly as seeds turn into pumpkins. But war changes a lot of things....
The flapdoodle mines outnumber the others, as the blacks outnumber the whites in Barbados. Some of them are just a few stakes in the ground, or a claim, or a hole, or a hope, or a false alarm. Some of them, not a doubt of it, would have turned into Eldorados of profit. And on this basis the flapdoodle mines have given us, in peacetime, a cheerful element of chance in a monotonous world, too prim to allow sweepstakes and without enough time to play Italian lotto or French dominoes: a little element of northern adventure in a dull routine of work, with a dime sent out to seek an Eldorado. Here’s to them and good-bye! They have sprung up like little flowers in their northern wilderness, but with the hot blast of war they perish, as the flowers do, in their own bush fires. But with peace again, and with the second growth of underbrush rising anew in the burnt forest, the flapdoodle mines, a new crop, will spring to life again, and their life go on as before.
Such is the gold stake in Canada. You Americans might care to come in on it. It’s better than sitting around in Oklahoma, arguing on neutrality. But if not, that’s all right; you don’t mind my talking of it.
But gold is only the minor part of our mineral resources. That same rim of rocks that encircles the desolate shores of the James and Hudson’s Bays is one vast treasure house of the world’s metals — iron, copper, cobalt, nickel, lead — and metals whose strange names and magic properties are known only to those whose business it is to forge the mechanisms of war. Our nickel represents 80 per cent of the world’s supply. Till now 95 per cent of it went into the arts of peace where its matchless property of hardening other metals puts it beyond competition. But in war the God Mars will claim his own.
But since we have started talking about this low business of gold and money and money getting, let us go a little further with it and recall how much our mutual trade means to each of us. The total of it in the last reported year ran to $900,000,000: but, as the Scotch say, never mind about the three cents. In fact, never mind about the figures at all. I may have got them all wrong: when I say millions, perhaps it was billions. I always feel that figures merely clutter up an argument.
But for those who do enjoy figures, please don’t add and subtract the columns to get at the “balance of trade” to see who is cheating who. Of all the fool doctrines that have obscured the commercial outlook of mankind and injured peace and good will among the nations, the balance of trade doctrine is the worst. What does it matter who sells and who buys as long as both are satisfied? If I buy a dozen eggs from my grocer, he has, I admit, the balance of trade, but after all I have the eggs. But according to this fool doctrine the grocer has outdone me by thirty-five cents. Over those points statesmen on your side of the line and statesmen on our side of the line have shouted denunciation for generations. We had the “balance” on you during the Civil War period and cheated you out of so much that you had to shut down on trade with us and terminate the Reciprocity Treaty. Just now and for some years past you’ve been cheating us regularly every year (see the reports) out of about fifty million dollars (or billion): in short, we would be absolutely on the rocks if we hadn’t been able to turn around and cheat the British (who, of course, are easy marks) out of still larger amounts. The British, in fact, are such nuts commercially that they’ve been running an unfavourable balance of trade for nearly a hundred years and have never caught on to it. Don’t whisper it to them or they might wake up.
The so-called unfavourable balance may mean glorious things for a nation. When this war ends, if there should ensue, as I am sure there will, a period of development for Canada such as few countries ever saw — a flood of immigration, a mass import of machinery and a vast development of natural resources — then the balance of trade will be utterly and completely unfavourable, year after year, and the more rapid the development the heavier the adverse balance. The infancy of a nation spells an adverse balance, from the efforts made on its behalf: just as human infancy means an adverse balance of care and kisses. And if a nation turns old, so old that its efforts end, and it sits still and lives on its investments abroad — its feet in warm water and its gruel at its side — then that again leaves the adverse balance, for the gruel. Thus in the life of trade as in the life of man, do youth and age contrast, and age presents its sorry parody of a second childhood.
So in this new period, first of our war and then of our rising industrial development and power, let the balance fall so heavy in the scale that it kicks the beam. Such a balance is measured visibly to the eyes by its actuality of carloads of machinery and material, and is reflected from that into terms of money. But the goods are the substance, the money just the moonshine in the water. When you lend us money and we import material, what has happened really is that you have lent us the material; and when we pay you interest, that also, at one remove, takes the form of handing over goods.
