Delphi complete works of.., p.549
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 549
To these exertions of the Government, private efforts were added. Thomas Douglas, Lord Selkirk, had already distinguished himself as a pioneer of Empire. At a time when the great “clearances” in the Highlands were turning out the peasantry to make way for the sheep, Selkirk had brought (1803) three shiploads, 800 people, to Prince Edward Island. Encouraged by this, he obtained a grant of land of 110,000 acres on the Red River, and from then until his death laboured unceasingly to promote an agricultural colony in the North-west. Commercial jealousy, faction, violence, and lack of capital virtually ruined Selkirk’s plans and laid him in the grave at the age of forty-eight. His aim had been to make the west of Canada something better than a buffalo pasture and a beaver meadow. The truth was buried with him for half a century, while the buffalo wallowed in Alberta and the British settlers moved into Kansas.
More successful was Colonel Talbot, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, who first came to Upper Canada with Governor Simcoe and returned about ten years later to help colonize the Lake Erie district. Talbot received 5,000 acres from the Government, and settled twenty townships, each settler receiving fifty acres. The plan was overwhelmingly successful.
To this was added the operation of the land companies. The Canada Land Company was founded in 1824 by John Galt, a brilliant and energetic Scotsman whose plan for the development of the colony was based on that happy blending of public activity and private enterprise which is the true secret of colonization. Galt raised money in England for the purchase of land from the Government at the rate of about £20,000 a year. The land bought by the company included almost two and a half million acres. It embraced a part of the western peninsula of Ontario and a tract on the shores of Lake Huron. Nearly all was unbroken forest. The Government accepted the building of roads, bridges, churches and schools as part payment on the price. Public spirit and shrewd commercial sense were combined in true Scottish fashion. “The objects of the company,” so it was stated in the Journals of the Assembly of Upper Canada, “will be to purchase waste and uncleared land in this province, and to settle, clear and dispose of such land, together with the subsidiary objects of making advances of capital to settlers, opening and improving roads and other internal communications, and promoting the cultivation of such articles as can advantageously be exported from the province.” There was a certain nobility in the enterprise, too. Galt and his associates stood in the forest, still dripping from a day of great rain, as the sun set on a summer evening of 1827, and with the axe passed from hand to hand, they felled on a rising knoll a great maple tree to mark the site of a town. This done the axe was exchanged for a circulating flask of whisky, and a health was drunk to the prosperity of the future city — the present city — of Guelph. The company founded likewise Stratford and Galt, placed 4,500 settlers in the Huron district, and built up a settlement at Goderich that numbered four families in 1829 and 5,000 people ten years later. Its activity covered the period just preceding responsible government and its legal shadow lingers still.
It is characteristic of the time that another company, the Columbian Agricultural Association, was founded in London alongside of the Canada Company with the patriotic object of settling Highlanders in Venezuela. Providence visited this enterprise as it deserved. Its destitute survivors were conveyed to Upper Canada. There was also the British American Land Company (1834), which was given an Imperial charter permitting it to buy 3,000,000 acres in British North America. In actual fact, it only took up land, with no great success, in the eastern townships of Quebec. The claim of the local legislature to jurisdiction frustrated its efforts.
These efforts, public, private and corporate were not without success. They indicate, as will be shown in a later chapter, exactly the line of policy to be followed now on a vast scale and with an industrial technique of which Galt never dreamed. There were great difficulties. At the best, population tended to drain away to the United States. It had the larger population, the long start and the easy accessibility of its roads, its new canals and its newer railroads. But till responsible government began in 1840, Canada held the balance almost even. British migration was divided. In the first quarter-century that elapsed after 1815 (the years 1815 to 1840) a total of 1,164,713 emigrants, or 44,796 each year, left the British Isles. The low tide of migration was represented by the 12,510 emigrants of 1816, the flood by the 103,140 of 1832. Nearly all of these went to North America. Migration to Australia was of no account till the political troubles in Canada and the notoriety of Wakefield’s schemes of colonization gave it a great impetus. Only 29,982 people went to Australia as emigrants in the period 1815 to 1835, an annual average of 1,149. From 1835 to 1841 no less than 86,320 migrated to the Antipodes, a movement to be examined later in this chapter. For the period 1815 to 1841 emigration from the British Isles to places other than British North America, the United States, Australia and New Zealand only included 348 people each year, a total of 9,072, a factor entirely negligible.
To North America there went from 1815 to 1840 a total of 990,826 emigrants, and of these 532,419 to British North America and 458,407 to the United States.
But with the institution of responsible government, the situation entirely changed. In the next quarter of the century (1841-66), which happens to correspond with the life of the old (united) Province of Canada, the total emigrants to the United States numbered 2,639,863 and those to British North America only 677,036. This was precisely the period when began the great modern exodus out of Europe. Circumstances conspired to cause and to accelerate its volume. Steam transport on the ocean and the steam-boat and railway made movement easy and cheap as never before. At the same time Europe seemed unable to support its population. There were a million paupers in England in 1842. In Ireland the potato crop failed (1845-6-7), and famine walked like a spectre through the land. When crops failed, rent failed. Alien landlords cast out the evicted tenant to die, or to emigrate as best he could. One hundred and sixty thousand people were evicted in Ireland in the years 1847, 1848 and 1849; they died in hundreds by the roadside; they died in hundreds in the seaports; they died in hundreds in the ships. And those who did not die, gaunt, famished and stinking with the filth and squalor of the emigrant ship, reached, as a long-sought haven, the shores of the United States. The harvest, planted thus for England, is not all gathered even yet. During the grim years of the decade of the forties, a million people died in Ireland and a million and a half, mostly with hatred in their hearts, migrated to America.
Continental Europe, convulsed by the revolutions of 1848, sent forth a stream of political refugees to be the Pulitzers and the Carl Schurzes of America. The leaven of liberty that should have tempered German autocracy was cast into the melting-pot of the United States. Political migration soon turned into economic. In the twenty years before the Civil War, there came to the United States 1,380,000 Germans, a movement which only slackened when the vigorous economic policy of the German Empire showed its people how to live at home.
Public opinion on both sides of the ocean favoured migration. In the United States, at this time, fortunately for the new-comers, the whole trend of thought and national policy favoured increase of numbers. It was held to build up the country. The new-comers arrived in a state of poverty and destitution beyond belief. But they were welcome. As yet the doctrine of “bread and work for all” prevailed, the sound economic idea that new undeveloped country must be all the better for having immigrants, had not yet been replaced by the one-eyed vision of the labour economist. There was no dream of a quota law. There was, as yet, no biological idea of a Nordic race too pure to mix: in those days a mixed race, if not compounded with black and yellow, was regarded with as much favour as a mixed drink. In England public opinion, which at times had revolted against loss of population, came round more and more strongly to the idea of emigration. The economists could find no other remedy. Even the noble John Stuart Mill, looking out on the “probable future of the labouring classes” in 1848, could see nothing better ahead of them than either to stay at home, work hard and have no children, or else to migrate out of England. The cosmopolitan idea, noble in conception, but false in fact, that all the world was one, made no distinction between migration to a British colony and migration to an American republic. So well had Malthus and Cobden done their work.
The emigration idea laid hold even of our literature. The Victorian novelists could find no better method of transformation of their characters, of their redemption from sin, rescue from evil, or escape from poverty, than to send them off to the Antipodes. There Mr. Micawber became a merry magnate, and there little Emily’s tears are dried away in the shadow of the eucalyptus. Dickens sent so many of his characters to Australia that he ended by sending his son after them.
Meantime, there was added, just at the close of the period of which we speak, in favour of the United States, the powerful attraction of the Homestead Law (1862). This acted like a forced draught to a furnace already burning hard. The Act represented a policy of “free homes for all”, which had been an uppermost idea in America politics for a generation. The jealousy of the slave-holding South had kept it off the statute-books. With its passage, new-comers immediately after the Civil War flocked into the farm-land of what is now called the Middle West. The law, like the present Canadian statute, gave 160 acres (a quarter-section) to every citizen head of a family. Twenty-seven million acres were taken between 1867 and 1874. In the ten years after the Act, 2,065,000 immigrants came from Europe to the United States, of whom forty-five per cent were British and thirty-four per cent were German. In the one year 1873 there came 460,000 immigrants.
So passed the middle of the century, a period, in the reckoning of migration, all to the bad for England and all to the good for the United States.
The Homestead Law exactly met and matched the circumstances of the day in the United States. Its great success then and later has concealed from sight its utter inadequacy to meet the present situation of the Empire. It remains as a misleading guide to policy: a stumbling-block to the feet of progress.
Meantime in another part of the British Empire at this same epoch there was initiated an entirely different plan of migration in which perhaps may be found the solution of the present imperial problem. This was the “systematic colonization” scheme of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This scheme, after an initial period, of roseate hope, collapsed in apparent failure, and left nothing but debris to be rebuilt on a better plan. Apparently what went up as a rocket came down as a stick. But the seeming failure was only like that of Langley’s flying machine which flew into the Potomac in 1896. The real success was there. If migration in the Empire is to be co-ordinated with land and capital it is from the fundamental ideas of Wakefield’s system that we must start anew. The homestead system has nothing to say to the man living on the dole in Birmingham and unable to pay his way to Canada.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862) was a young Englishman of decent family and education who went to Newgate prison, quite deservedly, for three years in 1837 for having kidnapped an heiress. Prison sharpened his wits, or at any rate his sympathies. These were the good old days of the transportation of criminals. Many of Wakefield’s fellow-unfortunates were bound for the long voyage to Botany Bay; others were to embark, just outside the prison, on a voyage longer still. Wakefield wrote, and his words came as one of those voices from prison which have reached humanity with such poignancy from Cervantes and Bunyan to Oscar Wilde and Julian Hawthorne. His Punishment of Death and its message to the world belongs elsewhere. But his Letter from Sydney (1829), developed later into his Art of Colonization, opened a new chapter in the history of European migration, and has stamped its effect on a large portion of the present empire.
Wakefield’s central idea, as propounded to the House of Commons by his friend Charles Buller in 1843, was “to make colonization an extension of civilized society instead of that mere emigration which aimed at little more than shovelling out paupers to where they might die, without shocking their betters with the sight or sound of their last agony”. Wakefield saw that for “systematic colonization” land, labour and capital are all needed. These must be co-ordinated and balanced. A connection must be made between “the boundless regions wanting people” and “the countless people wanting land”. This connection was to be made through capital, and the capital was to be obtained by the sale of the public land. The previous haphazard systems of colonial policy, so Wakefield argued, had led to an abundance of land, a lot of it, like the Clergy Reserves in Canada and the great blocks in the Swan River Settlement, unoccupied and unused, a mere encumbrance to real settlement. At the same time “the absolute want of hands at any rate of wages in a colony” precluded economic advance. Wakefield therefore proposed a sort of endless chain of prosperity. The Government would survey and sell the public land; with the money received they would give free passage to emigrants from England. On arrival in the colony these immigrants would hire as labourers. In a year or two they would save enough money to buy land and hire others to work for them. The price they paid would bring out more labourers: hence still more land occupied; more capital; more immigrants — and so on till the colonial wilderness should blossom like the gardens of England.
Wakefield, very properly, kept away from details too exact: at what price should the land be sold? At a “sufficient price”, according to place and circumstance. What wages should be paid to the new-comers? Sufficient wages. “To name a price for all the colonies”, said Wakefield, “would be as absurd as to fix the size of a coat for mankind.”
Wakefield’s theories were received, so wrote Professor Merivale thirty years later, “by the multitude with incredulity, by the learned with scorn”. Yet they made headway. Opposed at first by the Times, the Edinburgh and by the whole phalanx of Conservative opinion, they presently won over the Press and captured the Colonial Office. John Stuart Mill, Colonel Torrens and other economists rallied in support. A “Colonization Society” was founded to exploit the plan, and in the decade following (1830-40) the Wakefield scheme of colonization was tried out in Australia and New Zealand — tried out and, in appearance, failed. In reality the circumstances of the experiment were such that the system never had a chance. But unfortunately for imperial development, the apparent failures in Australia ruled the Wakefield plan out from further practical application, and led to the adoption of the inadequate homestead system as the method of colonization throughout the Empire.
There was scarcely any emigration of free settlers from England to Australia from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the formation of the Colonization Society of 1830. Till 1828 there were less than a thousand a year, and in some years only three or four hundred. But in the decade of the ‘thirties, distress in England swelled the volume of prospective emigrants at the very time when hard times and political troubles in the Canadas were discouraging emigration in that direction. Emigration to British North America, which had reached 60,000 in 1832, sank to 15,000 in 1835 and to 4,000 in 1838. Attention naturally turned to Australia as a field for emigration, and in particular as the proper site for an experiment in systematic colonization. Unfortunately the Australian colonies already existing, in spite of the insignificant number of their population, were already badly damaged as a field for the new system. Lavish and unsystematic grants of lands had set up huge holdings. In the parent colony of New South Wales land had been recklessly granted. Until 1822 a tract of land could be obtained by merely “sitting down” on it. A simple promise to occupy the land, handed in to the surveying department in writing, set up a claim. One military officer received 15,000 acres because the Governor “was inclined to think he might settle there”. By the year 1825 when this loose system at last received a check, 340,000 acres had been granted on such vague promises of occupation. Things were no better in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania); though the population was only 20,000 and the land occupied and cultivated only 56,000 acres, the grants of land had already alienated a million and a half acres. The newly founded Swan River Colony (Western Australia) (1828) was the worst of all. While the colony was less than a year old and had only 850 settlers, already 525,000 acres had been granted away. The huge grants of land were worse than useless for actual settlement, which was impeded by their existence. They served only as a basis for land speculation and as an incentive to further grants. Trading in land took the place of working the land.
The English disciples of the Wakefield idea decided therefore to avoid the existing settlements and to start a colony of their own. A South Australian Association was formed and secured (1834) an Act “to erect South Australia into a British Province, and to provide for the colonization and the government thereof”. Commissioners were appointed who were to borrow £200,000 from private sources and on the credit of the revenues of the future colony, not guaranteed by the Imperial Government. Theoretically this fund was to pay the cost of sending out the emigrants, establishing a port of settlement and surveying and allotting the lands. Theoretically also the proceeds of the sales of land would reimburse the original loan, and the productive output of the colony would then produce a revenue for further operations. In practice all was confusion. There was delay in choosing the commissioners. When chosen they quarrelled, resigned and were replaced. Lack of confidence made it impossible to raise money to begin, until a London magnate, George Angas, formed a private company to put money into the venture to start it going. There were quarrels as to how to sell the land — fixed price, graded prices or auction sales. Wakefield himself dropped out in disgust. All this in England, but worse when the “colony” reached its destination. Fifteen shiploads of immigrants (nearly 1,000 people) were deposited at the site of the future settlement (Adelaide). But the land was not yet surveyed and not ready for selection; so the immigrants sat about in idleness, made merry and quarrelled and speculated in land script for the unallotted land. This delayed all productive settlement. Public relief works had to be started to keep the emigrants at work for pay. The resources of the colony were eaten up in such fruitless operations without economic return. More and more settlers came in and less and less capital. By 1840 there were 14,600 settlers in the colony, of whom 8,400 were still sitting round in the capital. Finally an Imperial Act of 1842 wound up the colony, as far as its special features of colonization went. The Imperial Government made good a deficit of £215,000 involved in the failure of the project. But in reality the scheme had only failed as any other first attempt — a first steam engine, a first flying machine — is apt to fail. It was the details of the mechanism that were at fault, not the principle of the machine.
