Delphi complete works of.., p.686
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 686
The Canal, — when the energetic Roosevelt the First drove the plan through and that grand old engineer, Colonel Goethals, constructed it, — was in reality a strategic, a naval idea. The Spanish American war of 1898 had shown the United States where they stood, — their navy in two separate compartments. The sensational voyage of the battleship Oregon, round the Horn, expressed it in capital letters. But the Americans hate ‘strategy’ as much as we do. So they called it a commercial canal: and the joke is it turned out to be one. Not that it makes enough money to pay interest on the half billion dollars that built it. But it readjusts, redirects, a vast quantity of the world’s commerce, and none more than it does ours. It turns out that time doesn’t matter for certain cargoes, notably for grain, which has got to wait for its market anyway. Hence the port of Vancouver ships out Canadian wheat for Europe at the rate of 40 to 70 million bushels a year. The highest point yet reached is the shipment of over 96 million bushels in 1928. Wheat for the Panama Canal route is shipped from points as far east of Vancouver as the eastern border of Saskatchewan. And the route is open all the year round.
Wheat likes to take its time: and so it appears do certain passengers. Already over 15 lines of steamers carry passengers on regular schedules from Vancouver to Europe via Panama. Most steamers take the trip in a leisurely way, the stops being part of the pleasure, — Hollywood being one of them. But the voyage in mileage from Vancouver to Southampton via the Panama is 8,500 miles, and the necessary time about 28 days. The voyage across Canada to Montreal and thence to England may be put (with the same class of steamer) at about eleven days. No one would ‘hurry home’ via Panama, as people use to in 1860. But many people are attracted by the trip. ‘Cruising’ has come as a new phase of the world’s method of rest.
It by no means follows that the Panama Route will hurt our Canadian transcontinental railways. People will come via Panama to British Columbia for the cruise and return by rail, — people who otherwise would cruise somewhere else.
But even wheat and passengers are only the beginning of the subject.
The importance of the Panama route is such that public opinion in British Columbia should be directed in good time to the question of a second Isthmian canal. When it is built it should properly be a joint enterprise of Canada and the United States. At the present time the Panama Canal suffices, but with a much smaller margin than would be gathered from a superficial view of the traffic returns. In spacial capacity the dimensions of the Panama Canal are good enough. In point of length its locks can hold any ships in the world now afloat except the Normandie and the Queen Mary. In depth it is 41 feet at the shallowest. The canal is able to handle 17,000 ships a year. The highest annual traffic yet reached has been only 7,000 ships. Increasing the locks in size, it is said, can double the capacity, but there are obvious, general reasons for an international, rather than a national canal.
In a financial sense there is still little temptation to build a second canal. The Panama cost $543,000,000, the interest on which at 3 per cent. is $16,290,000. The canal made a return over operating cost in 1935 of $15,540,723: but if the interest is charged there is an annual deficit of $771,618. But all this situation can change, if not in the twinkling of an eye, at any rate in the twinkling of a British Columbia Cabinet. If a new canal is needed there is the Nicaragua route, probably always the better one, but side tracked in favour of the present one. Advocates of the other route gave it a bad name and filled it with volcanoes which it hasn’t got. The United States bought in 1916 for $3,000,000 from Nicaragua a monopoly right. But we could induce them to share it. The “Nicks” themselves are out of it. There is also the Colombian route below Panama, the subject, so it is said, of a lot of backstairs diplomacy. It is said that a British oil syndicate got a canal concession thrown in with the oil, but gave it back at the instance of the United States.
All of this the people in British Columbia ought to study. The first thing should be to get someone to make an address on it to the Women’s Canadian Club. That has grown to be the way to start things in Canada. It’s a pity there were no Women’s Canadian Clubs back in past history. Columbus could have given a talk on “Where is the United States?” and saved years of exploration. The Renaissance could have been put over in one winter session.
I offered to speak to the Club in Vancouver on the “Prospect of a Second Isthmian Canal.” They asked me what I knew of it and I said, “Nothing.” That was why I wanted to talk about it. A person who knows nothing about a thing brings to it a freshness, of enthusiasm impossible to those who know too much. But the club decided against it. They said it wasn’t funny enough.
But the great and outstanding aspect of the empire province of British Columbia is its need for further development, for more people. Of late years unfortunately a lot of people in Canada have taken a bilious view of immigration. The French Canadians are against it: they think they can attend to the increase of population right at home. And can you blame them unless the immigration was from France or Belgium. Moreover what is now called ‘labour’ is against it. Labour sees clearly, but it sees with only one eye and can’t see far. Can you blame the people whom we used boldly to call the ‘working class’ if they can’t look six months ahead. We never gave them a chance to.
Labour sees in the immigrant a man who has come to steal his job at lower wages. Foreshorten the picture sufficiently and that is what you see. How would we like it ourselves? How would our college professors like the import of Hindu teachers who could live on nuts and need only a loincloth? How would our bankers and financiers appreciate the import of real cannibals from the Marquesas?
But apart from French-Canadian and labour opposition there is a new anti-immigration school made up of academic socialists, pots without a lid, the kind of people who call you and me the ‘bourgeoisie’, and use terms we don’t understand, such as ‘social continuum’ and ‘sociological saturation’, — which evidently means something they wet. These people have invented for Canada the idea of an ‘optimum of population’, and have put it, for no particular reason at all, at 35,000,000 people.
The fundamental fallacy in all such thinking is that the immigrant takes away the other man’s job. The truth is the other way. The tide of immigration raises the home waters. The incoming immigrant, under proper circumstances, attracts with him a great import of capital, of physical goods and material, of intangible ‘money’ to invest. He represents society ‘moving house’ from one location to another. When you move house you don’t complain that there is no furniture, you bring it with you.
For proof of this ask the Winnipeg of the early eighties, when the hammers and saws were noisy on Main and Portage all day and night. People have told me of the big days of Regina before the War, when it was changing from a straggling town to a modern city, with the government buildings going up, with all incoming trains full, and nowhere for anyone to sleep. In fact they didn’t sleep.
All these times can come again.
* * * * *
Now there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that British Columbia alone can support 35,000,000 people: not only can but will: not only will, but will within the century. People alive now will be alive then.
Look at it this way. Population can be supported in either of two ways. People may live on an area, without any reference to its own fertility or resources by working up material brought in and taken out, or by performing services on the high seas and elsewhere and consuming goods sent in return. Thus might a community live and flourish on an ice-berg or on a rock. It is like taking in washing.
Thus live and flourish many of the millions that make up the 36 millions on the 50,000 square miles of England or of the 8 millions who live in the 11,700 square miles of Belgium.
But this is only for special areas. Obviously it can’t be everywhere. But any place and every place, empty or partly empty, and with resources not used or not fully used, can take in people (under proper organization) up to the measure of its resources. Humanity lives from the ground under its feet.
Now take the magnificent resources of British Columbia as detailed above. Here are the 22,000,000 acres of farm and garden land and the vast grazing country of the north. No market for grain, you say; can’t sell fruit; grapes over-produced! All right, then take the almost unrivalled fisheries of the British Columbia coast, 7,000 miles long, is it not? No market for any more export of fish! you object. Catch one more salmon and you break the market? Very good, then let the people turn to lumber. We said of the forest wealth of British Columbia that it covers 142,000 square miles. Can’t sell it? Too bad. But remember the enormous deposits of coal, the potential 40,000,000 thousands of tons. Or the mineral wealth. Vast beyond figures. Can’t sell it, can’t sell it? Don’t you see, my dear sir, that your talk is idiocy. You are saying that the human race no longer needs food, no longer wants shelter or clothes or warmth, or light or heat or power. If we can’t sell it abroad, let’s all go out there and eat it. If foreigners don’t want houses, let’s go and live in them. If no one wants light, let’s sit in a flood of it and laugh.
Of course immigration must be organized: what’s true of the mass is not true of the single man. Put one immigrant down in Victoria by himself with nothing more to it than that and of course it’s only one more man without a job. You’ll have to board him at the Empress Hotel: and he’ll never leave.
Nor does it follow that the system of immigration needed now, is the same as was needed fifty years ago. The ‘homestead system’ ran its course and finished it. The essence of it lay in the idea that if the immigrant were offered free land, of a kind that needed no clearing and was ready for instant cultivation, he would then find his way to it, and would sell his produce in a market practically unlimited. His coming to the country would automatically bring, without state aid, the crowd of shopkeepers, middle men, parasites (lawyers, clergymen, professors, etc.) who completed the environment. This was the famous Homestead System which we adopted from the United States in North West Canada in 1875.
But the situation is no longer there. In the States all the free land of that class is gone, every acre if it: in Canada a great deal. And what is more, the immigrant cannot find the money to come. Put the steamship fares at ten dollars a head and there are twenty million people in Europe who can’t pay it. The homestead system is a hopeless misfit in a world of doles and relief and collapsed markets.
But there are other systems, both public, — depending on the state, — and private, — depending on the inducement of profit. What many people do not know is that before the Homestead System, by its temporary appropriateness and its success, drove all others from the field, there were other systems some in full operation, others in an opening stage.
There is the ‘religious’ system, the motive pertaining to the next world but this. To it belong the Rappites of Indiana, the Shakers of Oneida and the Mormons of the Golden Temple and the Salt Sea. Of all systems it is economically the most successful. But we are not religious enough for it. There is the Wakefield system, initiated with considerable success in Canterbury Province, New Zealand and parodied in South Australia (1836). Gibbon Wakefield’s idea (he got it in prison where bright ideas come easy) was that the immigrant should have all his expenses paid, turn into a hired man, save his money, buy land, make money, hire another immigrant, and so on like a school girl’s chain letter to unknown gentlemen. What is more, the system can work and did work and will work again.
But it could be properly combined with the other system that worked with such extraordinary success in Upper Canada a hundred years ago. This was the system of land companies like the old Canada Company of John Galt and his associates, chartered in 1824. There people received the right to settle a tract of land, — in their case in the western peninsula of Ontario: they received proprietory rights on the soil and timber: they were pledged to bring out settlers: as part of the bargain they built roads, churches and schools: but they got exemption from taxes. Their reward, — apart from moral gratification, — lay in the fact that they scooped off what was afterwards called the ‘unearned increment’.
The company founded thus Gait and Stratford and Guelph, put 4,500 settlers into the Huron district and made lots of money. If the academic socialists are right they were all ‘bourgeoisie’ and no doubt went to hell. But it was worth it.
I like to recall some of the scenes of their incoming and to realize how easily, if we were so minded, it could be all done again.
“As the sun set on a summer evening of 1827 Gait and his associates stood in the forest 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 whiskey and a health was drunk to the prosperity of the future city — the present city — of Guelph.”
But there remains still another plan of immigration which so far as I know never had a name but which filled a large part in the development of earlier Canada. It might be called the Manorial system. What happened was this. People of the landed class, not quite rich enough to live at home, or having no land because of being younger sons, came out to Canada. They wanted country life, not the life of the working peasants but of landed gentry. To many people, of whom I am humbly one, this is the most fascinating, the most natural of all human activities: and it gives full scope to the activities of women as of men: it is the best life in the world for health, for children, for peace of mind. The seasons come and go, the planted hedges and the drooping elms take on antiquity: the grass grows smooth on the wide lawn. Outside it all, the world is well forgotten.
Such homes were made in Canada by people of family and substance, — people let us be bold even if we go to hell for it, — of the better class. They brought their servants and their labourers, imported cottagers and settled down on wide estates of five hundred to a thousand acres (wide for Canada, not England) to reproduce again the homes and the life they knew. The system failed here. The estates broke up. Democracy called the cottagers. The public school for all leveled up and leveled down. The ‘gentleman’ lost his money, grew shabby and turned into a tavern bum with an Oxford accent. As a child I remember lots of them.
We need the bums back. Coiled up in their method was a mainspring of vital truth. What we need is a ‘back to the land’ system, not merely for the working people of the labour class but for people with a little money. What spells poverty in a modern city crammed with luxury and every breath a dollar, is peace and comfort in the country. A man miserable on a city pension, or a retired, over-rich business man belching in his club, could be a manorial king on a country estate, up with lark, as busy and as useless. All we need is to bring back again the lost art of how to lose money like a gentleman.
* * * * *
But I can go no further with the topic here. I keep it for a more sustained chapter on Migration and Settlement. Immigration is our need and our opportunity.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE ISLAND OF THE BLEST
VANCOUVER ISLAND — The Last Word in Charm of Climate — English Summer and Pickwickian Winter — The Lost Glory and the New Future of Victoria — Manorial Settlement on Vancouver Island — Losing Money Like a Gentleman.
There is no doubt that Vancouver Island represents the last word in charm and beauty of scenery.
I stood looking out from the deck of the steamer as we drew near, at the varied scene of island, mountain and sanded beach that dotted the sunlit waters of Juan de Fuca Strait.
“So this,” I said to Captain Bob McMurray who was beside me, “This is Vancouver Island!” Just that, — I could find no other way to express it— “This is Vancouver Island!”
“No,” he said, “not that, that’s the United States.”
“Well, at any rate,” I said, “that is Vancouver Island, — beautiful!”
“Yes,” he said, “it reminds me of the Hebrides.”
“Everything does,” I said.
* * * * *
But there is no doubt of the instantaneous impression of peace and rest that the Island gives. No wonder that so many retired people, pensioned people make their homes in its chief city of Victoria.
For example (to run ahead of the steamer a minute) at a dinner presently given in my honour by a lot of ‘old boys’ (very much so) of my old school, I noted that one half — exactly and literally one half, — of the guests present were retired Colonels. The other half, poor fellows, were only Majors. There were two Generals on the list but they wouldn’t come.
It is very different out on the prairies. There all the elderly men of dignity and consequence are medical men. The rest are dead.
But what I failed to meet either on the prairies or the Island were men of my own particular rank, retired professors. I commented on this at the dinner of which I speak and they told me that there was a retired professor, (also of economics) at the Mental Hospital up at Ulgettit on the Island, (pronounced you’ll get it). They said I ought to go there.
It is odd, by the way, that on the Island they have a whole lot of names like that, Indian names, with the ‘U’ pronounced out in full as ‘You’; — such as Ucluit, and Uquittit, and Ucheesit and others I don’t remember. British Columbian Indian names are very easy: the natives’ minds are simple; they had to have something they could say and remember. If they had named the other Canadian places they would have called Quebec, Oceit, and Montreal, Owatalotofit and Toronto, Dontmentionit.
But as I was saying, Vancouver Island with the city of Victoria that lies at the foot of it, represents the last word in charm of climate and in beauty. Beyond it, till we reach another world, is nothing. Here is the long slow spring of England, lingering over its early flowers: here the wet tears of April sunshine weeping for a winter that never was; a luxuriant summer that blossoms but never burns; autumn mellow with mist and fruit; and well in time to make an English Christmas, a mimic winter, with a tang of frost in the air, a make believe snowstorm, with angry threatenings that dissolve again into sunshine. Such a Christmas and such a winter as a Charles Dickens might love, a truly Pickwickian season.
