Delphi complete works of.., p.711
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 711
A little place — that means ten, twenty or forty acres — with an old brick house on it that someone built out of the Crimean War wheat — old elms, a sweeping lawn, all ragged and overgrown, with flower-beds planted with the old-fashioned flowers of the England of a hundred years ago. You will find such places all the way westward through what was Upper Canada, from where the pointed French houses die out at Coteau du Lac to where the sky-scrapers rise in the mist of the river horizon, over in Detroit. The places represent the bygone chapters of our history of the early settlement of Upper Canada and of the valley of the St. John, New Brunswick, in the days of the Loyalists. Here came not only Loyalists, but the half-pay officers of the wars, the younger sons portioned off into exile, and all that class of ‘gentlemen’ by which is meant people who cannot earn their own living and, if they work, must do it out of sight. One can revive, with honour, the vanishing picture of the countryside that once held them, the strange mingling of the new world and the old, of hardship and simplicity of life, matched with old time courtesy. Inside a parsonage of logs or a manor house of hewn timber there were still the manners and the taste of those who had known the larger amenity of the old world. Their day is gone, but they helped to stamp on Upper Canada the tone and temper it has never lost and to which it was never truer than today.
Such families are now largely broken up. Few live where they first settled. The winds of fortune blowing to the West swept them to the prairies. The cities caught them to the arms of the professions. The conditions of Ontario farming cut each thousand acre estate into ten hundred-acre farms; paved highways cut through the lines of spruce trees where long ago each man must needs have his own avenue, and much that was once lawn and hedge or old time maze, quickened into sudden value as suburban real estate. But tucked away in corners still, you can find your old red-brick manor house if you want it. You can tell that it is the right one because it will have walls two and a half feet thick and a wine-cellar with bins for Madeira. Living in it with your children you cannot lose money as easily and simply as the financiers do, but you will keep losing a little all the time. But long before you have lost it all, your children will give you all you want.
If our Dominion and Provincial Governments were wise they would give a solid income tax exemption, for an initial period, to British people coming to us thus with money and children — our two foremost needs. If our municipalities were wise they would give an exemption from local taxes. Outsiders should be warned that the insane expansion of Canadian town areas has carried municipal taxes (rates, so-called in England) in many places clear out into the country. To settle down on such a bed of taxes would be like sitting on a wasp’s nest. But a five-year exemption would remove the sting. Meantime all that we gave to the manorial settlers we should get back twice over — the most blessed kind of giving that there is.
But the largest hope is in company settlement, corporate settlement. Here the government supplies a charter and sells certain privileges and monopolies. People with money buy the shares, and more willingly still, the bonds of the company. The settlers come out at the cost of the company, receiving at first everything, though they may individually be also shareholders. The simplest case is that of the land company. Here the prospective profit of the shareholder is found — or expected — in the advancing value, someday, of the blocks of land reserved for them among the actual settlers. Here is that beautiful prospect of getting rich without working, such as Solomon detected in the lily. This manner of growing rich has been much discredited in the past century, by the history of city lots on Broadway, the unearned increment of Henry George and the flock of taxes called the single tax. But, properly used, there is nothing more wrong with it than with whisky or tobacco. If a land company takes over a block of fifty square miles in the Peace River district, a subscriber, in putting in a hundred dollars, is not covenanting with sin. It is, for him, the result of past work, not of present. Those whose busy efforts give it value, are using his labour of the past.
Land companies are only one type. Equally feasible are mining, fishing and forest companies — anything where the grant of a privilege may be matched by the obligation to hire labour and to develop the country.
This was the general plan of migration strongly favoured by public opinion in England before the gift of responsible government took away British control of colonial land. It is the system that still connects the memory, half discredited and half exalted, of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whose remains lie in the cemetery of Wellington, New Zealand. Wakefield abducted an heiress. That’s not against him; few of us get the chance. But he went to Newgate for it, in the days when the transportation of convicts was going strong. Prison set him thinking. For after all, as La Fontaine said of the wolf’s lair, ‘What can you do in a prison except think in it?’ Wakefield planned a scheme of colonial settlement which presently ‘caught on.’ The Canterbury Province of New Zealand, and the State of South Australia stand as the result of it, if only by having tried it and cast it out. But the fault lay not in the scheme itself but in its application. Wakefield’s plan, as already indicated, is that of settlers, brought out free as labourers, buying cheap land holdings from their savings — which money then brings out new settlers to work for the first ones. This was to be set up as a sort of endless chain, like the endless chain letters of a Ladies Church Endowment Fund, which end so chainlessly. The Wakefield system, in its South Australian application, was a sort of cheerful comedy, suitable to a mild climate where you can sit on your packing cases and drink up your capital — a thing impossible below zero. Canterbury dropped the system, as a vigorous patient drops a crutch, and the world passed on and forgot it.
But something very similar was tried out with huge success in Upper Canada in the days of the old Canada Company (1824 and on) before yet the new Province of Canada, with its new responsible powers took over Upper Canada (1841), land and all. The Canada Company received great blocks of land in the western peninsula of Ontario — itself a garden country, never used, because of the nearby Senecas. The company received proprietary rights of soil and timber; were pledged to bring out settlers and put them on individual holdings; they built roads, churches and schools, with tax exemptions for doing so. The Company founded Galt, Stratford and Guelph. They got their money out of the unearned increment and made lots of it. If the academic socialists are right the company promoters were all ‘bourgeoisie’ seizing an ‘unearned increment’ and no doubt went to hell for it. But for Canada’s sake, it was worth having them go there.
Here is a passage quoted from a contemporary memoir of the old Canada Company.
As the sun set on a summer evening of 1827 Galt 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 whisky and a health was drunk to the prosperity of the future city (the present city) of Guelph.
Any one who can read that passage without sympathy and emotion, is not wanted in the British Empire.
Place beside it, as a pendant, this from a current annual register; Guelph, a city of Ontario on the River Speed; a large agricultural centre; exports grain fruit and live stock; seat of the Ontario Agricultural College; contains many factories, four mills, saw mills and woollen mills, population 21,000.
All that, with one drink of whisky.
Nor are we to think that migration from the mother country means flight or abandonment. It is the very essence of Empire, the support of our common existence. It is the reaction of its migrating people that helps to make Great Britain what it is. All those who have come over since first Gilbert claimed Newfoundland, and all who spring from them have had their share in building up, in increasing the power, in guaranteeing the safety, not of a Dominion alone but of the country from which it sprang. The boys who for three centuries ran away to sea, the dispossessed younger sons who blew like thistle-down over the newer lands, the Covenanters martyred to the West Indies, and, in the Victorian Age, the outgoing singing poor, crowded and dirty and triumphant — all these in their going and in their casual returns, in the magnet attraction of their new hopes, the glamour of their new fortunes — all of these helped to fashion, to re-make, the character of Britain as we know it. Those of us who thus belong to the new Dominions — I speak here collectively for uncounted millions of us, dead or alive, can in a sense say of it, ‘We too made it.’
SOME BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
KNOWLES, L. A. Economic Development of the Overseas Empire, 1st Ed. (1924)
CUNNINGHAM, w. Growth of English Industry and Commerce. 3 vols. Fifth Ed. 41927)
LEACOCK, STEPHEN. Economic Prosperity in the British Empire.
(1929)
CARROTHERS, w. A. Immigration from the British Isles. (1929)
CHAPTER VII
Bonds of Union
The Search for Peace and Union — The Clap Trap of Paper Treaties and Semi-Ready Federations — Limitations of a League of Nations; a Servant not a Master; Its Place the Kitchen not the Hall — Britain and America — Our Real and Unwritten Union — Canada and the United States a Pattern to the World — World security without Ink
NATIONS cannot be held to one another by written compacts. Malevolence can tear them up and then only force remains. In such one-sided bargains, sin beats righteousness at the start since the one is free to break its word and the other cannot help but keep it. A nation that throws away its arms on the strength of a piece of paper, is lost. The paper is only good if what is written on it is already in the heart.
A spring can rise no higher than its source. Laws and institutions cannot exist till the spirit first comes. They are the expression of it. Laws against theft arise from the fact that the great mass of the people are determined not to steal. The philosopher Kant thought that a social compact of laws could be made even among devils. But he was wrong. Why the devil should a devil keep a compact if he wants to break it? Kant would say that two or more devils could make a devil keep a compact. But so they could without the compact. The word is worthless without the inspiring spirit.
It is this that renders fruitless much of the current discussions of the future federations to be formed, presumably, of present devils; of a new League of Nations, or of a super-state to be made by mixing devils half and half with honest men.
All these things are ropes of sand, nothing — Kant’s devils over again. In the world about us we must look around for ties that hold.
If a League of Nations has no armed forces of its own, it cannot of itself use any coercive control. It can only say what it thinks; and any of us can do that. If it has armed forces, but not superior to those of ordinary nations, then it only adds one more to join in a fight; only turns a private fight into a public one. But if the League of Nations, is turned into a super-state armed with force over disarmed nations, powerless against it, then this is nothing but committing hari-kari. In the world in which we now know we live, the proposal is so silly as to be beyond discussion. It is silly in the good old English sense, meaning innocent. It belongs among the nebulous illusions of people too kind and too credulous to realize facts or of people cunning enough to think that they can fool others with it.
A League of Nations can do admirable service. It can serve as a voluntary agent for international discussion, for arbitration. It can serve as a world clearing house for statistics and economic research. It can gather information to aid the social progress of the world. But it can never exercise a coercive control. Its weapon is the pen, not the sword. Its member is a professor, not a statesman and still less a soldier.
We must therefore look about to find what real bonds of union there are to connect the Empire with enduring peace. These we find in its association with the United States. The peace of North America has risen on the horizon as a light for all the world. We can read the future by it. We can see from it how nations can remain in peace and harmony with neither force nor compact.
With America, and in a sense with all the world, the Empire is united by the English language, and by the community in literature that it brings. A single world-language is as yet only a world dream. But English is already, or already becoming, the second language of all the world. It is spoken as a mother tongue by 200,000,000 people. Russian, at a glance, seems to approach it with 140,000,000. But Russian is shut into its own area. It is an island. England is an atmosphere. Outside of Russia you cannot buy a cup of tea in Russian. You can feed in English all over the world. Where Russia changes into Mongolia, you can see printed signs for travellers, we are credibly informed, that read ‘English spoken; American understood.’ English is the language of the sea. And when the continents and islands of the Empire end, English still washes forward in broken waves of ‘pidgin English’ (business English) of the Orient, of the Beach-la-mar talk of the Pacific Island, or the queer jabber in which West Africa trades gin and coconuts. The outside people who have handled English — from the Normans on — have knocked out of it all the grammatical nonsense of suffixes and affixes, and fitted it for world consumption. It carries its awful spelling like a ball and chain on its foot, but it marches on. There is no doubt of the power of language to unite, or rather of the power of diverse language, to separate. In the United States, as colonies, the English language got enough rootage to hold its place and spread across the continent. Without that, the world’s history would be different. If the German immigrants to the Middle West had made a German speaking bloc, if the Creole French speech had spread to cover a larger Louisiana, with a Spanish area from Texas to California, and if a Scandinavian country had appeared in Minnesota and the Dakotas, it is hard to believe that there could exist the united republic that we see.
Still more intimate is the bond of literature common to us and to the Americans from Shakespeare to King James’s Bible down to Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard — common till then, and since then shared in common. American boys and girls at school charge with Tennyson’s Light Brigade. English children climb Excelsior with Longfellow’s mysterious boy, as ignorant of where he is trying to get to as American children themselves. Mr. Pickwick and Rip Van Winkle, the Deer Slayer and Gunga Din, the Boy on the Burning Deck and Huck Finn on his Raft, are the common possessions of Britain and America.
But most intimate and powerful of all is that union of intercourse and ideas. That is seen as between Canada and the United States. Here Canada acts as a middle term between the Empire and America. It is well to dwell on this for in it we can see the living outline of a world to come — that or chaos.
Turn back the pages of our history to the American Revolution that ended with the surrender of — or not that, it sounds a little painful — let us say, that ended with the Peace of 1783. It turned out and has been turning out more and more as kindlier eyes looked at it, in the colours of the sunset, that it wasn’t a revolution at all — just a sort of triumph of British freedom on the soil of America.
The British themselves saw it first. They discovered after the Revolution, as I say, that it was a great triumph for British freedom, and that George Washington was a typical English country gentleman. In fact, they annexed the whole thing, made it part of British school history, called it ‘manifest destiny,’ and recommended it to all other, quieter colonies — just as a mother, always likes best the bad boy of the family.
After the Revolution came the ‘Loyalists’ to settle in Upper Canada. But they none the less remained Americans, in their way. They brought with them from New England their Thanksgiving Day turkey, and from New York the ‘York shilling,’ that was our count of money till yesterday. From them, too, came the Tittle red school house’ in its ‘school section’ framed on the Massachusetts model; and later the local government and the township that they themselves had brought out of Lincolnshire.
Presently there came the war of 1812. We can’t get it quite straight now, what it was all about. It makes fine moving ‘pictures.’ But what that war was for, we can no more make out now than old Caspar could with his. It was something to do with ‘pressing’ sailors, but it’s all gone now— ‘pressed and cleaned’ like the rest of our history, as fragrant as old lavender in a cedar chest. As a matter of fact, as in all our conflicts and quarrels, both kinds of people seem to have been on both sides. Why, in the Upper Canada of that day, of its 80,000 inhabitants only 35,000 represented the Loyalists and their children, and 25,000 were ‘American’ settlers who had come in on their own account, and the rest (20,000) had wandered in from the old country. And, per contra, ever so many Americans thought the declaration of war was a policy of madness and the Governor of Massachusetts issued a proclamation (June 26th, 1812) for a public fast for a wrong committed ‘against the nation from which we are descended and which for many generations has been the bulwark of the religion we possess.’
So that was how our history started and that was the way it kept going on. Quarrels that refused to turn to hate, animosities that broke down into friendship, seeds of dissention sown in a soil that brought them up as flowers. Angers that passed like April showers, or summer thunder, only to clear the air. The underlying reason of all this is the queer intermingling of our history and our population. The loyalists were only just the beginning of it. All through a century and a half our populations have washed back and forward over the line. Why, if at the present moment you count up all the people born in Canada and still alive, fourteen out of every hundred are living in the United States, a total of 1,250,000 in all. And conversely, 350,000 American born peoples are living among us.
