Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 543
A most imposing asset of the British Empire which seems to carry in the very sound of it the voice of the future is the asset of the waterfall, the rapid and the river — the tremendous potentiality of water-power. Coal and petroleum are sources of power, but the present industrial world looks more and more to the electrical energy to be developed from falling water.
Statistics of potential power are often of little meaning to the ordinary reader from the want of an elementary understanding of the units concerned. It is customary to estimate the actual and potential use of falling water in terms of “horse-power”. This method of calculation originated with Mr. James Watt of the eighteenth century, inventor and patentee of the first practicable steam engine. By a “horse-power” he meant the amount of work performed by a first-class cart-horse, which he set as equivalent to raising 33,000 pounds through one foot in one minute. A cart-horse which could really do this and keep on doing it would be a rare and valuable beast indeed. But that is of no consequence. The unit, once established, is as good as any other. In the measurement of electric current and power, as applied and sold commercially, the mechanical horse-power unit is changed for the technical electric unit the watt, of which 746 equal one horse-power. In all general estimates of water-power, actual and potential, the horse-power unit is the common form of calculation. It is estimated that at the present time the world demands for power represents about 120,000,000 horse-power — the amount of energy needed for all the industries, all the transport, both on land and sea; in short, all the work of the world to which mechanical power is applied. All the factories of all the world are computed to use 75,000,000 horse-power.
The development of the world’s water-power is one of the great outstanding features of human achievement in the last twenty years. Of the 30,000,000 horse-power of electrical energy now used in the world about 20,000,000 has been developed since 1900. Modern hydraulic turbines can use any fall of from 10 to 5,000 feet and the electric power, up to pressures of 220,000 volts, can be effectively transmitted for distances up to 300 miles.
No estimate of value can be made of the physically potential energy of the world’s supply of water falling or ready to fall. But the estimates made are for “available” water-power, meaning power in known and accessible sites that have been made the subject of more or less definite calculation, afford at least a basis of comparison. On this basis it appears that the “available” water-power of the world amounts to 240,000,000 horse-power, of which 30,000,000 is now developed. The power available in the British Empire is 68,000,000, of which nearly one half is in Canada, which has a water area of rivers and lakes equal to 142,674 square miles. It is probable that the figures of “available” power greatly understate the case for Canada. Power resources in the United States and in Europe are on the whole better known and more definitely calculated. Immense reserves of power still run unheeded and scarcely known in the northern wildernesses of the Dominion. The latest official Canadian statistics show a development of 5,349,232 horse-power, of which 4,290,830 is in Quebec and in Ontario. Water-power in Great Britain is negligible as a prime national asset, but New Zealand, with 3,800,000 horse-power, and South Africa stand high. In Australia a better conservation of the rainfall would create large sources of power, and at the same time serve to irrigate many million acres of land. The Murrum-bridgee irrigation project will create a lake of over 12,000 acres; the damning of the Goulheim River will irrigate 868,000 acres in the State of Victoria, with a corresponding electrical development.
Such, then, is the general aspect of this globe, on which, according to the latest estimates, 2,000,000,000 human beings seek economic livelihood. The picture is still one of collective plenty. Humanity, in spite of the gloomy forebodings of the pessimist, is still a long way from starvation. If we are crowded and unhappy, the fault is ours. Nature is still bountiful enough. The statement has been recently widely circulated in the Press that bio-chemists claim that the potential food supply of the globe would feed 500,000,000,000 people. If so, it seems we are only beginning. In any case when we pass from the general heritage of all the inhabitants of the world to the special heritage of the sixty-six and a half million lucky people who “own” the white man’s Empire, the prospect changes from that of plenty to that of profusion. For each of us it seems there is nearly a tenth of a square mile of land (64 acres) — without making any claim on the ice-fields or the deserts or the territory of British India or the tropical dependencies of the Africans. Each of us has coal for 2,000 years and all the iron we need for 200. And for each one of the 66,000,000 of us the equivalent of one horse-power permanently at our service — the labour of ten men.
Contrast this generous picture of our unused wealth with the notion of overcrowding and the menace of population which haunts the mind of the civilized world, and impresses itself on our public policy and our domestic life.
In 1798 a clergyman of the Church of England, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, wrote an Essay on Population which led to the disastrous idea that the world was getting crowded. It appeared that the cause of industrial poverty lay in our increasing numbers. The idea, as translated into popular thought, was gloomy in the extreme. It bid defiance to all hope of general profusion and universal comfort. It set stern limits to our material happiness, and gave us poverty and want as the inevitable accompaniment of Western civilization. At the moment when the technique of machine production had opened the gates of a Garden of Eden, Malthus closed them. The shadow of his book still lies dark on the surface of the world. It is time that humanity, and above all that the British peoples, should come out into the sunlight. Our world, at least, is for the most part still empty and untenanted, waving with trees and murmuring with water, awaiting the uncounted millions of unborn children who are to occupy it.
CHAPTER II. THE POSSIBLE EXPANSION OF THE WHITE RACE WITHIN THE BRITISH EMPIRE
SUCH, THEN, AS described above, is the affluent heritage of the British Empire. To what extent is there room for the white population to expand and multiply in the vast territories which they are fortunate enough to own? Canada has now 10,000,000 inhabitants. How many more can be taken in? Australia has six and a half million. How much room is left? How nearly full is New Zealand with 1,454,000 inhabitants?
The true answer to these questions is so different from the current thought of humanity as to be, quite literally, staggering. I propose to show that Canada, even with our present limited industrial technique, can quite easily maintain 200,000,000 inhabitants; that the overseas dominions, in all, can undoubtedly support half a billion inhabitants; and that such a population can be placed there as fast as natural increase and migration can bring them. The capital apparatus needed for the operation is already in existence, is waiting.
But it is not possible to bring forward such a statement without first attempting to clear away something of the murky atmosphere of error and misconception in which the brilliant successes and the hidden failures of nineteenth-century industrialism have landed us.
Mankind, so the psychologists assure us, live more and more under the dominance of mass ideas. We all think the same thing at the same time. We carry with us unconsciously the mind of our generation. Just as cloud and sunshine move across a landscape, so do our mass ideas come and go. In the sixteenth century all the world shuddered at a witch, believed in a miracle and bought and sold a slave. Now a witch is only a decrepit old woman, muttering imbecile fancies, and a man who works a miracle is called a crook and goes to jail. The world’s thought has passed on, into other sunlight and newer shadows.
And among the mass ideas of our time is the obsession of a crowded world. Stamped into the basis of our common thought is the conviction that humanity has got to limit its numbers; that to let loose the full natural increase of mankind would mean pauperism and ruin; that the world is already so nearly filled up that only collective prudence can save it. We seem to see the symbol of all this in the limited family, the childless apartment and the pecuniary penalties of parenthood. But what we see is an entirely false and misleading phenomenon. It is confusion between the economics of the household and the economics of the world. A family of six or eight children reared on a small income represents a narrow margin of survival. A rash marriage at the dawn of adult life and a cradleful of rasher children would spell inevitable disaster, a fall into the abyss of the submerged class. We are so used to this as a collective idea that we take it for granted. We do not realize that there must be something wrong with it; that it is contrary to every sane idea of a normal human being. In time, perhaps, we may get a “survival instinct” to help it: a baby may appear as hideous as a toad to the “normal” young man and woman of the year 3000. But that time is not yet. Meantime, we never stop to ask whether this individual inhibition has anything to do with the question of the world’s resources and its capacity to maintain the race. If we did, we would see that resources do not come into it. It is a matter of deficient social organization. Our wants could easily be satisfied for centuries yet, if we knew how to see about it.
It was, as already said, the famous Essay of Malthus (1798) which first threw into a high light the idea of over-population. Malthus lived in the sudden and perplexing prospect of new wealth contrasted with new poverty, of factories and paupers, dividends and poor rates. And he misinterpreted it all. His silly dictum that numbers increase faster than subsistence, that humanity increases faster than food, is exactly the reverse of truth. Our food increases faster than we do. A grain of wheat with its full potential chance multiplies a hundred to one every four months. One grain in a year turns into a million. One egg laying oyster once started and encouraged to the full, would develop within ten years, a progeny that would require the symbol for infinity to indicate it. Man cannot begin to keep up with his food in this machine age. He has to stop planting it and turn to a wilderness of other activities. In the complex organization of these, appears unemployment, want and lack of food. But this through no lack of basic resources to produce it. What Malthus thought a phenomenon of nature is only a phenomenon of social organization. True it is, that if the race increased long enough and fast enough, the time would come when there would be no room for it on the globe. But that period is far away and the increase of mankind so limited in various ways not connected with its food that there is no need for so long a look.
This notion of the limitation of numbers applies least of all to the people of the British Empire, whose territory and resources, as far as the white race is concerned, is as yet but little used. We may, therefore, address ourselves with confidence to the idea of calculating just how large a population the Empire can support. For this we need make no discounts on the future advances of science, no anticipation of what will be the effect of new sources of power, of synthetic food and the stabilization of industrial society. We can take things as they are and the prospect is good enough.
Here first is the Dominion of Canada, with 10,000,000 people occupying three and half million square miles. What is the place good for? How much of it is habitable, what can we make it look like in a hundred years?
We may talk first in terms of the climate of Canada and the inhabitability of the country as apart from its resources. The myth of the Canadian climate dies hard. The sneer of a disappointed Frenchman over the “lost acres of snow” got into our history and stayed there. Writing as late as 1848 the English historian Alison speaks of the hopeless desolation of British North America. “Probably seven-eighths of this immense surface,” he says, “are doomed to eternal sterility from the excessive severity of the climate, which yields only a scanty herbage to the reindeer, the elk and the musk ox.” Even now few people in England realize that in point of latitude the most populous part of Canada is not a northern country at all. If England were slid along the parallels of latitude it would pass — even the most southern point of it — 500 miles north of Toronto. London would pass north of Winnipeg, and the island of Great Britain would nicely lie north and south in the province of Saskatchewan. Nearly all of Norway — the part from Oslo, the capital, upwards, lies north of all the Canadian Western provinces — begins, that is, where Alberta ends.
People who have only lived in the gloom of an English winter can form no idea of the charm of the longer days, and the bright winter sunshine in Ontario. Winnipeg, let us say, at times, is frightfully cold. But London is at times frightfully foggy and Rome frightfully hot. Yet in all of these the white race lives, flourishes and multiplies.
False ideas in regard to the coldness of a climate originate from the forbidding aspect of an empty country as yet devoid of shelter, light and the Company of mankind. The intense cold seems to the intrepid explorer to strike to his very bones. The still ice of the frozen lakes groans and reverberates beneath the dead light of the aurora borealis. The fierce blizzard cuts against the skin and blinds the vision. It is a picture of terror; to linger, to stumble, to fall asleep spells death.
Such must have seemed three hundred years ago on a bitter winter night the site of the city of Montreal. But compare it now. As I write this chapter the thermometer stands at about twenty degrees below zero — twenty or twenty-five, it doesn’t matter — in short, what is called in England fifty degrees of frost. Yet I look out over a vast city, bright with a myriad lights and animated with the life of a million inhabitants. Other such cities will rise — are rising now — all the way from here to where the Mackenzie River washes into the Arctic Sea.
To fortify a pictured vision with the solid frame of statistics, let it be said that, apart from the Arctic Archipelago, almost the whole of Canada lies within the temperate zone. A glance at the map herewith shows the isothermal line for mean July temperate of sixty degrees (Fahrenheit) drawn across the map of Canada. If this line were drawn across the British Isles, it would traverse the centre of Ireland and pass across England in the latitude of Liverpool. In Canada, in a rough-and-ready way it corresponds, or at least approximates, to the settled and habitable area of the provinces, as opposed to the northern or doubtful territory where population certainly will always be restricted below the European density.
HABITABLE CANADA
To come to closer details. Let it be noticed first for convenience of identification that the Dominion of Canada is divided in area as between the provinces and under Federal control. In the west, British Columbia and the Prairie provinces all extend to the sixtieth parallel, where they find a convenient, though not a natural, national boundary. This parallel, in Europe, runs through the lower end of the Shetland Islands, and just passes the cities of Oslo and Petrograd. The whole of Finland, with its three and a half million people, capital and all, is north of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, lies 500 miles farther north than Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.
In Central Canada the provinces of Ontario and Quebec were extended in 1912 to reach the Hudson Bay and the Hudson Strait.
The isothermal line of sixty degrees, July normal temperature, thus runs entirely north of all three of the Maritime Provinces, north of all the older, the occupied parts of Ontario, Quebec, and even north of a large part of what was recently thought of as the northern wilderness, now eagerly and rapidly being penetrated in all directions for its mineral wealth and its forests.
A glance at the map shows the peculiar bending of the Canadian isothermal lines in the middle and their sweeping lift to the north as they go westwards. The isothermal line of sixty degrees July temperature runs far above the province of Alberta and reaches almost to the Arctic. The winter line for the mean January temperature shows a similar though a lesser curvature. As compared with Europe the winter cold strikes farther to the south. The line of zero (thirty-two degrees of frost) may be taken as the basis of comparison and measurement. There is nothing unhabitable about this; it is the winter temperature of the city of Duluth and Winnipeg and Edmonton. But in Europe the isothermal line of January zero runs away to the north of the British Isles and traverses no other country than Northern Russia. The territory of Canada that lies to the south of the summer isothermal line of sixty degrees would contain approximately one half of its area, or not very far from 2,000,000 square miles. This means that there is at least that much of Canada absolutely and entirely suited for the white race in point of having sufficient warmth in summer.
The winter isothermal lines are not so favourable. The top half of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan has to be content with a January temperature of ten below zero. But in so large a country there must be some cold corners. And ten below zero menaces neither human life nor human happiness.
So much for the data in point of climate. Now turn to the question of natural productions — the soil, the forests, the grain. We start from the right and move left across the map. Here is first the Labrador Peninsula, about half of which, since the Privy Council decision of 1927, lies outside of Canada. Most of Labrador is a treeless district, a vast total area of over half a million square miles of denuded rocks with forest growth still struggling northward in the valleys, but nowhere reaching the Hudson Strait. Such value as this territory will have, will depend on its mineral wealth, and the possible transmission of water-power. As a home, it seems about as cheerful as Spitzbergen.
A similar area is seen in the “Barren Grounds”, the north-eastern corner of the North-west Territory. A slanting line drawn from Fort Churchill to the valley of the Coppermine River marks it off. It is a country of, perhaps, a quarter of a million square miles of unending emptiness, with great rivers, rushing in summer under the Arctic sunlight and never shaded by a tree. In winter it is a desolation of snow, its lakes and lesser rivers frozen, silent, and embedded. In summer its thin soil is a great verdant carpet of grass, broken with barren protruding rock and gay with a myriad of flowers. The mosquito, breeding in infinite millions, disputes every foot of its possession. Yet even this “barren land” is now known to contain great mineral wealth, and may yet represent in the future a vast pasture for domesticated musk-oxen and deer.
