Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 556
Let me attempt to explain in further detail what I mean by the companies themselves and what their operation would be and their relation to the emigrant and to natural resources. As I see it such companies would be under incorporation by the British and Dominion Governments in an associated capacity; a new kind of incorporation; an Imperial incorporation. The terms of subscription, the guarantees against fraud, the conditions of stock payment, the privileges granted and the obligations incurred would be by joint agreement with the associated Empire. For stability’s sake, part of their bonded debt, if need be, could be under Imperial guarantee. The aim would be to grant honest fair conditions of incorporation, with a big chance for the shareholders and a dead certainty of employment and business for thousands of other people. Concession companies of this kind could be formed anywhere and everywhere in the Empire for purposes involving the development of resources and the settlement of population in new areas. Their financial basis would be the money of a myriad of investors, both inside the Empire and outside of it. The part played by the associated Government would be in arranging and legalizing the terms of the concessions and carrying on in all the new country the cost of certain services — surveys, telegraphs, and even to some extent roads, bridges and transport, all of which could be financed with reproductive governmental loans. If these loans were made a part of a pan-imperial governmental debt, of which I shall speak in the next chapter, they could probably be floated at the lowest rates known to the financial world. Even the credit of the United States ought not to stand higher than that of a amalgamated British Imperial loan. Economic exploitation companies are already operating all over the world; there is a whole flock of them in Colombia and Venezuela seeking oil. They are penetrating Amazonian Brazil, and are prodding round in the Garden of Eden looking for oil. But from the point of view of the development of the Empire they are mostly in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. What we need to do is to connect up their eager economic driving power with the problem of Empire settlement. Innumerable examples of the field indicated might be taken from Australia, or New Zealand, or the Rhodesias, or other white man’s territories of the Empire. But I prefer to show what I mean by illustrations taken from the Dominion of Canada. Imagine, if you will, a company receiving the exclusive fishing rights of the Hudson Bay and the mineral rights, the value of which there are already more than whispers, of the islands that lie in it; or a concession to build a railway from James Bay via the Nottaway River to the transcontinental line as a winter outlet from the Hudson Bay with timber, mineral, and water-power rights as a consideration; or to take over for agricultural settlement, and for timber, a section of that wonderful region, the last land of the sunset, the watershed drained by the Peace River; to build a railway across Northern British Columbia from the Pacific Ocean at Prince Rupert to the junction of the Liard and the Fort Nelson River; to exploit the oil resources of the Mackenzie basin, or the great copper deposits that most likely lie under the frozen soil and the treeless rock of the valley of the Coppermine River. Such things rise before the mind’s eye with all the attraction of the unknown, the mystery of the wilderness, the lure of the unconquered. Economic, no doubt, it is, the urge, the driving power. But the element of romance is there as well. Companies of the sort described would have to undertake in return to employ and to settle — not necessarily on farms, but as workers — so many hundred or so many thousand, or so many hundred thousand workers and families, according to the scale and size of their concessions and operations. They could take some of their labour from the present over-supply of the Dominions, and such and such a fraction of it by migration (without cost to the emigrant) from Great Britain. It would of course be difficult to arrange the terms, the amount done by the Government of Great Britain, by the Dominion Government, by the provincial Government and by the concession company. But that is not a difficulty inherent in the undertaking. That is a difficulty which we have deliberately introduced into it by ninety years of careful subdivision of the Empire. But one could imagine a general act framed for acceptance at will by the Governments concerned, like the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and the Naturalization Act of 1911. If a public opinion were formed around the idea, the parliamentary and legal mechanism would soon be found.
But it is to be noticed that there is one person concerned whose initial contribution is easily adjusted. That person is the landless, jobless emigrant, the man, on the “dole” in London or out of work in Montreal. His contribution is nothing. Therein lies the whole virtue and meaning of the plan.
We must start, I say, from the fact that the emigrant, or local worker, with whom we are concerned possesses nothing; or, more likely, in the form of a dependent wife and children, possesses, economically, less than nothing. We have to start from this. Any scheme of migration dealing with thrifty Scottish farmers who have saved a hundred pounds, or well-to-do Americans from Kansas, or young men whose people will pay a hundred pounds to get rid of them, is quite beside the mark.
The emigrant has nothing, except his capacity to work. If he is disabled and cannot work, his case lies outside of this book. But at present, let us say, he cannot find work; he is one of the 2,000,000 unemployed and the 5,000,000 under-employed of Great Britain.
Citizens of alien countries are not under consideration, do not fit into the scheme. The outer empire needs population and settlement. Part of it, like Canada, can only carry its “overhead” of transportation and capital investment on the condition that a stream of new-comers shall move in. If there were no available British to come, we should very likely have to take in others or drift into liquidation. But it so happens that there are British — millions of them. The others we only need as a second-best choice.
Canada, especially in its north-west provinces, is badly damaged in this respect. As a result of the great foreign immigration before the War, the last census of Canada showed among its inhabitants 459,000 people born in continental Europe, including 57,000 Austrians, 31,000 Galicians, 101,000 Russians, 21,000 Poles, 35,000 Italians, and various others.
From the point of view of the Russians and the Galicians, etc., this meant improvement for the north-west. Not so from ours. Learning English and living under the British flag may make a British subject in the legal sense, but not in the real sense, in the light of national history and continuity. A few such people can easily be absorbed — over a large area many thousands can be absorbed. A little dose of them may even, by variation, do good, like a minute dose of poison in a medicine. But if you get enough of them, you get absorbed yourself. What you called the British Empire turns into the Russian and Galician Empire.
I am not saying that we should absolutely shut out and debar the European foreigner, as we should and do shut out the Oriental. But we should in no way facilitate his coming. Not for him the free ocean transit, nor the free coffee of the immigrant shed, nor the free land, nor the found job, nor the guaranteed anything. He is lucky if he is let in “on his own”.
But we come back to the penniless, able-bodied British immigrant and his dependants. Since the War the British unemployed have numbered anything from about 1,000,000 to 2,000,000. Even the accumulated wealth and the productive power of the country cannot continue indefinitely to support them. The recent British budgets carry a burden of some £370,000,000 as interest and charges on the national debt, a sum of over £50,000,000 as war pensions, a first claim on national gratitude and national resources, a sum of about £24,000,000 on non-contributory old-age pensions: sums paid out of local rates for the relief of the poor to a total of about £46,000,000; and the money paid to the unemployed in the eight years 1920-27 amounted in all to £303,000,000, or nearly £64,000,000 a year. Of this last item, it is true, £220,000,000 was collected from employers and workers under the Unemployed Insurance Act. But the social burden as a total is none the less. The dead weight of all this together is too much. Something has got to be done. And the only thing to be done is to turn the unemployed into productive workers. It is not likely that this can be done in England. It is doubtful whether the utmost impetus and stimulus of tariff change could pick up so heavy a weight and permanently carry it. The unemployed have got to go. And the outside empire, properly organized, needs them. The burden would turn into an asset. The word “manpower”, forgotten since the War, would get back its meaning.
Any and all of these people would migrate to the outer empire if they were given free transit and a job on arrival. If they wouldn’t, it would be a fair proposal to suggest to them that they die of starvation.
Now if you take a man across the ocean and then merely dump him down, let us say, in north-west Canada and show him 160 acres of empty prairie and tell him that it is his, you have still done nothing for him. He can’t use it; indeed, he would die on it more quickly than he would in the slums of Glasgow, for here he is beyond the reach of charity and the casual penny. It is on this point that the homestead system has proved hopelessly inadequate. Like so much in this world it has only meant that to those who have is given.
Equally ridiculous it would be to give to this landless man, free of cost, a farm, a house, a set of farm buildings, horses, machinery and supplies. This pretty little endowment, capitalized, would have just about kept him for life in Glasgow. Australian experience under the Empire Settlement Act proves as much. Nor can he receive and use all this equipment on the loan and long-payment system. He could never pay. He wouldn’t know how to begin, what to do. The wealth so easily acquired would run away into the sand. Subsidized idleness would sit down on the job — defiant of ejection. For where could you eject him to? Not to prison. Sentiment won’t allow it. Back into the unemployed? And then the chain begins again. And in any case, who would advance all the capital needed for such a form of settlement? The prospect of a fair return would be far too remote; the investment, viewed commercially, would be almost worthless. In a limited way and for people possessed of some means of their own and, what is more, some knowledge of what they are to do, assisted settlement on prepared farms is entirely feasible. It is not only feasible, but it is being done with practical success. But the whole possible scale of it is too small to count. As a solution for the Empire settlement problem it is nowhere.
In other words, it is necessary in our theories of emigration to get away from the “agricultural fallacy”. The experience of the United States in the settlement of the fertile “middle west”, the Mississippi Valley, led to false conclusions and gave a false bias to migration ever since. In the days of American expansion in the latter part of the nineteenth century it was possible for agricultural immigrants to come into new country in a single flock, raising the single product grain and subsisting off an unlimited world market. That day is all past. There are now in North America — certainly in the United States — too many farmers. The very progress made in the technique of their industry, the wonderful farm machinery, the “rationalization” of agricultural production cuts into their existence. A farmer using a “tractor” can plough at least six acres to one against a farmer with a team. An American farmer working with machinery raises a bushel of wheat off half a square chain of land — the twentieth part of an acre. He can plough this in two minutes, harrow it in two minutes, then go away for four months on a vacation, and when he comes back cut the grain in two minutes, haul and thrash it in four final minutes, thus producing a bushel of wheat with ten minutes’ work. To grow wheat it only needs an average of one man for about 250 acres. The output of the average American farmer rose forty-seven per cent from 1900 to 1925. As a result, from 1919 to 1927 4,000,000 people in the United States gave up farming and 19,000,000 acres went out of cultivation. All of such things and many more in regard to the technical aspect of farming can be read in the report of the National Industrial Conference Board of the United States. At every stage and in every operation of farming the marvellous American genius for invention substitutes the machine for the man. There are nearly a million tractors on the American farms. One and the same machine with a few magic adjustments turns itself into a plough or harrows, or a planting-machine or a mower. The machine called a “combine” can cut and thrash the grain all as one job and can tackle soy beans and sweet clover. The economic world is a strange paradox. The more we improve our powers of production, the fiercer seems to grow the fight for life. We cannot use the means we have. Abundance brings poverty. A blessed harvest spells ruin. And labour saving leaves the labourers to starve. The truth is that we are as ignorant of economics as people before Isaac Newton were ignorant of physics. This is not an exaggeration. It is a fact. Economics is not the name of a science but of a problem. And no one has solved it. The position of the American farmer results in a fierce fight against every intrusion upon his market. He must keep it all to himself. No foreigner must sell food or grain or meat or eggs to anyone in the four corners of the Republic. The “agricultural protection” of the platforms of thirty years ago has turned into agricultural exclusion. The tariff bills of the present year (1930) are meant to shut out anything and everything. If one fails to do it, the next one will succeed. For us in the Empire all this stands as a warning. The sooner the Canadian people cut loose entirely from the American agricultural market the better. They can never have it, or only at the price of reciprocity, amalgamation and the girdle of the eighteenth amendment wound round the Continent.
Our policy must rest on different and larger ideas. Our migration must open its own market — the secret of it lies in that. It must be so varied AND multiform that every part of it is the market for every other. To try to make a whole nation of farmers, in the days that are, is as hopeless as to make a whole nation of hairdressers. The attempt to expand grain-farming in the west of Canada without expanding other things with it and co-ordinating it with the outside — this means bankruptcy. The shadow of it falls in front of us now as we walk forward.
So, then, our companies set to work and bring with them into the area of their operations the landless, jobless man: and his family, if he has one. An immigration policy, to be sound, must be based on the family, not on the detached worker. The man thus brought works for wages. At the start he owns nothing — neither house, nor land nor capital. How can he? He begins from nothing. The immigrant must not only work for wages, but he must work for what seems low wages. His initial wages must take into account the fact that the company has transported him free of cost and has supplied him with shelter, perhaps with clothes — in fact, has given him a start. He begins in debt. This is deducted from his wages, so that he works for an initial period for what is lower in money than a current union wage, but more than equal to it if we add, in the transport for himself and his family, the temporary maintenance and the guarantee of work. On this basis the company can make money out of his work and pay dividends to the investor. Such a proposal, to those who know history, looks at first sight like the “indentured labour” of the Virginia colonial days, of the transported criminals of Botany Bay and the Chinese labour of the Transvaal. But there is no real analogy. One case represents coercion and exploitation; the other assistance. The man under a contract is only working, as most of us work, with a definite job to do and no immediate legal right to quit it. If the company immigrant “quits” his job, let him go. There need be no recourse against him in the criminal law except to forbid him in the future from making a valid contract for wages or for collecting debts. Also let him for the future starve if he wants to; he has lost his social right of participation.
But there is no need to confuse a scheme of migration with a wilderness of regulations and pains and penalties. Social organization should start with the honest man. Let the other sink.
Nor need the position of any immigrant labourer’s lot long remain an inferior one. As soon as his initial debit is cleared his wages will be ample; there is no reason why he should not receive a free grant of land, if he wants it, when he has saved the means to work it. Nor is there any reason why the company should not give him, even from the start, a payment in its common stock, small but accumulating, that will turn him from a hireling into a partner. This is done already in a number of Canadian and American companies. Such a feature could easily be taken over and incorporated in the plan of a concession company.
Some of the companies thus incorporated to bring out emigrants, absorb the unemployed of the Dominions in return for privileges and monopolies, may fail. Indeed, it is inevitable that some would fail. Even with best of legislation and supervision the objects pursued, though honest, may be entirely chimerical. Some of the companies may be so foolishly advised and so insanely conducted as to lose every cent that is put into them. But even here the loss is not complete. John Stuart Mill would have said so. But many economists of to-day would doubt it. At least the operations of the company would shift the money from the investors to the employees. The money would have been “spent” without a productive return. Mill thought this waste and said so. Mill thought, and all the economists of his time at least tried to think, that a mere demand for labour — money spent on labour — was useless unless the labour made something useful. According to Mill, the spendthrift who called for champagne and cigars and then consumed them was of no benefit to society. He merely turned labour into smoke and bubbles. According to Mill, the heavy snowstorm that “makes work” for 10,000 men in a Canadian city was a dead loss to society, not a benefit. According to Mill, the hailstorm that breaks all the glass in a rich man’s conservatory, and thus sets a band of glaziers busily to work, is a mere example of destruction which has to be made good. The glaziers never accepted this theory. Indeed, popular prejudice, as opposed to text-book economics, always favoured anything that “made work” and stimulated trade.
