Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 558
Most people in England seem to be unaware of the clumsiness of their money. Visitors from the United States and Canada watch their money calculations with an admiring despair. How do they do it? If a person lays down a sovereign at a railway station and asks for two adult tickets and one half-ticket at £1 3s. 2d. per ticket, how is it possible that the booking-clerk can hand back with lightning rapidity whatever he does hand back. Perhaps they just guess it. But there is no doubt that even with the utmost development of skill in counting there are lots of operations very simple to us in America and very useful in business which cannot be done in England. A Canadian departmental store can mark down a whole counter full, or a whole store full of goods, with the simple sign “20 per cent reduction”. The humblest of its customers can calculate the new price from the old ticket. A Canadian tax authority can put on a two per cent or five per cent sales tax above a current price. Imagine in England trying to calculate a five per cent tax on a pair of pyjamas costing 17s. 7½d. and bought at a January reduction sale at a twenty per cent discount. English money clogs external trade. On my desk as I write is a beautiful illustrated flower and seed catalogue for 1930 just arrived in Canada from a great English firm and calculated to fascinate the eye of the amateur gardener. Such wonderful Antirrhinum at one and six! Acquilegia at sixpence and Calendula — the hardy annual variety — as low as threepence! One wonders whether those who make up this catalogue with a convenient order list with columns for pounds and shillings and pence realize what a hindrance this stubborn money with its impossible arithmetic is to the 10,000,000 prospective customers in Canada. English money could, of course, be decimalized without turning it into Canadian and American dollars. If a shilling was declared to be tenpence instead of twelve and if ten shillings (the half-sovereign) were given a name and called let us say a Royal, or a George, or something equally loyal and appropriate, the money would run at once into decimals. This would very little disturb existing accounts since sovereigns would only need to be divided by two. On outstanding debts read from the old currency to the new. The maximum loss, however great, would be only twopence on the odd pennies over the last shilling, and even that could be avoided.
But the result would be incomplete. The Empire would still be divided with Canada and Newfoundland set against the other Dominions. Far better incur the full difficulty and get it over and done with and get a decimal currency and Empire coinage and Empire credit all consolidated into a rock of security.
There is a further reason for doing so. Everything that helps to increase the credit and stability of the Empire also helps to draw capital from abroad for investment in the Empire. The existence of a gold standard, the certainty of the payment of all interest on all Government debts in a currency that can be redeemed in gold, lends a further inducement to the outside capitalist over and above that offered by the natural opportunities of physical development. If the economic policy of the British Empire is properly directed from now on, British capital will find its natural investment in the Dominions and, in addition to this, large sums of capital will come in from foreign countries. The situation of a century ago will be exactly reversed. At that period the British productive surplus of capital went abroad to develop foreign countries. Now, that of foreign countries can be, and ought to be, turned into the British Empire. This is, of course, overwhelmingly the case with the United States from which a great flow of capital is already moving every year into British Dominions — Canada, Newfoundland, and to a smaller extent elsewhere. But the same thing will presently happen with Germany and with France as soon as the economic restoration of Europe is complete. The opportunities for investment are not only great, but will grow greater with every decade. They will offer also an element of security that is lacking in investment in cruder and more disturbed countries. It is the proper business of British policy to foresee and prepare for this, to decide whether we want the capital and on what conditions we will permit its investment.
American investment in Canada has already gone a long way, and is viewed with alternating enthusiasm and apprehension. Abundant statistics in this matter are available through the investigations of Mr. F. W. Field, Professor Viner, Mr. A. Kirschberg and other economic specialists. The whole movement is very recent. It only began in any serious proportions in the last five years of the nineteenth century (1896-1900), when American investment in Canadian mines, lumber companies, etc., together with the American building and holding of the Canada Southern (part of the Michigan Central) and other railway ownership, brought the total of investment up to some $150,000,000. From the beginning of the century until the War it increased continuously and rapidly. American interest in the pulp and paper industry represented a factor of increasing importance. There was no doubt also that it was greatly stimulated by the existence of the Canadian tariff, without which American investment would have had no need to enter into Canadian industry and manufacture. The pre-War tariff of Canada against the United States represented an ad valorem duty of about thirty-six per cent. The wall was too high to scale, except with slaughter prices and subsidized exports, and the Canadian anti-dumping legislation of 1907 prevented this form of invasion of the market. The existence of the British preference operated also to draw United States concerns into Canada as a basis from which to sell to Great Britain. This investment of capital from the United States assumed in larger and larger proportion the form of establishing branch factories and branch distribution houses inside the Dominion. This contrasts strongly with the investment of British capital which consists overwhelmingly in the purchase of Government securities, municipal loans and the stock of railway and public utility companies. It is the form of investment which prefers safety to adventure, and where the aim is not so much to make money as to keep it without losing it. Till the re-distribution of all social values effected by the Great War, England possessed, more than any other country in the world, an investing class, consisting of people of limited means. The money of these people came to them by descent and they knew more of Latin Iambics than of business. With them was a landed gentry whose only flight of business enterprise was the pursuit of agriculture by proxy. These people, in their other aspects, were the pride and bulwark of England. They wrote its poetry, they preached its sermons and they fought and won its battles. But of business they knew nothing. Beside them, the leaders and magnates of the business world used to be a mere minority, viewed with a mixture of contempt, awe and envy. This investing class of financially ignorant people, anxious only to keep their money and not hoping to increase it, set the peculiar tone to British investment which still shows itself in the location of British capital in Canada. The reports of the last volume of the Canada Year Book show that as computed up to 1927, the total investment of British capital in Canada was $2,192,467,000, of which $1,546,671,000 was placed in Government railway and utility securities and only $645,796,000 in the more “speculative” investment in pulp, paper, mines industries, trade, financial and insurance companies and land. Of the United States total of $3,069,181,000, the speculative investments absorbed $1,518,113,000.
Circumstances naturally favour American investment, especially in the form of branch factories. The people of Central Canada and their neighbours across the lakes are socially much alike. Young men move easily back and forward with no great sense of displacement. Families migrate easily. Till the advent of the prohibition law there was no great and obvious difference of social environment. The training of young men in engineering and in commerce is almost identical. Labour itself is internationally organized, and the methods of business, the forms of laws, and the mechanism and the processes of manufacture practically the same.
This influx of American capital, if we so will it, is only beginning. The proximate development of the north-west of Canada can absorb for years to come all the capital available both in Great Britain and in the United States. In the case of Great Britain our course is obvious. We want the British people’s money and we want it all, and themselves with it. What about the Americans?
The fear is constantly expressed that American capital means American control; that the American “penetration” of Canada industrially means American penetration politically; that ultimately the result might be the absorption of Canada into the Republic. From all of this I disagree entirely. Canada is not Nicaragua. There is in this country a sufficient urge and power to keep outside dominance at arm’s length. When Americans’ money builds in Canada a huge power plant, or a paper mill, what has really happened? A physical change, a physical improvement that has taken place in Canada; a new productive resource, as new equipment has been made on Canadian soil. And in the United States, what change? Nothing. Only “ownership” for which each year they get a bundle of paper sent to them. If their engineers and workmen come into Canada they, or at least their children, turn into Canadians. There is no fear of such a flood of Americans entering this country as to stampede it away to the United States, carrying with it all the British and Canadian subjects of King George. Nicaragua is a little country in the jungle. An American banker can put it in his pocket and so away with it. The republic of Colombia was crooked and rapacious, and so President Roosevelt took away Panama and the Canal zone. Haiti was quarrelsome and murderous, and so American marines and bankers had to land to keep order. The rightness and wrongness of all these things does not concern us here. They belong under the topic, nobly called the White Man’s Burden, and the British people — or at least the ones in Great Britain — bear it just as nobly as the Americans do. But Canada is never destined to be a White Man’s Burden to the United States. There is no fear of the Americans who come up to Canada absorbing anything, except as under the liquor control acts of the province. On the contrary, they easily, willingly and cheerfully get absorbed themselves.
CHAPTER IV. THE INTELLECTUAL UNITY OF THE EMPIRE
THERE IS ANOTHER aspect of the British Empire and the British people not yet treated, except incidentally, in this book. All that has gone before has been mainly a material discussion of material things — wealth, land, trade and settlement. These things are the first basis of human happiness and progress. But they are not the whole of it. There remains the realm of the mind — the sphere of art and letters, of education, thought, and culture. Which sphere is the more important it is not necessary to discuss. A full dinner pail may be better than an essay on philosophy or it may not; but it is at any rate necessary to give some consideration to the aspect of intellectual life in relation to the unity of the Empire. We must consider whether any positive and co-operative action can be taken to increase the unity of thought, the unity of culture, of arts and letters among the British peoples.
Here again, as in so much else, the United States and the British Empire offer a great and increasing contrast. In the States education and intellectual life are standardized and uniform to the last degree. In the British Empire, as a whole, there is but little intellectual unity and almost no standardization. Only in Canada, owing to the proximity of the United States, does the idea of uniformity and standardization in education make much progress, and even there it encounters a good deal of opposition. The present question, therefore, is whether the integration and unity of the British Empire necessitates on our part an attempt to render our education uniform, and to standardize the work of our schools and colleges into adjustable parts, so that a graduate from Cape Town can fill a position as a teacher in Saskatoon and an engineer from Sheffield build a bridge in Alberta. Over and above the mere technique and programme of education, to what extent should we try to harmonize and standardize our culture?
In the United States standardization has gone to terrific lengths with an extraordinary effect on the unity and consolidation of the country. The process indicated was taken over into education from large-scale industry where standardization has proved a leading factor in mass production. As has already been said in an earlier part of this book, the system of standardization achieves a marvellous accuracy in machine production. All parts and sections of things manufactured are cut so exactly alike that any one fits in anywhere as an adjustable part. The machines which grind axles and similar steel parts make them true to the one-ten-thousandth of an inch. An American micrometer will measure an error ten times as small as that, the one-hundredth-thousandth part of an inch! All this means that “parts” can be manufactured on a vast scale, each one without any reference to the machine into which it will be adjusted. Each one is the same as every other one — one would almost say like “peas in a pod” — except that nature’s clumsy handiwork cannot compare with American machine production. Everyone knows how standardization has reached its acme in the production of the motor-car. All the world has read of the Ford car, beginning as a poor inchoate skeleton moving along a little track, to receive in turn its body, its engine, its hood, its bolts, its nuts, its glass, its paint, its varnish, at the hands of standardized workmen, who roll along with it, till at the end it passes into life, a finished car, as utterly without individuality of its own as some of the men who make it. There can be no doubt as to the physical and commercial effectiveness of standardization as applied to industry and commerce. It is doubtful, more than doubtful, whether its results are so happy when applied to culture, art and education. It is a wonderful thing so to train the consumer that he wants only the standardized interchangeable article. This cuts down the need for varieties, makes every stock of articles good everywhere and simplifies and cheapens production. It is, no doubt, an excellent thing that now, as said in an earlier chapter, there are in the United States only five kinds of paving-bricks instead of the sixty that there used to be; that instead of the seven hundred patterns of hotel china that existed a few years ago there are now only one hundred and sixty; that the sixty-seven kinds of hospital beds have been reduced to four, and the varieties of milk-bottle tops cut down to one. But is it quite so happy that the varieties of Sunday newspapers in the United States have been cut to a single type; that the editorials, the feature articles, the comic strips and the sob-stuff are all faithfully reproduced in adjustable parts from Maine to California? The Sunday Press of the United States that consumes a forest every week to make its paper, that is carried in car-load lots through the United States and to which is devoted all the brains and all the technical art that can be bought for money, is a merely huge mass of standardized material, possessing a bewildering bulk but always and everywhere the same. The trouble is that it cannot exist on mass production unless it can train consumers in millions to look at the same thing, laugh at the same thing, cry at the same thing. It is compelled to give the public what it wants. Real literary progress and eminence is found in giving the public what it does not want.
So, too, with American education. From their earliest colonial days the American people have realized the value of the school and college. They made great sacrifices even in the hardest days of their first settlement, to get schools and teachers for their children. The “school teacher” and the “school marm” of New England are among the honoured characters of American history. The result is seen in a people who from the very first were literate, whose book knowledge could join with their native ingenuity in making machines, whose “spelling book” and whose ability to “cypher” enabled them to subdue nature with the power of mechanical knowledge. Two centuries and a half passed by, and then the Spirit of Machinery in its turn came to give its reward to the people who had made it. It offered to apply to the whole of their education the wonderful process of mass production, adjustable parts and standardized products which had made the industrial fortune of the nation. The American people are accepting the gift, rapidly and eagerly, spreading abroad standardized education and culture from East to West, from North to South, till the schools and the colleges like the Sunday papers are all turning into one vast uniformity. All this is only a theory of the immediate present, with its results still in the future.
In the history of modern education there was for long centuries no uniformity standard nor rule at all. Oxford from its beginnings under Henry III for 300 years never held any written examinations. Shakespeare and Milton, Isaac Newton and Adam Smith were all educated in different ways. Westminster school was not at all like Eton School, and no one wanted it to be. There were no technical qualifications for entry into anything except for the law and for medicines; for the law by eating so many dinners, for medicine by walking a hospital. Entry to the army was by being born of the right parents. There were no standardized matriculations, credits, units, courses, half-courses, semesters, equivalents, protantos and prerequisites. As for the poor, education was not for them, except to lead them out of danger into a monastery.
In point of uniformity, education in England was a mere welter till at least the middle of the nineteenth century, with no “public schools”, in the North American sense, till the year 1870. In America, education was far more uniform from the first because it had to rely upon legislation. But it was, until the present generation, far more diversified and varied than it is now. Indeed until very recently education everywhere, and in England more than in America, was in need of system, of organization, of standards. The danger is that we may now run to the other extreme.
