Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 679
Opinion in the West overwhelmingly tells us that the cases are not parallel. For the West it is mechanized farming or nothing. The great plains are lacking in water, in wood, in diversity. The very suitability for vast fields of wheat forbids other uses. It is true that in the new areas of the Peace River and even to some extent in the northern half of Saskatchewan, as yet hardly occupied, there may be room for barnyard and woodpile farming. It is true that a rearrangement of holdings to favour communal pasturage and bring dwelling houses in closer range may at once diversify agriculture and social life. But in the main the economic future of the prairie country must follow the fortune of machine agriculture. It has made its bed and must lie in it; and its couch not the trim bed of a vegetable garden but the “boundless and beautiful” field from which it took its name.
All that can be done, then, is to go ahead and raise wheat like all possessed.
But for the next few years, — four or five, and who cares to look further, — there is a plan that has occurred to me for which I have already solicited a little publicity. The idea is that of storing up in England, as a war measure, enough wheat, or flour, to last five years even if all supplies are cut. It would mean, I think, about 1,000,000,000 bushels, — call it that anyway. It is harder to store wheat in England than it is here owing to the damp climate. But modern scientific refrigerator methods, and “conditioned air” can make a sport of all that. Wheat shrinks, I understand, about 1 per cent. in its first year, after that very little. But what it loses is only water, and there’s lots of that.
It would be a great thing if England would buy all our export crop for a few years for this purpose: a greater thing, still, if we gave it to them, or at least a lot of it. We could do it as our contribution to imperial defense.
The Canadian Parliament is opening up a debate on imperial and national defense. It is a dangerous discussion. The attempt to show that we need to join in Empire defense may lead people to pretend that we need defense here, as against the Americans.
That is just crazy and worse. That could do infinite harm. Our best defense, our only defense, against the Americans, and theirs against us, is to have no defense at all. None that either of us could ever prepare would be effective along such a frontier. We live in peace or die together.
We show every sign of living in peace. Don’t let’s spoil it by pretending that we need air-bases and gas masks and sally ports and demi-culverins and half-scotches against the Americans. We don’t. Honestly, I wouldn’t shoot an American, even if I found him sitting on a bough where I could sneak right up on him.
So the idea which I propose is as large as the side of a house, in fact as large as the side of a grain elevator.
Let us make our Empire contribution in the shape of a huge annual gift of wheat for storage in England against war. England must begin to store up wheat, flour, oil and food in this cursed situation that has arisen.
If we give them wheat it is as good as gunpowder. The beauty of it is that it has all the Scotch virtue of being a mighty canny thing for ourselves anyway. It would be the end of all this “carry-over” trouble, this “nonproduction” and “go easy”. It would mean that merry old Saskatchewan would put on so many teams and so many tractors for spring plowing on such a big scale that they’d disappear over the horizon.
CHAPTER SIX
OUR ELDORADO IN THE WILDERNESS
THE WILDERNESS THAT Divided Canada — An Unsuspected Aladdin’s Cave — Its Mineral Wealth — Canada and Gold — Proper Uses of a New Gold Standard.
In the centre of Canada, running in a great sickle, or crescent, around the Hudson Bay, is what long seemed to be a vast wilderness of rock and scrub and muskeg, doomed to hyperborean cold, sterile and silent. Even where the silence was broken by the roar of falling waters, the tumult was only a meaningless fury of foam, useless for transport or commerce.
In our own immediate day all this is changed, this barren wilderness is now our Eldorado. From the Flin-flon mines on the border of Saskatchewan to the Belcher Islands off the mouth of the Great Whale River, it is now one vast Aladdin’s cave. It is the greatest mineral district of all the world. Beside its vast deposit the Comstock lode is just a pocket, Ballarat a memory and even the Witwatersand only a beginning. Here is gold with silver and copper as bye-products, or copper and zinc with a bye-product of casual gold. Here is nickel, the delight of the God Mars and of his humble servant the Tubal Cain who once made iron ploughshares now makes hard-metal castings. Over these thousands of miles of wilderness aeroplanes float in the sky and flurry on the frozen lakes, carrying a new race of men, as Hyperborean as the cold itself.
This new Eldorado means for us the achievement of the long sought unity of Canada. Gold means, when we know how to turn it to the magic of currency and credit, the alleviation of the burden of debt, the restoration of prosperity. It is all there. Nothing needed but brains and unity of purpose.
* * * * *
The main importance to us of this central Eldorado, we repeat, is not the commercial value in gold and metals but the effect it is destined to have, is having already, on the unity of Canada. Till recent times Canada seemed hopelessly cut in two in the middle. The downward sweep of the Hudson and James Bays reduces its north-and-south mainland dimension from 1,500 miles to little more than 300. Worse than that, — the Hudson and James Bays are, to all intents, land-locked seas: they are not, like the other seven seas of the temperate zone, a means of commercial access. Otherwise a new Vancouver might arise at Churchill or at the Ontario tide-water harbour of Moosonee. The one ship a year sent through the Straits by the Hudson’s Bay Co. for two centuries, hardly counts except as romance. Neither do the grain ships of the last five years since the Hudson Bay Railway and the Churchill port were opened in 1931. Up-to-date the route has cost $70,000,000 and has carried, in five years, 17,000,000 bushels of grain. Neither do the odd whalers count, in days when Hudson Bay whales are getting as doubtful as Jonah. Worse than that: there are no smaller fish in the Bay, or none to speak of. This was a peculiar piece of hard luck for British North America. With fish in the Hudson Bay, to compare with those of the Grand Banks and the North Sea, a new Aberdeen could have arisen, college and all, at the mouth of the Rupert or the Great Whale.
But the worst feature of all was the character of the land itself. All the way around the great bay, along what is now the sea-coast of Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, stretched a frozen wilderness of rock, leading nowhere, of unending forests of small and worthless trees, broken with sunken muskeg, and ending in a low and mournful sea coast, shallow for miles out, fringed with ice in winter and wild, from its very shallowness, with equinoctial storms, Over this hyperborean region brooded the eternal cold. As late as in the year 1866 (the year before Confederation) a “new edition” of Lippincott’s Philadelphia Gazetteer could write: “There can be but little doubt that the greater part of the vast region included under the name of British America is doomed to ever-lasting sterility on account of the severity of its climate.” All Canadians are still familiar with Goldwin Smith’s famous picture of Canada in his Canada and the Canadian Question of 1891. He shows it as a country divided into geographical sections, with wildernesses in between, — and the greatest of these, the wilderness of the Lake Superior country. It all seemed worthless. The rushing rivers meant nothing while electricity still slept. At Confederation, paper was still made from rags: there was no such word as pulp-wood: the spruce, too small for lumber, stood buried in the snow, a billion Christmas trees without a Xmas. The best that any one could say of the place was that it was a “sportsman’s paradise”, which only means a good place to drink whiskey in.
All that even geology could say was that this great semi-circle of rock was the oldest part of the globe, the first land that God made. That was at least an apology for it.
Yet it is a romance of our Canadian history that the Indians knew, in a general way, about the mineral district. They tried to tell Jacques Cartier about it on the top of Mount Royal in 1535, touching the silver whistle that he carried and the copper of his dagger and pointing up the Ottawa. Hence the legend of the Kingdom of “Sagné” or Saguenay which presently mixed up its geography and shifted to the wrong place. But if Cartier could have reached the country beyond the Ottawa and found silver (that he could reduce) the world’s history would have been different. Later on complacent historians said the Indians only meant the silver waters of the Ottawa. Professors can explain anything.
Then came — all within forty years or so, — accident and chance and invention — and changed the wilderness into the place that we now know, the greatest mineral district in the world, with hydro-electric power to run it, and with thousands of square miles of pulp-wood to turn into newspapers to talk about it.
* * * * *
It is not possible in this space (and without a change of writer) to describe in its geological and metalliferous aspect the watershed that forms the great “rim” around the Hudson Bay. It is a vast country. The sea coast of Ontario alone extends 680 miles. To those of us who fully remember the limited Ontario of fifty years ago, this sounds like Shakespeare’s “sea coast of Bohemia”. Manitoba has a coastal line of four hundred miles, while that of Quebec which extends “round and out” to the Atlantic, has at least an equal extent of the sea coast that is the mineral area.
The technical description of this mining area as given by an expert, for example, as explained by the Geological Survey Department for our admirable Canadian Year Book, sounds like Greek to most of us. Yet it sounds fine too. “The great area in Eastern Canada underlain by rocks of Precambrian age is known as the Canadian or Precambrian Shield. It may be regarded as a peneplanated surface that has been rejuvenated by Pleistocene glaciation (fine!) .... The Precambrian formations are prolific of mineral deposits of great number, variety and extent. Among them are the gold deposits of Porcupine and Kirkland Lake, associated with intrusions of porphyry, the silver deposits of Cobalt, South Lorrain and Gowganda, associated with diabase sills, the enormous nickel-copper deposits of Sudbury associated with norite of a thick laccolithic intrusion, the auriferous copper sulphides of western Quebec, and the copper zinc sulphides of Manitoba.” Intrusions of Porphyry! It sounds like King Solomon’s Mines, the Building of the Temple and the Queen of Sheba.
* * * * *
The increasing importance of mineral production in Canada is a notable feature of our national economy. Since the first regular estimates made in 1880, the value of mineral production per capita has risen from $2.23 to $28.33 in 1935. This is chiefly owing to the discoveries in the Hudson and James Watershed. Ontario alone produces over 50 per cent. of the minerals of Canada: Quebec adds another 12 per cent. In gold Ontario produced in 1934 some 60 per cent. and Quebec 10 per cent. of the output. Taking the same year as the latest for world comparisons, 81 per cent. of the world’s nickel, 13 per cent. of the copper, of lead 12, of zinc 10, of silver 9, and of gold 11 per cent.
The Canadian output of gold in several years (1931-2-3) surpassed that of the United States and was exceeded only by Russia and South Africa. In 1934 it stood at 2,972,000 fine ounces, with South Africa (10,479,000 fine ounces) leading Russia (4,262,000) and the United States (2,741,000). The present Canadian output is greater than that of California and Colorado added together, and greater than they were in the golden legendary days of 1851 to 1855. It is an easy prophecy that Canada will soon rank second, and in a measurable time first among the gold countries.
The Canadian annual output of gold can be computed (see Jacob’s History of the Precious Metals) at probably twice as much as all the gold existing in Europe in the days between Charlemagne and Columbus in the year 1492. The gold and silver together only equalled about $160,000,000 and silver was the far greater part. The feeble annual production just maintained the stock. The Canadian annual output of gold is twelve times as great as the “flood” of gold that came each year to Spain after the exploits of Cortes and the Pizarros and five times as great as all the world produced even when Queen Victoria began to reign. This steady rise in the production of gold heaps up an accumulated stock. Gold may be mislaid: it can’t be destroyed. The $50,000,000 (maximum) of 1492 had increased by 1935 to $21,500,000,000, using a fine ounce of gold to mean 20.67 “dollars” and counting only the gold in central banks and government reserves, and not the mass of gold hoarded and converted to ornamental and commercial use.
Incidentally our new Canadian method of calculating the value of gold in our present depreciated paper dollar at $35.00 to the ounce distorts all appearance and makes riches out of poverty, like the reflection of a thin man fattened in a convex mirror. We ought to get away from it.
The steady rise in the stock of gold, faster than the rise in “business” has made the progressive increase in price a fixed feature of large-view history. As far as such a thing can be calculated, English prices at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign were perhaps twenty times the prices of Norman England. This steady rise is of great meaning to Canadian public policy. If we keep to a gold standard, it will automatically lift a lot of our debt and automatically prime the pump of business.
But before talking specifically of gold, turn a moment to the sister metals of our Eldorado.
Here first is nickel. This is a metal, an element. It was known, like everything else, to the ancient Chinese; but they got nowhere with it. Europe knew nothing of it till the end of the eighteenth century when it was first completely separated from combined ore by the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman. But it was a rare metal, indeed there was hardly any of it. A little turned up in metallic combinations in United States’ mines, quite a lot on the island New Caledonia, the French penal settlement off Australia. Modern metallurgy learnt to use it towards the end of the nineteenth century. Mixed with iron and carbon it makes nickel-steel: with chromium added it makes nickel-chromium steel. These combinations are of great hardness: they constitute the armourplate and the great guns of war and enter into a hundred of its grim uses. Only 3 or 4 per cent. of nickel with less than 1 per cent. of carbon, or a little more than 1 per cent. of chromium, turns cheap iron into the implements of death. But nickel also stands for peace. The fault is ours if we think of it in terms of war. It is unique as a hardening alloy for castings, for highly-stressed forgings, for boiler plate, bridge steel, motor car parts and for plating, coin-making, — a thousand means of human happiness. Of the world’s supply of this ambiguous product Canada contributes from 80 to 90 per cent. a year. It is found chiefly in New Ontario near Sudbury.
The nickel bearing rocks in the district form a sort of band or strip, over two miles wide, and running round in an ellipse about 36 miles long and 13 miles across the middle. Here is enough nickel “in sight” (as miners call things that can’t see) to last the world for years and years, and probably lots more in the same wilderness.
In the last year fully reported (1934) the world used about 80,000 tons (2,000 lbs., — the “short” ton) of nickel and Canada supplied about 70,000 tons of it. The value was about $35,000,000 ($500 a ton, 25 cents a pound).
But nickel is only the most outstanding of these new element minerals not important in themselves but in the power contained in a small quantity of them to alter the temper or the properties of common metals, like iron, themselves easily obtained but only rudimentary in their use. Side by side with nickel in Canada is cobalt, an element metal used as an alloy, along with tungsten, in making steel for the permanent magnets needed in telephones: and used along with tungsten and chromium in making the hard steel of high-speed cutting tools, that must be indifferent to heat. The metal world of today includes as agents of vast importance substances unknown or unheeded fifty years ago: the vanadium brought from the summit of the Andes to make a 1 per cent. alloy of effectiveness: radium, the world’s mystery, barium so strangely sensitive that in pure shape it takes fire at the touch of water, molybdenum, — things only names and mysteries to us humble outsiders, and most of all to people of my generation who traded the opportunity to learn “science” for a knowledge of the Greek verbs. Some of these metals we have in Canada: some not, or not as yet. Of cobalt we had, ten or twelve years ago, all the world’s supply — till it turned up also on the Congo and elsewhere in Africa. Radium we have, — besides the Great Bear Lake, wisely and secretly held by the government of Canada, being out of the clutches of the provinces. But it is likely that all the world’s metals, and enough of them will be found in our frozen treasure house of the North.
Of all these, in history, in prestige, in commercial (not in intrinsic) value, gold takes first place. But before talking of gold it is necessary to make quite clear the way in which gold and gold-standard-money was, and is, measured and computed. This is all the more necessary now that the standard is merely a piece of paper. Such a majesty still hedges the idea of a “pound sterling” or a “U.S. dollar” that we don’t realize that at present a pound sterling and a U.S. dollar are twin sisters to an Alberta Prosperity Certificate.
Gold is properly measured in “fine ounces” which means ounce weights of pure gold. The ounces are the so-called Troy ounce of 480 grains. The grains are combined into pennyweights or carats which contain 24 grains. Gold that is “18 carats fine” means gold mixed with alloy in the proportion of 18 to 6. It follows that 20 pennyweights make an ounce. But pennyweights and carats are only used in jewelers’ reckoning, not in monetary science. The ordinary “ounce” of the butcher and baker is the ounce avoirdupois, containing 437-½ grains. It is to be noted that a grain is a grain whether avoirdupois or Troy. It originally meant an ear of dried wheat. It now means the 7,000 part of the pound avoirdupois, which itself is an arbitrary standard based on a physical sample.
