Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 685
To my mind, the situation is exactly the other way. If Canada is being Americanized then what England needs is to be Frenchified, and what France needs is to be Anglicized — and both of them to be Germanized. If then one might take the resulting amalgamation and Italianize it a little, and even give it a touch of Czechoslovak shellac rubbed on with a piece of old Russian Soviet, the world would be on the way to peace on earth. That is to say, the best hope for the European countries is to get into the kind of mutual relationship now fortunately held between the United States and Canada.
That this relationship is likely to end in, or even move towards, a political union, is just a forgotten dream. For those of us who best know this North American continent, on both sides of the line, know also that there is not on the present horizon, nor in the furthest vision possible, any prospect of a political amalgamation of the two countries.
The truth is that what we have in Canada and the United States is what all the world must get or perish. It is universal peace or nothing. Machinery prohibits war. Out of war, courage is vanishing as its supreme asset; personal size and physical power went long ago; soon there will be nothing left but machine equipment. Have it, and you win. Lack it and you lose. For proof, look at any of the recent pictures of the effects of Italian gas. I would like to inscribe a monument with the picture of one of those torn bodies on the burnt heath of Ethiopia, “The Death of Courage”. It is not a triumph of civilization over savagery. It is a triumph of machinery over both. Our turn is next.
The union of the world can never be brought about by treaties, sanctions and the ultima ratio of war. All that, in the words of Tacitus, can make a desert but not peace. World solidarity can only come through unity of ideals, of interest, of understanding.
In past history, association and union did not go very far. They were blocked by all kinds of hindrances — physical, geographical, personal, spiteful. But they didn’t need to go far. Distance did the rest. Men out of arm’s reach could not hurt one another. A little nation in a valley sat snug: a people in an island lived in peace; a castle gathered in its brood like chickens.
All this is gone. An island is nothing. A valley is a grave, — as in Ethiopia. Men must unite or die: and for their union a written compact is nothing but a rope of sand. The only hope lies in what would be academically called “the interpermeation of culture.” In other words, nations have got to know one another.
Now the Canadians and the Americans know one another. That places the Canadians as a sort of half-way element between the Americans and the British people — creates as it were the nucleus of a world union: not in the sense of an alliance to challenge and menace the world, but as a first area of solidarity from which it may spread abroad. If we could only send over to Europe a few of our students to play hockey, or some of our international crooks, the union might start and spread at any time.
CHAPTER TEN
BRITISH COLUMBIA: EMPIRE PROVINCE
BRITISH COLUMBIA: A Vast Pacific Empire Beside the Sea — Vancouver, A Wonder City — The “Pan-handle” of Alaska — Vancouver, the Terminus of the Panama Route — Wheat Outlet — British Columbian Potential Population 35,000,000.
You cross the Rocky Mountains from the prairies to British Columbia, and you are in a different place: you are in another country. I don’t know how to say it strongly enough. Let me begin again. The Prairie Provinces are one place and British Columbia is another. Many people had tried to tell me this but they never succeeded. I don’t know of any words, — even of mine let alone their poor attempts, — to express the fact.
British Columbia is a thing by itself: a vast Pacific Empire beside the sea. It is only the fact that it is as far from Europe as you can get that so long kept it out of history. The ancient world lived round the Mediterranean Sea. The British Isles were away out in the dark. They called them dimly the Tin Islands: the North Sea coast was Ultima Thule: the Atlantic Ocean was just a great black cloud, beyond which was terror. In the course of twenty centuries the world shifted its base. It centres now round the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The Mediterranean is just a passage way, — drafty with high explosives, an area for the next war. One side is sand: the other side is oranges and history. At one end is a fight of Spanish Kilkenny cats — at the other, Turks. Neither is the real world. The real world lies round the Atlantic.
No one would say that the Pacific Ocean will displace the Atlantic. We, now living, can’t imagine it. But it will go a long way to supplement and rival it. And as it does so, British Columbia will rise into splendour.
This absolute physical, geographic and climate separation from Canada is of course more marked, more cruelly emphasized in winter. As the early evening is closing in your train is still on the flat prairies. Everything about it is desolate, wind-swept with snow driven in fierce gusts. Even in the lighted towns and in stations life is frozen numb. Outside is the dark and the storm. Next morning you are among the great gorges of the Rockies, heavy with evergreen trees enbedded in snow. There is deep silence. The cold has fallen soft. It is like sleep. And from that, down through the hills, the rushing streams and lakes that lie open and unfrozen in the snow, snow that diminishes and disappears, — and at the end the sea, the open sea, and the sunshine on the harbour of Vancouver and the snow-capped mountains beyond.
Here is a city indeed, busy and bright with a “shopping district”, — (they don’t call it “business section”; they’re English) as crowded and as crooked as Regent Street or the Rue de la Paix: a harbour crowded with ships, literally, from all the world, a harbour that never sees ice-breakers: as busy in January as July: at the sea end of it a vast park with towering trees as old as Genesis: beyond it great mountains capped with snow to recall Scotland, and over it is the soft wet air, salt with the sea, to call up visions of England.
Vancouver is a wonder city. There will be a million people in it in twenty years. It has the combined excellence of nature’s gift and man’s handiwork. God did a lot for Montreal, but man didn’t add to it. Quebec is historical and has a majesty of situation, but a lot of it is squalid: Toronto, — I come from there myself, so I have the right to insult it, — Toronto is a village and always will be, if it spreads out a hundred miles wide: the prairie cities are impressive in their isolation and extension — fill in houses and they will be wonderful — but Vancouver is wonderful right now.
When I arrived in Vancouver, I said to the Press: “I am fascinated with it. You may have heard of O’Rourke, the Irish immigrant who went before a New York state judge to see about getting a vote.
“Have you read the Constitution of the United States?” asked the judge.
“I’m delighted with it,” answered O’Rourke.
You see, O’Rourke didn’t pretend to understand the constitution as yet, but he was delighted with it at the start.
That was me with British Columbia.
I looked at the fertile valleys and compared them with my own poor little holding on the Old Brewery Bay, Ontario, and my heart sank. Besides this, my place seems as rugged as Scotland. I’ll have to turn it into a distillery.
They asked me later on at the Canadian Club why I had never visited the province before. I answered that, like so many other people, I had never come to it because I didn’t realize how wonderful it was.
“If I had known what it was like,” I said, “I wouldn’t have been content with a mere visit. I’d have been born here.”
* * * * *
Now let me start to prove what I say.
To understand British Columbia you must first get an elementary grip on its geography, which few of us outsiders ever do. When nature made our North American continent, the west side of it whether, as used to be thought, from shrinking as it cooled down, or perhaps, as is now suggested, from sliding sideways, was squeezed and furrowed into great ridges like the fingers of a hand laid flat. There they lie, the mountains of British Columbia, — the Rocky Mountains in the world-wide sense, or in the intimate geography of Canada, the successive ranges that lie side by side, the Rockies, the Selkirk and the Coast mountains. Here and there the ranges fall apart with wide valleys and lakes opening in between, and in the north they sink down to lower rolling land. Through these mountain walls the heavy rains from the great rain-clouds of the Pacific gathered in streams and rivers and drove north and south to find a way back to the sea. In the north, the Finlay and the Parsnip, joining to form the Peace River, burst eastward through the Rockies, to find themselves caught in the Mackenzie Basin and diverted to the Arctic Sea. Further north, on the confines of the province, in country still scarcely known, the Liard follows a similar course. The Fraser, moving north behind the Rockies, finds its way blocked, is turned south and drives a deep furrow of valley and canyon through the heart of British Columbia, to reach the sea close to the American border. The most westerly of these alternating belts of river and mountain chain, is seen in the Vancouver mountains of Vancouver Island, — which come up from the ocean again as the Queen Charlotte Islands, — and the narrow waters of Johnstone Strait and Discovery Passage which refused to remain a river and let in the sea.
Greatest of all the Columbia, moving north from its Kootenay tributaries, is deflected in a right-about turn and flows back south behind the Rockies, to pass far below the forty-ninth parallel and reach the sea in the wide and beautiful sweep that encircles the larger half of the state of Washington. This was nature’s boundary for the Empire Province. We lost it, through no one’s fault or error, in the give-and-take of the Oregon award of 1846. That British diplomacy ever sacrificed Canada, is a myth: that it often saved it, is a fact. But in 1783, when first the United States obtained boundaries, the continent was so vast, its features so unknown, the need of new land so little and the future so far away, that lines and parallels and watersheds were accepted with but little knowledge of what they would ultimately mean. So British Columbia lost the state of Washington and the United States lost British Columbia.
* * * * *
But the Columbia River does not represent the province’s only boundary trouble. There is also, of course, the “pan-handle” of Alaska, the downward stretch of heavily indented coast (in all some 35,000 square miles) that reaches downward from the sixtieth parallel to latitude 54° 40’ and shuts off the northern half of British Columbia from the sea. All of this “ought” to belong to British Columbia: only it doesn’t and never did.
It was of this territory, finally allotted to the United States by the Alaska Tribunal of 1903 that Sir Wilfred Laurier said that Canada had again been sacrificed on the altar of British diplomates. He spoke out of the fulness of indignation, not of knowledge. The case was as clear as day. The Russians had explored and settled and fished all this north Pacific coast. Alaska was called Russian America. The Czar of Russia made a treaty with England in 1825 which made latitude 54° 40’ the boundary. It gave Russia the land for ten marine leagues behind the coast. The purpose and meaning, the sole purpose and the only meaning, was to keep the coast and the fisheries for Russia. The coast was deeply indented. There were no complete maps. The boundary line was of course meant to follow the indentations and keep away from the sea. Otherwise British vessels could run in and out at will and every Russian inlet would be a British harbour. Both parties were completely satisfied.
In 1867 the Czar, Alexander II, as a gesture to show how big he was, gave Alaska to the United States for $7,200,000. (The annual produce now is worth in fish alone $30,000,000; in minerals $20,000,000.) The United States didn’t want the “ice-box” but they took it and paid for it just to show that they were as big as the Czar. They took the boundary with it. The Klondike gold rush made it all look priceless. Hence the dispute and the award.
But if I were British Columbia I’d buy back the Panhandle now while it is still possible; or at any rate buy all that is south of Juneau. Let the Americans see that we’re just as big as the Czar and themselves: we’ll take anything we can get. The Americans in 1922 gave the Republic of Colombia $25,000,000 for their old Panama claim that wasn’t really worth a button, just to wipe away their tears. Let them wipe ours away too.
* * * * *
In point of climate British Columbia is an ideal home for the human race, not too cold, not too hot, not too wet, and not too dry, — except in the hotels, a thing that time may remedy. The mean annual temperature of 40 degrees that skirts the bottom of British Columbia is that of Cornwall and Paris. There is a thermal line that on the Pacific slope of the provinces marks an average January temperature the same as that of Atlantic City.
Vancouver Island and Victoria, to which I propose to devote the next chapter, live bathed in the winter sunshine. They think the mainland cloudy by comparison. Their people should recall London, where in the month of January 1936, the whole month, there was only a total of twenty-three hours of sunshine, and in the December previous seventeen and a half hours. The city of Vancouver at least had a lot more than that.
A recital of the physical resources and assets of British Columbia is impressive. The first is its marvellous climate and fertility given to it by the geography described above. The ocean currents from the Orient, the Kurosiwo, keep it warm: the ocean rain keeps it wet. The soil and atmosphere combined to give its vegetation a primeval vigour that rears great trees, the Douglas fir, 500 feet high and ten feet across, that were living as young trees when the Greeks built the Parthenon.
The province contains 372,000 square miles. It is announced that the Yukon territory (205 square miles) will be joined to British Columbia to make a total of 577 square miles and a province reaching from the Arctic Ocean to the American border. It is said that the ‘population’ may refuse their consent. The ‘population’ are so rare that there is only the fiftieth part of a human being to a square mile. Eighty-three of it are Eskimos. There are 1,543 who admit they are Indians. The whites numbered 2,602 in 1931. They are nearly all transients. In my opinion they “own” the Yukon about as much as I own the Island of Montreal.
Even without the Yukon, British Columbia, measured in Europe, is more than half as much again as Germany: it is as much as all Scandinavian Europe (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) which contains 350,000 square miles, supports a population of over 12,000,000 and is not ‘in it’, square mile for square mile, with British Columbia. It is true a large section of the province is mountainous and when the mountains are steep enough must be deducted from agricultural use. But mountains carry minerals and timber, and the slopes where not too steep add to the surface, not subtract. Few people have probably thought of it but when you think of it you see it. The rolling land of Ontario and the hill sides of the vineyards of France carry more acres to a surveyor’s square mile than the prairie of Saskatchewan. To be exact, land with a slope of four to ten (quite easy to plough, crosswise) adds about eight per cent.: a slope of two to ten adds about five per cent. On the other hand the steeper a mountain is the less room it takes: a precipice doesn’t take any at all.
British Columbia has 22,000,000 acres of farm land, of which only one acre in ten is in present use. Its forest area covers 240,000 square miles. Of this 142,000 square miles is merchantable, 16,000 square miles is set apart as forest reserve: only 18,000 square miles of lumber has yet passed out of public possession.
The water power of British Columbia, reckoned at ordinary six months flow, is over 5,000,000 horse power: only 718,000 is as yet under installation.
The actual coal reserve of the province has been estimated as well over 20,000,000 thousands of tons. The Pacific coast fisheries of British Columbia produce two fifths of the fish output of all Canada. The salmon fisheries of the estuaries of the Fraser and now especially of the more northern rivers, the Skeena and the Nass are unrivalled. The development of whale and herring fishing at the Queen Charlotte Islands is a new feature. Figures of output and value show that the British Columbia fisheries have at times exceeded 20 millions of dollars. But these figures only tell a part of the tale. The province has 7,000 miles of sea coast. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.
All these figures mean that what British Columbia needs is people, more people, and still more. Land, labour and capital represented the triology of the older economists. The land (resources) is there: bring in the labour: the capital follows it.
Especially is this true because of the new Pacific orientation of British Columbia. It is no longer the end of America: it is the beginning of the Pacific: and in a sense a point on the great circle that now swings round the northern continent via Panama.
Everybody knows of course that Vancouver took its rise as the ready-made terminus of the Canadian Pacific, the port of departure for the Orient and Australia. As that it rose from the surrounding woods of Burrard Inlet and flourished for thirty years. But the great factor in its growth now is the Panama Canal. Vancouver is now the Canadian terminus of the Panama route. Of its 4,000,000 tons of ocean shipping, as apart from the coastal and ferry trade, in and out, one half are to and from Panama. In 1935 imports and exports from Eastern Canada through the Panama were more than 75,000 tons.
The Panama Canal route is one of the great economic factors in the modern world and everybody in British Columbia, indeed in Canada, should ‘get wise’ about it. Its consequences have been utterly unexpected: and they are even now only beginning.
