Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 710
There is much futile and idle discussion of how many people the Dominions can absorb, and much silly limitation set on it. A broken town, its industries collapsed, its workers on relief, cannot absorb one man. A western farm, dried out in dust, cropless and bankrupt, cannot feed another mouth. But when the wheels hum and the prairies blossom, every newcomer is an asset. We can absorb them up to the full power of sustenance in the soil.
A false doctrine has got abroad that implies that newcomers to a new country live on those already there, share their bread and steal their jobs. This new view of migration is a product of industrial depression, favoured by the more or less natural point of view of organized labour. Labour sees clearly but with only one eye. It cannot focus the background. For people working by the day, the present is as far as they dare look. They see only a first apparent effect, and must not look beyond. This defeatest view, that immigration is an added burden, contrasts with the triumphant optimism of the nineteenth century which saw an asset in every immigrant, and new jobs for all with every increase of arrivals. The immigrant ‘built up the country,’ the poorer and the humbler the better. For with him came capital as a whale follows fish. Hence the traditional American policy of the open door and the free homestead land as the lure that opened up the West. Instinctively the moving picture public of today never tires of the covered wagons, the canal boats, the boom-towns and the river-steamers that chronicle the great American epic of migration. In place of this our gloomy century sits behind its closed doors, counting its quotas and warning the destitute from the gate. The world cannot live on that. That way lies war. We must get back into the sunshine.
Immigration of course needs boom times. But with proper contrivance immigration makes boom times and boom times make immigration. The only difficulty in hard times is to step forward with both feet first. But it can be done and we must do it.
The extent of ‘absorption’ of possible immigration is only limited by the amount of land and resources. In the mass and in the long run, nations live on the ground under their feet, from what is in, on, and under the soil. A nation may live, irrespective of local resources, if work is carried to its people and carried away when completed. A nation can live if its people follow the calling of the sea, carriers of the world’s goods. In these ways live a great part of the British population. But nations cannot all be workshops of the world or carriers of the sea. Mainly their populations live on their home resources.
In the overseas Empire are great areas of diversified land, forest, field and stream — the valleys and the uplands and the islands of British Columbia, the varied and fertile Peace River country, as yet scarcely touched, and the wooded land, the more northerly part, of Saskatchewan — to speak of only one Dominion. These are not like the flat wheat land of the plains, the spruce forests of the north, capable of only one use, dependent on an exterior market, blessed or ruined outside of their power of control.
The fatal idea of a ‘market’ has replaced the simpler idea of settlement that supports itself. Selling to the foreigner has obscured the humbler notion of eating at home. Take the case of British Columbia. Here are 350,000 — square miles, and if the Yukon is added, 377.000. Here are 22,000,000 acres of farm land, only one acre in ten in use. Here are 142,000 square miles of merchantable timber, all but about 20,000 of it still belonging to the public. Here is a coal reserve estimated at twenty billion — let us write it out —
20.000. 000.000 tons. Here are fish strung along an iceless coast of 7,000 miles, and crowding up into the rivers, waiting to be canned. Here are valleys hung with fruit, rivers roaring with power, hidden gold and copper to be dug from the mountains. Over it all is the enchantment, a climate that recalls the long, slow spring of England lingering over its early flowers, April sunshine wet with tears as for a winter that never was; a summer that blossoms but never burns; and a mimic winter with a tang of frost just in time for an English Christmas.
We own this place. And if we had twenty million children to dispose of, there is easily room for all of them. But the place is, so to speak, boarded and shut up. No market for grain, we are told; no sale for fruit; catch one more salmon and you break the market — and so on all along the line. But if we can’t sell the food suppose we eat it; if we can’t sell the fish let’s cook them; if we can’t export the lumber let’s make it into houses and sit in them. If no one wants to buy power or light, let’s sit in a flood of it, and laugh.
In other words everybody is everybody else’s customer. All live off the produce of the earth, by the fruit of their labour. This, since Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, is the sole source of human sustenance. Adam and Eve had no foreigner to sell to except the Devil. And we have no devil to sell to, except the foreigner.
This great opportunity for the development and settlement of the overseas Dominions is coming after the war. It came to us after the last war, but we missed it. The Empire Settlement Act of 1922 was a conspicuous failure. It had against it the hostility of organized labour overseas, refusing to share up. In South Africa the dead weight of Dutch opinion was thrown into the scale against it; the back-block Boers had enough British already. In Canada it met the hostility, or at least the indifference, of the French. Immigration meant to them one more wave of English-speaking incomers, swamping out their language and their aspirations. Without immigration they can hope, within two generations, to see their prolific increase equal their numbers with the English. The ‘revenge of the cradle,’ as they call it, will restore the lost balance. They prefer the home product to the imported. Hence the Empire Settlement Act offered no general opportunity for the rank and file of the people to come out overseas. In shutting out untrained, untaught, destitute people it broke the mould in which the world’s migration had been cast. It was Israel without the Israelites, a Great Trek without vortrekkers. The Settlement Act and all the Dominions statutes that went with it, are dead. Next time we must try something else. And while we were waiting, the population of the Empire, before the present war, was drifting back to the centre, like retrograde stars across the sky, back to the bright lights and the cheerful rackets of the slums, in place of the God awful silence of the winter prairie, back to the crowded little streets and lighted pubs and shops, where poverty at least rubs elbows with its fellows and out-of-doors becomes a club.
How are we to approach the organization of migration, how set in work the moving mass of capital and labour, to call the empty spaces to life? We cannot do it on philanthropy alone. Voluntary contribution, patriotic subscription, charity, goodwill and ready endeavour — the springs run dry in the sands of difficulty and disappointment. There is a limit to what people will do for nothing. There is no limit to what they will do for money. A voluntary worker, apart from war time, working for nothing, is just about worth what he gets. One of the chief contemporary authorities on the colonial Empire, Lord Lugard, has said, ‘European brains, capital and energy have not been, and never will be expended in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy.’ What is true of Nigeria, holds good of Canada or Australia.
Moreover, the schemes of philanthropy are aimed mostly at ‘deserving people.’ The world has perhaps heard a little too much of them. The ones we must help are the undeserving. In the Christian sense, they deserve it most. But philanthropy at best can only be a supplement, a tributary stream and not a main current. A touch of it must be there to sweeten profit, and give the double satisfaction that goes with charity that comes home, not to roost but as dividends. Migration must be business, with direct profit to land and development companies, and indirect profit to all the nation in quicker business and new chances, and adding every year by the increase of numbers and power a further bulwark of national defence in arms by which alone, for a generation, the devil can be trampled under foot.
The broad basis of migration as I see it, lies thus. It must aim first and foremost at bringing British people; French, too, if they would come. But they won’t. They prefer to stay at home on the boulevards, read the sixth edition of the evening paper over a ‘bock,’ and wait for the next war. Scandinavians, too, in any amount. Because we can turn a Scandinavian into a Canadian so fast that he doesn’t know what’s happened to him. Before he knows it, he’s in the Saskatchewan legislature, talking English. In any case there are not enough Scandinavians all put together, to swamp us. But for continental Europe we should go slow, and for some areas, shut out their people as we would a bubonic plague. For all the Orient the only policy is and must be exclusion. Where we cannot marry, where we cannot worship, where we cannot eat, there we cannot live. The Eastern and Western races cannot unite. Biologists tell us that where they intermarry their progeny is an ill-joined product, two brains rattling in one skull. Nor could we institute in the Empire, certainly not in the temperate Dominions, a servile class, a race of coolies. All the old empires based on that have crumbled with Nineveh and Tyre — and the new ones will go down in earthquake. It has been claimed that perhaps, in the part of Australia too hot for white labour, the settlement of people of a less sensitive race — in families, as free people but under control — might be hazarded. As such immigrants we could not let in people like the Japanese with an imperial home power behind them. That would mean an open gate for war. But we might let in the meeker and homeless people — the negroes who have learned humility in centuries of adversity. The meek, it is said, will inherit the earth. Long-time vision shows already how it may happen.
The immigration of those we want should be based on the idea of free transport, all found, of a start in debt and a struggle out of it. It can originate with private settlers bringing money and servants. This is the class that used to be called ‘gentleman,’ lords of the manor in the bush, ‘squires’ of a new squireship, with time to die before the squireship and the gentility has quite died out as the mass levels up and the class levels down. It can originate with direct government ‘planting’ of people in a favoured spot, a Peace River Valley, a Slave Lake district (when free from mosquitoes). These would be people with a little money but not much, but enough to afford from the start a place to call their own and not be hired labourers. These are the people who ‘learn farming.’ By the time they have learned it their money is gone, but then they can begin farming. Different from all these is the great class of people who come out, free of cost to work as labourers and to save money, so that they too can learn farming, and then lose it. This is not comedy. This is the strange up and down of the economics of immigration, a moving dynamic mass, by which a community is stirred and kneeded like dough — and some time later on settles down, as dough does. Presently as a ‘settled community’ it falls asleep beneath the elm trees of its country churchyard. Parts of older Canada — the sequestered corners of Ontario, as Lundy’s Lane beside Niagara, or Georgina on Lake Simcoe, the ‘townships’ (in Quebec) and more than all the French settlements of the Island of Orleans still dreaming of Jacques Cartier — have taken on already this air of immemorial antiquity. So, too, the embowered districts of Dutch South Africa, as at Stellenboch, and along the Avon in Canterbury, New Zealand. We must hurry up and make some more of them. It will only take a hundred and fifty years.
This great flock of immigrant labourers will work mainly for companies — land, mines, fish, timber, every one of them with special privileges, monopolies, and the hope of gain in the future if not at once. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but not deferred profits. These opportunities for colonial investment waft the sweet scent of profit from overseas to unlock capital from London vaults and ducal deed boxes. Nor is there any more pleasant pastime in life, any more rhythmical accompaniment to the passage of life itself than to sprinkle a little capital round and see what happens to it. Not much is needed. We are told, as already quoted in this book, that in Evangeline’s time even the poorest had a share in abundance. So, too, it was seen that in the days of the recent stock exchange boom, even the poorest had a few shares of something. These were halcyon days. Barbers as they shaved talked of their gold mines. The dull monotony of life — all visible in its narrow track ahead — changed all its colour when illuminated by a chance — even an odd, an infinitesimal chance — of sudden fortune. Our unhappy Puritanical legacy has bred in us a national attitude, reflected in our national legislation, against the sin of gambling, of sweepstakes, of games of chance — things that are said to undermine character, destroy effort and lead to ruin. So they will, if you let them. So will whisky, tobacco, golf, study — even Christianity itself, if you get too much of it.
The organization of Empire development companies should be on such broad lines that stock can be widely distributed, that people with only a few pounds to throw away can throw them in that direction. But they should carry also classes of securities, duly baited for philanthropists, bonds at a very low interest, too low to represent a real commercial return — but with a silver lining of common stock, lowest class, that just may, someday, bring a great return. The philanthropist subscribes for his 2 per cent bond as a patriot, dreams, as his real self, of the someday dividend, and so dies dreaming.
The immigrant policy must get away from the preconceptions of bygone days — above all from the preconception that immigration means only land working, and that land means wheat farming. Homesteading has vanished — or at least shifted from the centre of the picture to the back corner. This was the plan which the United States adopted as soon as the Civil War set the North free from Southern opposition to Western free settlement. The law of 1862, copied in Canada in 1874, inaugurated a system that pushed aside all others and ran strong till 1914. The basis was the gift of 160 acres of fertile empty land which needed nothing but scratching, to anybody who could live on it for at least three months of scratching. The immigrant must make his own way to the land. But cheap transportation made that easy. He scratched and up came wheat. He made a house of sods, or bought a few boards and made a shack. Then he stayed all winter, scratched harder, up came more wheat, and then presently a brick house, and a bam as big as a church, and a harvester and a pianola and a trip back to Ontario to bring his mother, and then a trip to California, without his mother. Then came the dust and buried him.
Homesteading depended on free fertile land, needing no clearing. It is gone. It depended on an insatiable wheat market. It is glutted and sluggish, inert as an overfed hog. It depended on people able and willing to live in sod houses and frame shacks, in the dark, in silence, in solitude. There are none left. Those earlier people had never seen the ‘pictures’ flicker on the screen, nor heard the radio calling all dogs to Hollywood. Our world is urbanized. The radio, indeed, can work both ways, to comfort solitude itself, or make it still more solitary with the contrast that it recalls. Kipling’s banjo on the Nile, was pain, not solace.
The homesteader is gone. Gone also, except for an odd eccentric here and there, the pioneer. This man, the pioneer, is one of the epic figures of North American history. By the pioneer is meant the individual settler, the man with the axe, moving with his few scattered fellows as the skirmish line of civilization, into the rich woods and fertile plains. He built his cabin of cedar logs, hewn flat with a broad-axe, with spruce poles for rafters; lived on game and on a random com patch till he could clear the land. With him was his wife, the spinning wheel as her emblem of office, and with them presently a raggedy flock of barefoot children, born God knows how, with death’s relentless discount taken from their number. There are little graveyard corners in what are now the sunny fields of Ontario or Ohio where the wild flowers straggle over the rude stones and rain-sunk mounds, where rest the settlers, advanced even beyond the pale of cemeteries. Such people would walk forty miles to carry home a bag of salt, or make a painful journey of a week, with a yoke of oxen over a bush track, once a year to buy supplies in the nearest settlement — a run pleasantly made by their descendants in an hour’s drive in a motor-car.
Such people are gone and passed with their epoch. We no longer have the rich land, the gardens of the wilderness to give them. But if we had, few people now would willingly accept the conditions, not so much the isolation in itself, as the distance from all outside help and, above all, from medical care. Read over again in the pages of Maria Chapdelaine, as the tragic shadow of illness falls across the Peribonka cabin, the helplessness of the slow surrender to inevitable death. Few people now, even if we had the land, would consent to see their wives, few wives to see their children so far from help. Our settlement must move on a broader front, with a skirmish line of doctors, young men whose aeroplane flight can reach everywhere. Medicine in great cities cannot easily be socialized without incurring the inertia which threatens all governmental service. But the medicine of the immigration frontier easily can. The frontier supplies its own inspiration to sustained effort.
But a great deal can be done by the other type of migration to which I have referred above, the ‘manorial migration’ of people with a certain amount of means.
I am thinking here of British people who live on their own money and wish they had more of it — not young people with nothing but old people with something. These are people straightened within a narrow income, distracted by taxation and anxious for their children’s future. These are the people who ought all to come to Canada. Of Australia I cannot speak; perhaps they ought all to go there too, and to South Africa. But I know that they ought all to come to Canada, and that there is room for all of them. I mean, they should come out to Canada, buy a Tittle place,’ and live ‘on it’ and ‘off it,’ ever after. They will not make money. They will lose it, but lose it as gradually and gently as the vigour of life itself fades into old age. In the meantime as the Lord of a little Manor, or the Lady of a lesser Grange, their means will last out their lives and their children grow up in what will sooner or later be again a country of advancing glory.
