Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 788
Meanwhile Montreal, unvexed by Quebec’s dreams, or by the ambitions of Toronto and Fort William, goes steadily on.
The mention of the Panama canal suggests at once its peculiar connection with the Port of Vancouver, and the unexpected diversion of a large part of the grain trade. Vancouver arose — was bidden in 1885 by the Canadian Pacific Railway to arise — as a Pacific port to replace Victoria, disqualified for larger destiny by its island situation. Cities on islands may be great sea-ports as notably New York, and the Singapore that was. But they must have one foot, if only a bridge, on land. This foot was the Achilles heel of Singapore, but in a restored world will have its meaning again. But on Vancouver Island Victoria, bridgeless, meant transhipment of ocean cargoes, a thing easy enough for old-time cargoes and old-time schooners, but impossible for metropolitan trade. Hence came Vancouver of which the commercial destiny is only limited by the future of the Pacific world itself. The port was established with an eye on Yokohama and Hong-Kong, thus harking back to the old Nootka Sound days, to Canton and to the sea-otter skins by which British Columbia began. But from the Orient the eye moved easily to Australasia and the All-Red Route.
Quite unforeseen was Panama. It is probable that few Americans realized its commercial possibilities. They built the canal for political reason, for national defence by the navy, so as to turn two fleets into one. The object lesson of the American Olympia going round Cape Horn to fight in Manila Bay was plain to the naval mind. To teach it to the business mind it was pretended (with a wink) that the canal would pay. History is full of such winks, later extolled as wisdom.
A distinctive feature of Canadian maritime development in the twentieth century has been the exploration and patrol of Arctic waters. The old fantastic aspirations of a North West Passage and the competitive struggle towards the The North West Territories (Official), 1943 North Pole long since passed away. In place of them has come the steady purpose of opening up the Arctic coasts and islands as a contributory part of the economic life of Canada. Even now but little is known of the mineral resources that lie beyond the Arctic circle but even that little is ample warrant for further investigation. The work has been mainly done, as apart from private or company prospecting done on shore, by the Dominion Government.
In 1884 the Government sent Lieut. A. R. Gordon in the Sealer Neptune to explore the outlying islands of the Arctic and to test the navigability of Hudson Strait. In the next year the Government sent out under the same command the screw steamer Alert, one of the specially built ships of Sir George Nares’ polar expedition of 1876. The reports of these expeditions both as to navigation and fishery resources were highly encouraging. In 1903 the Neptune was again sent out under Mr. A. P. Low of the Geological survey, visited Baffin Land, wintered on Chesterfield Inlet and returned to Halifax after a voyage of 10,000 miles. In 1904 began the Arctic voyages of the celebrated Captain Bernier, mentioned above, and since that time Arctic exploration and patrol, has become a regular and most important task of the Dominion.
At the present time there is a regular annual patrol of the waters of the Eastern Arctic accessible from the Atlantic side. This is carried on — and we are here quoting from the official report of 1943 — chiefly by R.M.S. Nascopie, a vessel owned and operated by the Hudson’s Bay Company and used by the Government of Canada for the annual Eastern Arctic Patrol of medical centres, Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments, post offices, radio stations, trading posts and missions in the region. This vessel was designed to navigate northern waters under all conditions. Auxiliary services are provided to reach other points not served directly by the Nascopie. Some of these boats operate out of Churchill, Manitoba, making connection with the Hudson Bay Railway. The Hudson’s Bay Company, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and missions also have small seagoing motor boats by means of which they are able to maintain communication with the native encampments along the coasts.
Each summer the R.M.S. Nascopie sails from some port in Eastern Canada with a party of government officials for a voyage of more than 10,000 miles to posts in northern Quebec, on islands in Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay and in the Arctic Archipelago. The party usually includes — as the quoted report indicates — administrative officers, doctors, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and others going north to relieve those who have completed their term of service in the Arctic. In normal times, scientific parties and a limited number of tourists also accompany the expedition. Ports of call are visited for inspection, administration of justice, delivery and acceptance of mail, change of personnel and renewal of supplies. Eskimos frequently are transferred to more abundant hunting grounds. The voyage usually extends over a period of from fourteen to sixteen weeks during which twenty-five to thirty calls are made.
Among other things this Arctic patrol has helped to “keep the flag flying,” in other words to consolidate by actual visit and by the occupation of northern stations the claim of Canada to its “slice” of the Polar area. Time was when this meant nothing more than idle curiosity and national pride. Time will be, since time flies, when it will mean a great deal.
Meantime the expansion of Canadian commerce on both oceans and the increasing complexities of navigation have necessitated a corresponding expansion of the operations of the Government of Canada in aid of shipping and sea-borne trade. The original scheme of departments and services instituted at Confederation with the creation of the Department of Marine and Fisheries (1867) proved inadequate for the wider tasks and expanded horizons of the present day. The Fisheries became a separate Department in 1930. The Department of Transport Act of November 1936, gathered together a number of previously separated agencies into one co-ordinated group. In the new Department of Transport are merged the former Departments of Marine and of Railways and Canals (dating from 1879) together with the Civil Aviation Branch of the Department of National Defence.
Even before the expansion of the war period the Department Annual Reports of Transport represented an enormous field of work. The largest part of it, the operation of the Canadian National Railways, is indeed segregated entirely under the control of the Canadian National Railways Company. But its nautical and maritime sections, wide and varied in scope, carry with them everywhere something of the atmosphere of interest and romance that clings like a mist around all that concerns the sea. Through the Minister, affiliated with it, is the National Harbours Board which has taken over the great sea-ports of the Dominion in place of the previous local Harbour Commissions. The National Harbours Board is a distinct unit as apart from the Department but reports directly to the minister. It operates the grain elevators of its sea-ports and also those of Port Colborne, Prescott and the Port of Churchill on the sea-coast of Manitoba. The Department has taken over the Canals including the St. Lawrence Ship Channel. It supervises Civil Aviation, the Meteorological Services and Radio.
The most elaborate and the most characteristically nautical of its functions are perhaps those grouped under Aids to Navigation. In this connection the Department has charge of the construction and repair of light houses, lightships, fog-alarms, buoys and beacons. It publishes its List of Lights (3 volumes). It issues also Notices to Mariners, about a hundred a year on over two hundred different subjects. It looks after the 300 public harbours of Canada which contain 2,000 wharves. It searches out and destroys derelicts and obstructions to navigation; and it keeps its eye on the Humane Establishment at Sable Island, “the grave yard of the Atlantic.”
A similar salt of the sea flavours the duties of the Nautical Services Division which registers ships, examines masters and mates, conducts navigation schools, licenses pilots and examines into wrecks and salvage. Such is the wide and impressive dominion over the sea that has grown up under the Dominion of Canada.
From all that has gone above one may gather a picture of the maritime life of Canada, in naval defence and in peace-time commerce, that may serve as an introduction to the volumes dealing with the War Effort of Canada by sea to which this outline of maritime history is intended as an introduction. But the close of the war will mark, we hope, only a new beginning. There are great things ahead. The St. Lawrence Sea-way is destined to become the most important inland waterway of the world. The Arctic coasts and seas of Canada will take on a significance and a new service when aviation goes over the top of the world and joins Europe to America by a polar route. There is no doubt that for such a traffic great depots, bases, points of repair and supply will be needed in the far north, especially for the transshipment of sea cargoes into aeroplanes. Water transport, by reason of its inconceivable cheapness in comparison with the air, will carry its cargoes to the farthest available northern harbours. The very traffic itself, permitting great capital expenditure, will open up and maintain such harbours, now impossible. It is quite possible also that such a route may develop a by-product of mineral wealth, especially of copper perhaps of rarer metals. Still wider is the view across the Pacific. The extinction of Japan as a “power” may mean the beginning of a new Orient and a new Pacific, to rival in coming centuries by the re-born energy of old countries, such as China, and the new born strength of Siberia and Australasia, all that once went with the Mediterranean world and later with the Atlantic. Such is our outlook. There are wonderful things coming to Canada as well by sea and by land. All that we need is a nation fully conscious of it and equal to the occasion.
While There is Time
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I THE GATHERING CRISIS
CHAPTER II PRIVATE ENTERPRISE
CHAPTER III THE UTOPIA OF SOCIALISM
CHAPTER IV SOCIALISM IN THE CONCRETE
CHAPTER V ESCAPE
CHAPTER VI TO DEVELOP CANADA
CHAPTER VII PROVINCES AND RACES
CHAPTER VIII CANADA AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD
PREFACE
IN WRITING THIS book I have drawn to some small extent on my previous work on the subject, such as Afternoons in Utopia and The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice. For the concluding chapters I have made use also of articles recently contributed by me to the Toronto Financial Post.
I have tried to write with honesty and fairness, not attributing mean motives to any body or to any party.
Stephen Leacock
CHAPTER I THE GATHERING CRISIS
I CALL THIS discussion The Case Against Social Catastrophe. I do not call it the Case Against Capitalism nor the Case Against Socialism. This is because I am afraid that unless we take thought while there is yet time, a far worse thing than either socialism or capitalism may come to us — a social catastrophe which may mean wreckage of all that we have taken so long to build. What I mean is that there may be forces let loose upon us which will get beyond the control of those who set them in motion. Plans for social betterment which originate in the best motives may be hurried forward so fast, with so little mature consideration as to break the ranks of society.
A grave danger, a great crisis is gathering in front of us. It is a sombre cloud on the horizon which rises so fast as to threaten to darken the whole sky. This is the dispute as to private enterprise and state control. Private enterprise is called by those who oppose it the profits system, and capitalism. State control means, in an ill-defined way, the taking over by the government of the industry of the nation. At present this dispute is still only argument. The danger is that it may turn to worse. While there is yet time we must agree by the way or disaster may fall upon us.
The war has given a peculiar intensity to this controversy. People contrast their past hard times with the “prosperity” of the war, under which there is work for all at high pay and where the plain people, the working people, in spite of all taxes, all rationing, all artificial shortnesses, receive more not only in money but in goods than they ever did in peace. They feel that the end of the war will bring an end to this, that they will be back again on low wages, with unemployment all around them, the black care of a narrow home and the cold and insufficient charity of a dole. This gives them a sense that they have been cheated, that there was plenty there all the time but that the rich took it all and left them nothing. This also makes it seem that the people were cheated after the last war; that soldiers came back to poverty; that the rich closed up their ranks; that brotherhood was over and servitude began again.
This belief easily leads to the further conclusion that the poor have always been cheated, that the world’s work has always been carried on by the weak under the compulsion of the strong. The slave became a serf, the serf became a factory hand — but whether slave or serf or hand, he got nothing but his bread. Hence the dream of a new and better world in which somehow all will work together and the welfare of each one will be the welfare of all. The new power of machinery, the new control of resources seems to put this new world within easy reach. In all this indictment there is so much that is true that it can only be met with truth. Only by admitting all that is true in it can we hope to cast out what is false.
The close of the war, even with the best good will, is almost certain to bring a severe shock to employment as it is, to wages as they are, to the short lived “prosperity” purchased at war’s awful price. Half a million of disbanded men, a million of war plant employees, “let go” of necessity by employers with no further contracts will be thrown on the country. Free enterprise will not know how to look after them as well as state enterprise did in hiring them for war. A mass movement will sweep the country. Where will it sweep it to?
It is not the victory of a political party that is to be feared. In and of itself the victory of a new political party in a British country means no more than a revolution in South America. The new party just become the new ins who replace the outs. The responsibility of office sobers the delirium of opposition. Things just go on. If that were all we had to fear wise men might well sit back and watch it all go by, as it has these eighty years, a circus procession in the street with a couple of new attractions.
But there is more than that. The impetus may prove too strong. A storm may break that no shelter can withstand, flattening the country as does a cyclone. A wild attempt to set up a new system — crude, inadequate, the work of anger and revenge — may break our existing commonwealth, our links of common life, our daily task, our daily bread. Once started such a cyclone of disaster cannot be stopped, or only by a long and weary struggle, an exhaustion that permits a new start. Such chapters as this, we would have thought, could never come into the pages of our history. We must see that they do not come into it. While there is yet time, we must find means to agree.
Our only safety is to be found in truth and decency. We must get at the truth of this bitter social indictment, must admit all that was wrong and urge all that was right.
A large part of the social indictment is true. We have been too indifferent to poverty for a hundred years past. We made no real attempt to remove it. We let children slave in factories, paupers rattle their bones over their stones in the one pleasure drive of their life (to the graveyard); we watched the slums fester, the weak die; we left wealth unchecked and privilege unshorn, looked only at the glorious “progress” of the machine and looked away from the submerged humanity below.
Individually we were each powerless to stop it all. But few even gave it tears.
This is not to say that private enterprise is a wicked thing. In its proper field it is the real incentive to action, the real path to progress. But it must be restricted to its proper field. It is not true that property is wicked. Property in the sense of something to call one’s own, one’s very own, is the deepest, the dearest instinct of our nature. Those whom we love are in a sense our “property,” our own. Property in land — one’s own house and garden, if it were but weeds, one’s own farm, if it be but in the bush, all that is the very breath of life in the nostrils of those who love the open field; love the creative sense of working with nature, not at the bidding of man.
Not property is wrong, not profits are wrong, nor money nor gain, but the swollen disproportionate gain that can turn a monied group to be the bosses of their fellow men. Not property is wrong but the abuse of it, not money but the too much of it, not wealth but the uneven iniquity of it.
