Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 794
The proof of this inherent value of self help is to be found all about us. It lies as the root of the pride that any man who has made some little headway in life feels in his own upward career — not in the later, easier, successful stages but in its harder opening years. Let any such man tell you how he used to walk four miles to high school, how he saved his money dollar by dollar towards college matriculation, how he worked in a drug store in winter evenings and on a survey party on summer mornings. Ask him about helping his younger brother along, and note how he mentions without complaint as without pride, just as part of the record, that of course during all those earlier years he had to send “mother” ten dollars a month. With every one such man, worth listening to, you will find that help to others is always part of the story. I once heard such a narrator say in the course of his story, “then mother died and we saw daylight.” It seems strange, but he meant it, quietly and reverently, looking a long way back across the years. I have heard another such man talk of the crushing annual financial burden of seventeen dollars interest on the family bush farm and how the day came when he was able to earn it himself for the old people and came in and “slapped it down on the table.” Note that he “slapped it down on the table.” That’s the way — effort, triumph and defiance in every syllable of it.
The element of upward, strenuous effort is the true stimulus and motive of life. Our only care must be that it shall have fair play and shall succeed.
Nor is it only in the effort of work that the principle of private enterprise vindicates itself. It shows equally in the satisfaction that comes with the reward — the possession of something that is one’s own. This holds especially with the ownership of a house, a home, a garden, all that falls under the “magic of property.” There are many of us to whom the ownership of a “little place in the country” seems the very ideal of human good fortune. So it is, if you hook it up with the family circle that gives it meaning. And the strange thing in this is, as with all magic fancies and fairy creations, that a “little place in the country” may be of any size from nothing at all to a palace. It may be a lake shore lot with nothing on it that the outside eye can see but on which possessors see already the cottage they are going to build, the garage that they mean to “run up,” the electric light that they “may” install, to say nothing of the flower beds already planted (you didn’t notice them; they are those weeds along the path). Or a little place in the country may mean a real stucco-and-half-timber cottage with a two acre lawn and garden and trees and a real hired man, or half of one. Or it may mean ten acres and a mansion and a man (an old soldier) and his wife in a lodge. It doesn’t matter what size it is; its all little.
I have no doubt that an English Duke looks on his family estate and “stately home” as a little place in the country. So does, or did, the Sultan of Turkey regard his quiet little harem out in the oasis — sixty rooms and a Turkish bath.
With which, after all, the system of every man for himself does keep things going, and it does supply to the consumer that unending quantity of universal commodities, corresponding to all grades of income and shades of choice, moving automatically from the source of supply to the focus of demand. All we have to do is correct the faults of the system. And this is easy or hard to do according to the kind of people we are, to how honest we are, how much we have public spirit and private conscience. In the long run all depends on this. The spirit rules.
CHAPTER V ESCAPE
THE LAZINESS OF socialism, its drowsy work, its inability to handle money, its incompetence as to nourishing art and letters — these things could easily be forgiven, for they are shared by many of the best of us, and take away but little from that vague aspect of Utopia which is Socialism’s chief charm. It is only when Socialism gets into full power and authority, when it assumes a hundred per cent control of industry that it develops another and a far different side, a harsh, forbidding aspect that turns ultimately to a hideous vision of brute force, to a reign of terror. This comes, as has been said above, when socialism covers the whole field, when there is no longer any escape into freedom, no choice as between working under a socialist boss or taking the penalty (prison or worse) for refusing to work. This does not happen where democratic government rules, for democracy, as developed in Great Britain and America, has come to mean a rule of alternating parties, now in, now out. A change of government does not mean a change of system. It may mean a wholesale change of office and with it an altered distribution of governmental favour. It may mean — has meant in the past, still means to some extent in the present — quite a bit of crookedness, of ill-gotten gain but a change of government does not mean disaster. Indeed for the ordinary citizen, not concerned with politics, it means, in days of peace, relatively little.
But socialism cannot tolerate a change of government at the polls. A country cannot alter its system of government with every recurring vote. Socialism has got to stay in office or vanish. In ancient Rome they used to say the Tarpeian Rock is close to the capital — supreme power on the one hand but near it a precipice of disaster. Hence socialism once in office must consolidate itself, must find something to depend on in case votes fail, must look to the control of the armed forces, of the police. Nor can socialism feel sure that the armed forces, as it finds them, can be depended on to do its will. Socialism must create “controls” of its own. There must come into existence all that hideous apparatus of official police and armed terror only too familiar in the picture of Europe today. We don’t need to theorize on it. The thing is there.
Now I do not doubt that if socialism were instituted in Canada (or, rather, if the attempt were made) great numbers of men and women, the young people, would break out of it into the wilderness where somehow they might live on their own. They would go as their ancestors did, pilgrims, loyalists, pioneers and frontiersmen, the people who made this continent.
BACK TO THE WILDERNESS
I think that a novelist might write a wonderful story — (I would call it Escape) — dealing with the people who break away from the restraint, the prison of the iron frame of socialist regimentation which tries to hold them to their fixed task, to guide them under state rule, to circumscribe their lives with the pressure of the community, of committees, of choice by majority votes. They would want to get back to their own will and choice, to have some place and something to call their own, even if they had to reclaim it from the wilderness. And in Canada the wilderness is still next door, right there to the north of us.
I would picture such people stealing away on a summer night from some leaf shadowed side street of some Ontario town — young people, a young man and his wife, getting ready — their motor car packed with their goods and supplies, their two little children roused from slumber to be stowed away in the corner of the back seat piled round with blankets.
“Not that! John,” says the girl apprehensively, as the young man puts in his double-barrelled shot gun.
“There’ll be game up there, Joanna,” he answers. “I have a bag of two hundred cartridges . . . But I’ll use it to-night,” he mutters, “if I have to — before anyone shall stop us.”
“Not that, John, never that!” she says, clutching at his arm.
Thus their silent midnight departure and their escape — by unfrequented side-roads and bush tracks, avoiding the main highways — north, ever north, towards the country of their deliverance. From point to point they are secretly aided by confederates and passed forward on their way and their car sent back. At times a truck by secret arrangement helps them on their journey. Others have joined them, till they form a little group. Their course is like that of the famous “Underground railway” which once directed slaves secretly to freedom. But these are not of slave class: these are chosen people men and women of strength and knowledge and trained skill, with science in their brains, and artifice in their hands; young people mostly, with their children beside them but a few older people too, in whose spirit burns still the fire of freedom as in their pioneer ancestors of four generations back. North, still north! They have crossed the great railway lines that stretch across their path; they have avoided and left behind them the last of the mining towns and before them now is nothing but the rolling hills and woods divided by the great rivers of the north. What country, but Canada has such a background where those who will can call back three centuries of time, and redeem the errors of the past by the new adventure of the future. North, still north . . . They are reaching their last stages. On a broad far-north river there is waiting a steam tug, a hardy veteran of the past, the captain and deck hands, albeit it is a government tug, only too willing to give them surreptitious help and to carry them a long stretch on their way.
We can visualize the scene of their embarkation in the tug, late at night, with but little light in the summer sky, the river in half darkness, the tug lying out in the stream, its deck lighted in part by the glowing fires of jack-pine that roar in its furnace. The faces of the captain and the deckhands are illuminated in the glow and the light reaches to the group of the refugees gathered on the shore.
“Everything all right, Captain?” calls John from the bank to the tug.
“All fine and clear,” shouts back the Captain. “We’ll haul alongside and take you on; we’ve got most of your stuff aboard already. There’s hot coffee here and a bite of warm food. Now, then, stand by there to catch our line.” . . .
The tug carries them for a hundred miles of river and lake, and from there by canoes and portages, as of two hundred and fifty years ago, when Frenchmen groped their way from New France beyond Mistassini to the Hudson Bay, they reach a favoured valley, already chosen by those before them as their journey’s end.
In the country which they have reached, far away to the north in Canada beyond the great divide, there are still open and beautiful areas known at present only to the wandering parties of prospectors or to the swift view of the aeroplane. It is rolling country of wooded slopes. The maple and the elm and pine are gone but the hillsides are covered with spruce and white birch. There are river valleys whose sheltering sides are turned towards the sun, with alluvial stretches of fine soil along the bends of the stream. Rich grasses grow beside the waters. In winter all is rigid and desolate under the snow. The spring is tardy and still vexed with snow and storm and by the swollen torrents of the melting streams. But the long sunshine of the brief summer carpets all the valleys with flowers, and calls life to every grove and thicket with the song of the birds and the call of the water fowl. All the year round there is abundant game, in the cover of the spruce, and in the marshes beside the broken lakes, and fish leap in the streams and lie in the translucent water under the winter ice. It is a land not of plenty, but of enough for those whose energy can match its rigour.
Thither come the free settlers. This is the open country that has become, as the net of state control tightens over the nation, the new haven of the refugees, the land of escape, where people can still work and live on their own. Secretly, yet with the knowledge and contrivance of many people who aid their flight, they make their way to the north. Here and there in the snug hollows of the river valleys they build their little settlements, patterned on the old plan of mingled self help and joint effort that has come down from the days of the pioneers, of the United Empire Loyalists.
It is in such a spot as this that John and Joanna and those with them build their settlement, trim cabins of spruce with wide fireplaces and chimneys of limestone: garden plots laid out in the best of the alluvial soil along the river. A certain contact they can still maintain with civilization, surreptitious, illegal but with no one willing to denounce or impede it. Thus come to them from time to time letters from the outside, news of the world they have left behind. Their lot has all the bitterness of exile but all the stern joy of freedom. All day they work but never count the hours for it is work that each does for himself and those dear to him — a house, a home, a garden — the making of something, man’s earliest inspiration. And with that too they join forces for common tasks too great for the strength of one.
The government knows of the existence of these free settlements, knows of them yet hesitates to interfere.
Sometimes the thing is discussed in their cabinet meeting. “I tell you,” says one angry member of the Socialist Cabinet, “them there places must be rooted out. They’re illegal. They’re in flat violation of the whole basis of the law of collective property. You’ve got to do something.”
The Prime Minister shakes his head. One of the two of the older ministers murmurs their dissent.
The speaker goes on.
“Break them up. Send in Mounted Police and arrest the lot of them. Burn down their houses. We have the full right to do it. When we became the government of this country it gave us the full right, didn’t it, to use force? Every government does. We have the right to use the police, the soldiers to see that the law is carried out. What we say must be obeyed.”
He struck the table with an angry fist. “That’s the law Mr. Prime Minister. Carry it out!”
There were voices of mingled agreement and dissent.
The Prime Minister spoke with hesitation.
“I don’t think we can,” he said. “I don’t believe that the people of the country would stand for it.”
“The people of the country,” snorted his antagonist, “who are they to decide? We are the government of the country. Let them learn that!”
“I mean,” said the prime minister, “that the people, the mass of the people even if they fully accept our new regime wouldn’t let us go too far. After all they have the vote, and their elected representatives in parliament, if they wish to, can turn us out in a day. I don’t believe they’d let us break up these” — he paused for a word— “these free settlements. These people in the wilderness seem to them to be something like, what, well, there’s a certain I won’t say sympathy but a tolerance for them. After all,” he said, and his eye kindled for a moment with a different light, “our own great grandfathers began like them. Mine did — in the Talbot settlement — and those of many of the rest of us.”
Warm voices of assent. “Let them stay, they’re not hurting anybody.”
“That’s just it,” said the recalcitrant member of the Cabinet. All those round the table knew that he was really a rival of the kindly old prime minister, meaning to usurp his place, and that he and a group about him meant to mould the government to their own way of thinking. “That’s just it. That’s the weak spot of our position. We’re left with that threat of a majority vote, perhaps a sudden majority vote against us, hanging over us all the time. What we should do is to consolidate our position, see to it that the police are with us — pay them well to be with us, and fire them if they’re not — make sure that the permanent force is under men we can trust, organize our agents in every city in every centre” —
The prime minister interrupted angrily, with a blow on the table.
“That isn’t Canada!” he said. “That’s Prussia. I’ll have none of it while I’m here. Be damned to it!”
So the settlements stayed on. Every now and then such discussions, though the public didn’t know it, divided the cabinet; but nothing was done, and meantime the free settlements of the north grew apace. That of John and Joanna had grown to the appearance of a comfortable village round a village common, with its meeting house, its school for the children, its forge and its saw-mill and its grist-mill of solid limestone humming and murmuring beside the mill dam as it ground into meal the rough grains of the north. Communication with the outside world had become almost regular. The settlers made their way back and forward to the shores of the Great Bay, their sea coast, trading with fishing ships. Already some of them, bred to the sea, began to talk of building ships on the Bay, of trading across the ocean, and of a government of their own under the old flag.
But such a situation couldn’t last indefinitely. The plain breach of law involved was too clear. Sooner or later the government must act, and when they at last decided to act they did it, as all such governments are apt to, with a sudden ruthless severity that showed their own lack of confidence. We need only recall the expulsion of the Acadians, called suddenly to their fate, and gathered into their Church to hear their doom.
Such was to be the fate of these free settlement villages.
It is an autumn afternoon. A bright sunshine floods the fading yellow grass of the hills and the wind sweeps among the hollows. The people are all at work around the hamlet gathering the harvest of their late crop in a latitude where harvest must push close against the oncoming winter. But the weather is still bright, the day almost warm.
The people look up from their work to see horsemen approaching rapidly over the brow of the hill slope. It is a squadron of Royal Mounted Police, in that familiar uniform of scarlet, dark blue and yellow stripe, that has won honour throughout all of Canada and the homage of the outside world.
The people come gathering in from the outlying fields and woodlots. They cannot doubt the meaning of what they see. They group in little clusters, talking together, some in fierce denunciation of what they know is to come. “They daren’t do it!” they say. “They daren’t do it!”
But they are there to do it.
The police have reached the head of the hamlet. The squadron wheels and halts in a rough half circle in the open square.
