CANADA AS A NATION.*
WHATES has written an admirable book, which we have read with keen enjoyment. He went to Canada as a steerage passenger, posed as an emigrant, and made actual trial of the difficulties which confront the settler. In this way he met Canadians of every type and class, and had every chance of learning their real views. He travelled over much of the continent, selected a homestead area in the wheatlands of the North-West, and returned after five well-spent months with a knowledge of the land which few could acquire in as many years. The result is a book which is partly a record of travel, partly a most practical guide to the intending settler, and partly a careful and sympathetic study of Canadian political thought. Mr. Whates writes with grace and distinction, he has keen powers of observation, and the tolerant, humorous outlook of the true traveller. His account of his experiences as a day-labourer on landing at St. John is excellent reading. Excellent, too, is his picture, not over-coloured, of the lumber- men of the New Brunswick forests, than whom there is no finer class of men in the Empire. But it is in his pictures of the North-West that the main interest is to be found. These immense spaces with their scanty population come as a sharp contrast to the closely settled Eastern provinces. He was dis- appointed in Winnipeg, which is a " dead " city from October till the beginning of April, since the West has all its eggs in one basket, and when the wheat is not being sown or harvested sits idle. For an emigrant, therefore, it is an expensive city to make a stay in, and to the ordinary traveller it has little to offer. It is the emporium and distributing centre of the North-West, a gigantic country town rather than a city with its own private interests. We commend Mr. Whates's tale of his winter journeys over the frozen plains looking for a homestead to settle on. It is an austere land, where the wealth of Nature can only be won by constant toil and self-sacrifice; and the reading of these pages will give a fair notion of the hardihood and strength of character which such a life demands. It is different across the mountains in the garden valleys of British Columbia. At present the need of population is not felt there, for the Colony has scarcely been awakened to the richness of her heritage. If it is to be kept for settlers of British blood, both Chinese and Japanese must be excluded, he thinks, from permanent settlement,—a duty on which the Dominion Government is gradually making up its mind.
The first fact for the emigrant to remember is that Canada does not want educated men, unless they have means—"she breeds her own "—nor gentlemen in the conventional sense, unless they are prepared to begin as labourers, nor "soft-handed people" like clerks and shopmen. We are talking of the man without capital, or with very little, who must always be the common type of emigrant. "No man who is skilled in the use of any tool or appliance from a shovel upwards need be out of work for more than twenty-four hours." In the virgin districts of the North-West, where a man can grow up with the country, the one great demand is for manual labour. An emigrant who is prepared to live barely and work unceasingly can begin as a labourer and gradually save enough money to take up a farm on his own, and so in turn become a capitalist. Canada is an expensive place to live in, and though the wages are high, the work lasts for little more than half the year ; hence it is * Canada : the Nem Nation. A Book for the Settler, the Bmigrant, and the Politician. By H. B. Whates. London: J. M. Dent and Co. 1_38.0d. net.] necessary for the intending settler to be fully aware of the conditions he is going to face. The advantages of Canada do not lie either in highly paid or continuous labour, but in the fact that it is a "growing country, in which there are oppor- tunities for an adventurous and frugal man to develop or change his calling. The agricultural labourer, for example, can do what is impossible for him in England, however frugal and industrious he may be—become a farmer owning his own land." Canada is no city of refuge for the shiftless and incompetent poor. Mr. Whates's wise words should be written over every emigration office :— "An emigrant to Canada, who goes without capital or without secure and definite employment, should be a single man, under forty years of age, of strong physique and accustomed to, or pre- pared to enter upon, the roughest kinds of manual labour. That is the only kind of emigrant who is sure to obtain work sufficiently continuous and remunerative to enable him to feed and clothe himself the year round well and comfortably, and save a little money with which to become independent of wage- earning, either by farming a homestead or engaging in business.'
Given such a man, his chances are limitless, and Mr. Whates quotes many instances of brilliant success attained solely by thrift and toil. He gives many useful practical details as to the cost of taking up from the Dominion Government a free farm of a hundred and sixty acres. The minimum which a settler must bring with him or save out of his earnings as a labourer he puts at £180, and this figure allows no margin for mistakes. Emigration, after all, is a science, the fitting of the right man to the right conditions, and no mere dumping down anywhere of all and sundry. Mr. Whates argues that the time has come for a reasoned policy on the part of both the Home and Colonial Governments. Instead of being confined to a little office in a back-street which is mainly concerned with the distribution of pamphlets, emigra- tion ought to be in the bands of an organised Administrative Department. It is the only way in which we can hope for an ultimate solution of two of our greatest Imperial problems,— how to relieve congestion at home by transplanting classes who can still be saved to a land where they will have the opportunity and a fair hope of success, and how to ensure that the population of the new countries will be "pre- dominantly British in blood and speech and traditions."
The closing chapters are an attempt to analyse the nascent political aspirations of the Dominion. The average Canadian has in a high degree the civic sense, and thinks continually about the future of his country. "He is a man of strong natural intelligence ; and, unlike many men in the street in England, his intellect is not fuddled by drink or paralysed by anxiety as to whether this or that horse will first pass the post." The current of Canadian thought, in Mr. Whates's opinion, is setting towards absolute independence,—"a Nation, self-acting in all matters, foreign and domestic." There will still remain, he thinks, the tie of the Crown. "The future which most Canadians of British blood imagine for themselves is that of an independent kingdom, either Republican or under the British Crown—preferably the latter—so they think at present ; a kingdom in voluntary alliance with Great Britain, but co-equal with, and in no sense subordinate to, Great Britain." The future Canada may have one hundred and forty millions of population, and it is this hope which inspires an extreme self-confident nationalism in spite of the many obvious dangers. It is this which makes Canadians desire the treaty-making power, although they have not the military or naval force to give any sanction to their independent negotiations. Now nationalism is, to our mind, a most valuable and wholesome creed, but it is none the less a stage in development, and not the end, and we are not without hope that a more organic connexion than mere alliance may yet be devised. But of the immediate reality of Canadian nationalism there can be no doubt, and it makes any scheme of an artificial Imperial union, Constitutional or fiscal, both dangerous and futile. Mr. Whates's chapter on the fiscal question seems to us one of the most convincing refutations of Cliamberlainism on Imperial grounds that we have met with. The theory of alliance is, for the present, the only one that can fit the facts. We believe and hope that in the future it may be possible to reach some form of executive union more organic and permanent than mere alliance; but we are most deeply convinced that the alternative to alliance can never be a "device of props and barriers, enclosed by an Imperial ring-fence staked in nothing better than the shifting sands of economic expediency and the mutations of party strife in England and the Colonies." At all costa the new nations must have their hands free to follow that economic policy which best fits their stage of development. For nationalism, if given free scope, may show itself a true centri- petal force ; but if curbed and hampered it becomes a most potent engine of disruption.
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