Harry Jeffs

“ One does not have to be long in Canada before discovering that nothing is more unpopular in the Dominion than rent-paying, whether for land or for a house. Every householder wants to own his home, and the powers that be in the State Governments and in the municipalities encourage this ambition. It is this desire to own the home that accounts for the ubiquity of the Real Estate agent, who swarms all over Canada. No sooner is it decided to lay out a town, and the municipality is created and invested with authority, than the Real Estate man puts in an appearance. ”

“ You cannot offend the modern Canadian more than by describing him as a “Colonial.” He is a Canadian—an Imperialist, a man who claims his full share in the concerns of the British Empire—a man who has firmly convinced himself that within a hundred years Canada, so far from being a British Dependency, will be the most stalwart protector of the Mother Country. The epoch-making offer of a gift of seven millions for the addition of three super-Dreadnoughts to the British Navy is the first expression of the Canadian sense of Imperial destiny. ”

“ Anything more exquisitely lovely than sunrise in the Rocky Mountains it is impossible to imagine. The gilded snow peaks look like cubes and pyramids of glittering gold. The railway itself is a continual wonder. It is a triumph of the mind, the resolute will, the skilful hands, and the Napoleonic organisation of labour and mechanical ingenuity over the forces of Nature, which it would almost seem intended to place the Rockies as an everlasting barrier between the prairie and the Pacific. ”

“ I have been amazed at the evidences of the overpowering prosperity of your British industries under the system of Free Trade. If I were living in Great Britain I should be a Free Trader out and out. You have the instinct of manufacturing industry. You had a long start of all your rivals. Geographically you are marked out to be the great manufacturing, producing and distributing centre of the world. You would be most foolish to attempt to overthrow a fiscal system under which you have done so well. But when I come to Canada I am a Protectionist out and out. ”

“ It was not merely inspired by the feeling of men of all political parties in the Dominion that the Atlantic and Pacific coasts must be safeguarded against foreign attack and the blocking up of the outlets and inlets of Canadian trade, but by the over-mastering consciousness of the Canadian people that they are a Nation of Destiny and that in the near future they will play a great and increasing part in the shaping of the industrial and political history of the world. ”

“ On the journey of 300 miles odd from Winnipeg to Regina, the capital of the central Prairie Province of Saskatchewan, the traveller sees the prairie stretching out on either side of the line to the horizon. Early in the summer it is a sea of green growing wheat; towards harvest time it is a sea of gold, with the wheat to the height of a man; after harvest the prairie presents the appearance of a vast encampment with the wheat stooks waiting for the threshing. ”

“ British Columbia is as confident of its magnificent future as are its sister Provinces. With the opening of the Panama Canal it looks forward to such an outlet for its agricultural and manufacturing products as will draw millions of people to the country and make it not only by its scenic glories a gem of the Imperial crown, but one of the Empire’s richest wealth-producers. ”

“ Let it be impressed on all emigrants to Canada that the sooner they get into friendly touch with Churches, Brotherhoods, the splendid Y.M.C.A.’s, and other institutions of the Dominion, the better it will be for them. Canada is no more than any other country a paradise without a serpent. There are temptations, moral dangers, land sharks on the look out for easy victims. The members of the Canadian Churches, Brotherhoods and Y.M.C.A.’s are willing and eager to safeguard immigrants from the moment of their arrival from all such dangers. ”

“ The Canadian Governments are all very keenly alive to the social and economic value of every immigrant of the right sort. Every man able and willing to work and to adapt himself to the conditions means an addition to the economic development power of the country. He is alike a producer and a consumer. He makes a home, and that home means increased trade to the producer and consumer of every necessary of life. This is why not only the Dominion but all the Provincial Governments are offering inducements to the right sort of emigrant to make his home in Canada. ”

“ As the railway descends to the lower slopes of the Rockies the country opens out. There are large and lovely lakes swarming with fish, a country abounding with valleys that rival Annapolis valley of Nova Scotia and the Niagara country of South Ontario in their fitness for fruit growing, while the humidity of the atmosphere, the soft Pacific breezes, the flood of summer sunshine, and the mildness of the winter give British Columbia enormous advantages over its eastern fruit-producing rivals. ”

“ The first thing that strikes a visitor to Hamilton, if he should arrive after dark, is what he will consider the scandalous luxury of the brilliant electric lighting with which the fronts of business houses and places of entertainment literally blaze, but should the visitor express his concern at such apparent wicked waste he will be told that electricity is so cheap that its cost is practically negligible. It is to the cheapness of natural sources of power, that is given without stint, that the growing manufacturing prosperity of Canada is largely due. ”

“ Canadians must be made to realise that a nation, like an individual, “lives not by bread alone,” that it has a soul to be saved as well as a body to be fed. Canada must be preserved from the national tragedy of growing to be a giant in bulk with the strength of a giant—but a giant without a soul. ”

“ I am convinced that many of those whom I met, both those dealing in town sites and those dealing in acreage, were men of sound judgment and good commercial honesty; but business is business, and the principle in the minds of a large number of the Canadian Real Estate men generally is caveat emptor—“let the buyer keep his eyes skinned—my business is to sell. I have to make my profit—it is the buyer’s business to take care that he makes his. If the land is not what he expected that is his look out—he must find somebody else as simple as himself to relieve him of it.” ”

“ Not that Canada will tolerate in the Dominion the creation of a feudal land system such as we have in the Old Country. Land ownership, not tenancy from a landlord, is the rule in Canada, and if there were any danger of landlord monopoly being created in Canada public opinion would soon force the Dominion and Provincial Governments to put a stop to it, but in land purchase and the reselling, in railway construction and in the development of the rapidly-growing industrial concerns of Canada, hundreds of millions of British capital have already been absorbed and the cry is still for more. ”

“ You must have manufacturing industries, and at present, as a manufacturing country, Canada is in its infancy. Our people have to acquire the manufacturing instinct. Until they have acquired it, if we allowed our country to be flooded with the manufacturing products of the United States, of the Old Country, and of France, Germany, and other countries, we should be beaten hands down and our rising manufacturing industries would be strangled in their cradle. ”

“ If we are not prepared at whatever cost to make Great Britain worth remaining in to the more intelligent and aspiring of our young men and young women we have no right to complain if they leave Great Britain, and if, by leaving the homeland, the country is drained of its best blood. ”

“ No scenery can give a more favourable first impression of the country. The ranges of wooded hills, the towns and villages, each with its church spire in the centre, the fishing boats, are all objects of never-failing interest. Quebec is the landing place for the immigrants. There is no more picturesque approach to any city than the approach up the river to Quebec, the old capital of French Canada. ”

“ My own experience of railway travelling in Canada, of many nights spent sleeping in Pullman cars, confirms the testimony of English travellers. The temperature at times in the railway trains is almost unbearable, and it was a delight when the train stopped for five or ten minutes to alight on platforms sprinkled with snow and to breathe the clear crisp air. I have no doubt that the train-heating is as necessary as the house-heating having regard to the conditions. Canadians adapt themselves to the conditions, and what is abnormal to us becomes normal to them. ”

“ I heard of University men, young barristers, young journalists, young doctors, who had got tired of waiting at home for an opportunity that was slow to come, or who found themselves of too energetic and restless a temper to settle down under the conditions of British life, who had gone out to Canada and hired themselves to farmers in Ontario or the Prairie Provinces and were soon working on the land as to the manner born. ”

“ The threshing over, the prairie glows at night with conflagrations as if a hostile army was marching through the land destroying as it went, but all that is happening is the burning of waste straw and refuse from the threshing, the ashes being the only fertiliser that the soil has so far received. ”

“ On my visit to the Falls I saw the great power-house in which the mighty rush of the Rapids is harnessed and tamed by the engineering skill of man and compelled to serve alike the industrial prosperity, the domestic comfort, the tram service, and the house and street lighting not only of Hamilton, but of Toronto and of many other cities. ”

“ Such a man, with the money he may save in a couple of years, would find it quite easy, if he does not desire to take a homestead which may be in a lonely district and may mean considerable hardship for two or three years, to take on easy instalment terms a ready-made farm within an area that affords a certain amount of society. It is the woman rather than the man who finds the loneliness of the homestead on the fresh-broken prairie almost unbearable. She cannot live without the company-keeping and social gossip of the village. ”

“ During the emigration season—from March to the middle of November—from 10,000 to 15,000 a week leave Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, and Southampton by the various lines for Canada. The steerage of an emigrant ship, viewed from one standpoint, is a melancholy spectacle. There would be from 700 to 1,500 people, men and women mostly under the age of twenty-five, and even whole families, leaving the Old Country behind them in order to make themselves citizens of a new country 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. ”

“ One class of woman worker that Canada has no use for is the barmaid. The employment of women in drink shops is absolutely forbidden. It may be added that for a woman to enter a public-house in Canada is to write herself down as a pariah. No Canadian woman could enter a public-house without being regarded as outside the ranks of decent society. As a matter of fact, except perhaps in Vancouver and one or two other cosmopolitan ports, no woman does enter a public-house. ”

“ Again, Canada has offered a field for the investment of British surplus profits second to none in the world. During the last few years our country has been passing through a period of unprecedented prosperity. It has been impossible to find employment in the industries of our country for the annual two hundred millions or so of surplus profits, and much of that surplus has been pouring in a river of gold into Canadian channels for the development of the country. ”