Canada: the Empire of the North: Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to KingdomLaut, Agnes C.
History
Canada: the Empire of the North: Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom
Laut, Agnes C.
Canada -- History
And the movement to Canada has begun. To her shores are thronging the
hosts of the Old World's dispossessed, in multitudes greater than any
army that ever marched to conquest under Napoleon. When the history of
America comes to be written in a hundred years, it will not be the
record of a slaughter field with contending nations battling for the
mastery, or generals wading to glory knee-deep in blood. It will be an
account of the most wonderful race movement, the most wonderful
experiment in democracy the world has known.
The people thronging to Canada for homes, who are to be her nation
builders, are people crowded out of their home lands, who had n't room
for the shoulder swing manhood and womanhood need to carve out
honorable careers. Look at them in the streets of London, or Glasgow,
or Dublin, or Berlin, these _émigrés_, as the French called their
royalists, whom revolution drove from home, and I think the word
_émigré_ is a truer description of the newcomer to Canada than the word
"emigrant." They are {x} poor, they are desperately poor, so poor that
a month's illness or a shut-down of the factory may push them from
poverty to the abyss. They are thrifty, but can neither earn nor save
enough to feel absolutely sure that the hollow-eyed specter of Want may
not seize them by the throat. They are willing to work, so eager to
work that at the docks and the factory gates they trample and jostle
one another for the chance to work. They are the underpinnings, the
underprops of an old system, these _émigrés_, by which the masses were
expected to toil for the benefit of the classes.
"It's all the average man or woman is good for," says the Old Order,
"just a day's wage representing bodily needs."
"Wait," says the New Order. "Give him room! Give him an opportunity!
Give him a full stomach to pump blood to his muscles and life to his
brain! Wait and see! If he fails _then_, let him drop to the bottom
of the social pit without stop of poorhouse or help!"
A penniless immigrant boy arrives in New York. First he peddles
peanuts, then he trades in a half-huckster way whatever comes to hand
and earns profits. Presently he becomes a fur trader and invests his
savings in real estate. Before that man dies, he has a monthly income
equal to the yearly income of European kings. That man's name was John
Jacob Astor.
Or a young Scotch boy comes out on a sailing vessel to Canada. For a
score of years he is an obscure clerk at a distant trading post in
Labrador. He comes out of the wilds to take a higher position as land
commissioner. Presently he is backing railroad ventures of tremendous
cost and tremendous risk. Within thirty years from the time he came
out of the wilds penniless, that man possesses a fortune equal to the
national income of European kingdoms. The man's name is Lord
Strathcona.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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