Between 350,000 and 400,000 people every year enter Canada with the intention of making Canada their home: 60,000 of these cross the border from the United States. Probably 50,000 to 70,000 are emigrants from the various non-British countries. The remainder are from the British Isles, and chiefly from England, Scotland, and Wales. The Irish prefer to go to the United States, where some twelve millions of people of Irish blood are already settled, and nearly every Irish family in the homeland has some representative in the States who will lend a helping hand. 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. In Parliament, and out of Parliament, there is dismal talk about “draining the country of its best blood,” and of “sending the cream of the working manhood and womanhood of our nation to become rival producers with our British farmers and workers in factories that will compete with ourselves.” Such talk is natural enough, but who can blame these people for leaving a land where they have seemed to be hopelessly pressed down by force of circumstances, with no prospect of ever rising, to a land that offers all sorts of opportunities to the man or woman with capacity, good character and grit? The way to quench the desire for emigration is to open wider the doors of opportunity at home, but that opening of the doors seems to baffle the wisest and most progressive and the most humanitarian of our statesmen. We live in a state of society that is the resultant of fifteen hundred years of social evolution, and evolution that has not always proceeded on right lines. We are a small country with a very great population, and the land for the most part is held up by a handful of owners, few of whom have had the vision to see that the real wealth of Great Britain lies not in its property but in its people. We have given rights to property and denied rights to people. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, deer, and pheasants must be taken great care of, for they have a saleable value, or they provide pleasure for the rich in their happy hunting grounds; but in our villages, country towns, and great cities hundreds of thousands of men and women with capable hands and willing hearts are either denied the right to earn a living wage or are compelled to work under such conditions as rob life of its joy and buoyancy. What wonder if the townsman whose wages are at starvation level, and whose employment is most precarious, who may be thrown out of work at any moment, who is dependent for his daily