Canada -- Economic conditions; Canada -- Emigration and immigration
Plough Works and the International Harvester Works that has made the
marvellous wheat production of the Prairie Provinces, increasing
constantly at the rate of millions of bushels a year, possible.
Hamilton is also the scene of enormous works of the Canadian
Westinghouse Brake Company, a branch of the Pittsburg Company, whose
brakes are necessities of existence to every railway company and to most
of the electrical tram systems of the world.
A constant stream of immigrants pours into Hamilton. The demand for
labour is insatiable. I noticed in the International Harvester Works
that warnings and regulations for the guidance of the _employés_ were
printed in seven languages. It was evident that the workmen were a
cosmopolitan mixture of races. They included many men from the Balkan
States, Italians, Russians, and others who in Canada take more kindly to
manufacturing and railway construction employment than to the life of
agriculture. Mr. Marsh informed me that in March 1,200 men could readily
be found employment in the various Hamilton factories.
Ontario, with its four millions of population out of the seven millions
of Canada, is the great manufacturing Province, although there are
growing manufactures in the Eastern Provinces of Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick, and Quebec. A Government publication summarising the
industries of Ontario states that, in addition to Hamilton and in and
around Toronto, at London, further west on its own river Thames; at
Brantford, Chatham, Guelph, Kingston, Ottawa, Peterborough, St.
Catharines, St. Thomas, Stratford, Berlin, Collingwood, Galt, Ingersoll,
Oshawa, Sarnia, Sault Ste. Marie, Woodstock, and scores of other
centres, the mills and factories are busy. They produce vast quantities
of iron and everything that iron makes, from a tin-tack to a locomotive.
The agricultural machinery made in Canada stands so high in reputation
that it finds a market not only in South America and in the sister
realms of Australia and New Zealand and in the Mother Country itself,
but in continental Europe. Several other special lines of manufacture,
including parlour organs, are now well known abroad; but in most
branches the Canadians themselves use all that their manufacturers
produce; and here in the towns of Ontario are produced not only such
wares as we have just mentioned, but cotton, woollen and leather goods
and clothing; waggons and carriages, on wheels or runners; furniture,
paper, and almost everything else that is made of wood; foodstuffs,
plain and fancy—but really there is no end to the list.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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