Pictures of Canadian Life: A Record of Actual ExperiencesRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
Pictures of Canadian Life: A Record of Actual Experiences
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Canada -- Description and travel; Canada -- Emigration and immigration
In a month or two the emigration season will have commenced, and there is
no time to spare. Why cannot other denominations do what the Church of
England is now preparing to do? Canada can feed and fatten millions, who
in England will have to live as a burden on the community. There is many
a man who does ill here who would do well there. We are all more or less
the creatures of circumstances. In England the beershop has degraded the
community, and many a man finds it hard to get away from its foul
companionship: here, he declines into a criminal or a sot; there, not
only will he be neither the one nor the other, but he will develop all
the better tendencies of his character, and become a man. Make him a
peasant-proprietor at home, and the chances are the old Adam in him will
be too strong. Plant him in a colony, he feels in a new world, with a
new aim. Here, he is looked down on: there, he is hailed as a man and a
brother. We who are old must stop at home; but there is no reason why
our sons should do so. Why should a young man be a drudge because his
father was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water, when in a colony
there are many ways of becoming well-off to a man who has good muscles
and brains, has the sense to avail himself of opportunity when it occurs,
and to keep his money in his pocket? I say Canada, because Canada is
easy to get at, and is yet almost in a virgin state. It is only recently
that it has been opened up by the Canadian Government and the Canadian
Pacific Railway. I say Canada, because Canada is English, and I am an
Englishman; because the Canadian Government does all it can to help the
emigrant; and because the Canadians are mostly healthy, honest men.
Englishmen thrive there better, at any rate, than they do in the United
States, or in South Africa. Arrangements for a colony can easily be
made. In London, the Canadian Pacific Railway have a fine office in
Cannon Street, where you can see for yourself what are the results of
farming in the North-West, and where you will find its courteous and
intelligent representative, Mr. Alexander Begg, whose only fault is that
he will persist in maintaining that the English climate is killing him,
and that he enjoys much better health in that frosty Canada, the cold of
which is a bugbear that has kept too many away. Go to him, and he will
tell you where to plant your colony. The money which is now squandered
in keeping paupers at home surely might be better spent in forming
village communities in the boundless plains of the North-West. Let
Dissenters imitate the Church. Let them have their communities as the
Church of England seek to have theirs. Some people say the Salvationists
are a nuisance in our crowded cities: let General Booth betake himself to
Manitoba; he will find few people to complain of his processions there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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