The contest between capital and labor in Canada has never become that
armed camp divided by a chasm of hatred known in other lands. This for
two reasons: First, the labor of yesterday is the capital of to-day,
and the labor of to-day is the capital of to-morrow. Second, from the
very nature of Canada's greatest wealth--agricultural lands--the
substantial proportion of the population consists of land owners,
vested righters, respecters of property interests because they
themselves are property holders. The city dweller in Canada has been
from the very nature of things the anachronism, the anomaly, the
parasite, the extraneous outgrowth on the main body of production.
To take the first reason why capital and labor has not been divided in
hostile camps in Canada, because the labor of yesterday is the capital
of to-day--I am not dealing with speculative arguments and opinions. I
am trying to set down facts. The owner of the largest fortune west of
the Rocky Mountains in Canada began life with a pick and shovel. The
owner of the richest timber limits in British Columbia began at a
dollar and twenty-five cents a day piling slabs. The wealthiest meat
packer east of the Rocky Mountains was "bucking" and "breaking"
bronchoes thirty years ago at twenty-five dollars a month. The packer
who comes next to him in wealth began life in Pt. Douglas, Winnipeg,
loading frozen hogs. The richest newspaper man in Canada began life so
poor that he and his father hauled the first editions of their paper to
customers on a hand sled. The four men who are to-day the greatest
powers in the railroad world of the Dominion began life, one as a stone
mason, another as a lumber-jack, a third as a store keeper, a fourth as
a telegraph operator. I do not think I am wrong in saying that the
richest wholesaler in Canada reached the scene of his present
activities with his entire earthly possessions in a pocket handkerchief
and a tin lunch pail. Of two of the most powerful men who ever came
out of the maritime provinces, one swept a village store for his living
at a dollar and fifty cents a week; another reached St. John, New
Brunswick, from his home in the backwoods, dressed in a home-made suit,
which his mother had spun and carded from their own wool. The fact
that the door of opportunity is open to the talented tends to prevent
the opening of a chasm of hatred between capital and labor, though it
must be admitted that the warfare of capital and labor in the States
was developing in the era when Rockefeller and Carnegie were lifting
themselves from penury to the heights of financial power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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