The case is a standing joke in one province of a man who as an agitator
used to rave at "the British flag as a bloody rag." The police were
never quite sure whether to arrest him for treason or let him blow off
steam and exhaust. They wisely chose the latter course. Prosperity
came to the town. The man sold his small bit of real estate for
something under a hundred thousand. He didn't stay to divide his
unearned increment among his fellow agitators. He hied him to retire
to the land where "the flag was a bloody rag." This, of course, proves
nothing for or against Socialism as a system. There was a Judas among
the apostles; but it illustrates the point that Canada is still at the
stage where every man may become a capitalist, a vested righter, the
owner of his own freehold. When every man may have a vested property
right in a country--not as a gift but as the reward of his own effort
in a fair field with no favors--it is a fairly safe prophecy that the
vested rights earned and held by the fit and the strong will never be
handed over as a gift to the unfit and the weak and the don't-trys.
The savings of the man who has not squandered his earnings on saloons
and reckless living will never be taxed to support in idleness--even an
idle old age--the feckless who have spent on stomach and lust what
other men save. Sounds hard; doesn't it, in the face of almost
universal nostrums for the salvation and propagation of the useless?
But it is like Canada's climate. Perhaps the climate has a good deal
to do with it. Hard it may be; but the issue is clean-cut and crystal
clear--work, or starve; be fit, or die; make good, or drop out; here is
a fair field and no favors! Gird yourself as a man to it, and no
puling puny whining for pity!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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