dollars. I have heard immigration officials figure how each colonist
was worth to the country as a producer fifteen hundred dollars a year.
This is an excessive estimate, but the bargain was a good one for
Canada. In 1901, when Canada's population was five millions, there
were seven hundred thousand people of British birth in the Dominion; so
that of Canada's present population of 7,800,000, there are in the
Dominion a million and a half people of British birth.[1] Averaging
winter with summer for ten years, colonists of British birth have been
landing on Canada's shores at the rate of three hundred a day.
Canada's natural increase is under one hundred thousand a year.
British colonists are to-day yearly outnumbering Canada's natural
increase.
Only two other such migrations of Saxon blood have taken place in
history: when the Angles and Jutes and Saxons came in plunder raids to
English shores at the dawn of the Christian Era; when in the
seventeenth century Englishmen came to America; and both these tides of
migration were as a drop in an ocean wave compared to the numbers of
English born now flooding to the shores of Canada.
Knowing the Viking spirit that rode out to conquer the very elements in
the teeth of death, it is easy to look back and realize that these
Angles and Jutes and Saxons were bound to found a great sea empire.
So, too, of the New England Puritans! Men who sacrificed their all for
a political and religious belief were bound to build of such belief
foundation for a sturdy nation of the future. It is easy to look back
and realize. It is hard to look forward with eyes that see; but one
must be a very opaque thinker, indeed, not to wonder what this latest
vast migration of Saxon blood portends for future empire. The Jutes
and Angles and Saxons poured into ancient Albion for just one
reason--to acquire each for his own freehold of land. Look at the
ancient words! Freehold of land! For what else have a million and a
half British born come to the free homesteads of Canada? For freehold
of land--land unoppressed by taxes for war lords; land unoppressed by
tithes for landlord; land absolutely free to the worker. That such a
migration should break in waves over Canadian life and leave it
untouched, uninfluenced, unswerved, is as inconceivable as that the
Jutes and Angles and Saxons could have settled in ancient Albion and
not made it their own.
II
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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