It is futile to talk of the poor and ignorant foreigner as a Goth or a
Vandal--to talk of excluding the ignorant and the lowly. The floating
"he-camps"--as these floating immigrants are called in labor
circles--are to-day doing much of the manual work of the world.
Canadian railways could not be built without them. Canadian industrial
and farm life could not go on without them. They are needed from
Halifax to Vancouver, and their labor is one of the wealth producers
for the nation.
And do not think for a moment that the wealth they produce is for
capital--for the lords of finance and not for themselves. When
Montenegrins, who earn thirty cents a day in their own land, earn
eleven dollars a day on dynamite work constructing Canadian railroads,
it is not surprising that they retire rich, and that the railroad for
which they worked would have gone bankrupt if the Dominion had not come
to its aid with a loan of millions. Likewise of Poles and Galicians in
the coal mines. When Charles Gordon--Ralph Connor--was sent to
investigate the strike in these mines he found foreigners earning
seventeen dollars a day on piecework who had never earned fifty cents a
day in their own land. I have in mind one Galician settler who has
accumulated a fortune of $150,000 in perfectly legitimate ways in ten
years. Even the Doukhobors--the eccentric Russian religious
sect--hooted for their oddities of manner and frenzies of religion--are
accumulating wealth in the Elbow of the Saskatchewan, where they are
settled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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