From the national point of view Canada needs these foreign settlers.
She needs their labor. Every man to her is worth fifteen hundred
dollars in productive work. The higher wages he earns on piecework the
more Canada is pleased; for the more work he has done. But at the
present rate of peopling Canada these foreign born will in twenty years
outnumber the native born. What will become of Canada's national
ideals then? In one foreign section of the Northwest I once traveled a
hundred miles through new settlements without hearing one word of
English spoken; and these Doukhobors and Galicians and Roumanians and
Slavs were making good. They were prospering exceedingly. Men who had
come with less than one hundred dollars each and lived for the first
years in crowded tenements of Winnipeg or under thatch-roof huts on the
prairie now had good frame houses, stables, stock, modern implements.
The story is told of one poor Russian who, when informed of the fact
that the land would be his very own, fell to the earth and kissed the
soil and wept. Such settlers make good on soil, whatever ill they work
in a polling booth. Except for his religious vagaries, the Doukhobor
Russian is law abiding. The same can not be said of the other Slav
immigrants. Crime in the Northwest, according to the report of the
Mounted Police, has increased appallingly. The crimes are against life
rather than against property--the crimes of a people formerly kept in
order by the constant presence of a soldier's bayonet run amuck in
Canada with too much freedom. And the votes of these people will in
twenty years out-vote the Canadian. These poverty-stricken Jews and
Polacks and Galicians will be the wealth and power of Canada to-morrow.
If you doubt what will happen, stroll down Fifth Avenue, New York, and
note the nationality of the names. A Chicago professor carefully noted
the nationality of all the names submitted in Chicago's elections for a
term of years. Three-quarters of the names were of nationalities only
one generation away from the Ghetto.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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