Man to man on the prairie farm, in the lumber woods, your Canadian can
out-do the Russian or Galician or Hebrew. The Canadian uses more
brains and his aggregate returns are bigger; but boned down to a basis
of _who_ can save the most and become rich fastest, your foreigner has
the native-born Canadian beaten at the start. Where the Canadian earns
ten dollars and spends eighty per cent. of it, your foreigner earns
five dollars, and saves almost all of it. How does he do this? He
spends next to nothing. Let me be perfectly specific on how he does
it: I have known Russian, Hebrew, Italian families in the Northwest who
sewed their children into their clothes for the winter and never
permitted a change till spring. Your Canadian would buy half a dozen
suits for his children in the interval. Your foreigner buys of
furniture and furnishings and comforts practically nothing for the
first few years. He sleeps on the floor, with straw for a bed, and he
occupies houses twenty-four to a room--which is the actual report in
foreign quarters in the north end of Winnipeg. Your Canadian requires
a house of six rooms for a family of six. When your foreigner has
accumulated a little capital he buys land or a city tenement. Your
Canadian educates his children, clothes them a little better, moves
into a better house. When the foreigner buys a block, he moves his
whole family into one room in the basement and does the janitor and
scrubbing and heating work himself or forces his women to do it for
him. When the Canadian buys a block, he hires a janitor, an engineer,
a scrub woman, and if he moves into the block, he takes one of the best
apartments. It does not take any guessing to know which of these two
will buy a second block first--especially if the foreigner lives on
peanuts and beer, and the Canadian on beefsteak and fresh fruit. Nor
does it take any guessing to know which type stands for the higher
citizenship--which will make toward the better nation.
IV
The question is--will Canada remain Canada when these new races come up
to power? And Canada need not hoot that question; or gather her skirts
self-righteously and exclusively about her and pass by on the other
side. The United States did that, and to-day certain sections of the
foreign vote are powerful enough to dictate to the President.
Take a little closer look at facts!
Foreigners have never been rushed into Canada as cheap labor to
displace the native born, so they have not, as in great American
industrial centers, lowered the standard of living for Canadians. They
have come attracted by two magnets that give them great power: (1)
wages so high they can save; (2) land absolutely free but for the
ten-dollar preemption fee.
In 1881 there were six hundred and sixty-seven Jews in Canada.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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