The Canadian Commonwealth Part 12

CHAPTER XII

SOME INDUSTRIAL PROBLEMS

I

The contest between capital and labor in Canada has never become that armed camp divided by a chasm of hatred known in other lands. This for two reasons: First, the labor of yesterday is the capital of to-day, and the labor of to-day is the capital of to-morrow. Second, from the very nature of Canada's greatest wealth--agricultural lands--the substantial proportion of the population consists of land owners, vested righters, respecters of property interests because they themselves are property holders. The city dweller in Canada has been from the very nature of things the anachronism, the anomaly, the parasite, the extraneous outgrowth on the main body of production.

To take the first reason why capital and labor has not been divided in hostile camps in Canada, because the labor of yesterday is the capital of to-day--I am not dealing with speculative arguments and opinions. I am trying to set down facts. The owner of the largest fortune west of the Rocky Mountains in Canada began life with a pick and shovel. The owner of the richest timber limits in British Columbia began at a dollar and twenty-five cents a day piling slabs. The wealthiest meat packer east of the Rocky Mountains was "bucking" and "breaking"

bronchoes thirty years ago at twenty-five dollars a month. The packer who comes next to him in wealth began life in Pt. Douglas, Winnipeg, loading frozen hogs. The richest newspaper man in Canada began life so poor that he and his father hauled the first editions of their paper to customers on a hand sled. The four men who are to-day the greatest powers in the railroad world of the Dominion began life, one as a stone mason, another as a lumber-jack, a third as a store keeper, a fourth as a telegraph operator. I do not think I am wrong in saying that the richest wholesaler in Canada reached the scene of his present activities with his entire earthly possessions in a pocket handkerchief and a tin lunch pail. Of two of the most powerful men who ever came out of the maritime provinces, one swept a village store for his living at a dollar and fifty cents a week; another reached St. John, New Brunswick, from his home in the backwoods, dressed in a home-made suit, which his mother had spun and carded from their own wool. The fact that the door of opportunity is open to the talented tends to prevent the opening of a chasm of hatred between capital and labor, though it must be admitted that the warfare of capital and labor in the States was developing in the era when Rockefeller and Carnegie were lifting themselves from penury to the heights of financial power.

Infinitely more important is the second reason. For a long time at least the stanchest, strongest and stablest part of Canada's people must be rooted to the soil. Up to the present half her population has been rural, and less than three per cent. absorbed by the factory, the railway, the labor union. Of her population of 7,800,000, only 176,000 workers belong to labor organizations, and ninety per cent. of these have never been on strike. These figures alone explain why cla.s.s hatred has never widened into a chasm dividing society in Canada.

Why Big Business has never dominated government in Canada will be dealt with in a later chapter, but if Big Business can not violate law with impunity at one end of the social scale, it may be safely said that anarchy will never violate law at the other end of the scale.

At the same time there are symptoms appearing in the industrial conditions of Canada as gravely dangerous as anything in her immigration problems. These need only be stated to be apparent. Where wages have increased only ten per cent. in a decade, the cost of living has increased fifty-one per cent.--according to an official commission appointed by the Ottawa government to report. Though Canada is an agricultural country, in food products alone, she pays ten million dollars duty yearly. In one farming province ten million dollars'

worth of food is yearly imported. Why is this? Why is Canada not producing all the food she consumes? Because in certain sections only one settler goes out to the farm for four that live in the town.

In the West, if you add up the population of all the cities, you will find that one-fourth as many people live in the cities as in the country. In one province you will find that out of half a million population, three hundred thousand are living in cities and towns.

This is the province that imports such quant.i.ties of food. It is also the province that has more labor trouble than all the other sections of the Dominion put together. Demagogues harangue the city squares for "the right to work," "the right to live;" and mill owners, farmers, ranchers, railway builders go bankrupt for lack of men to work. It is the province where the highest wages in the world are paid for every form of labor. It is also the province where the greatest number of people are idle, and neither you nor I nor anybody else, can convince the idle stone mason who demands eight dollars a day that he keeps himself idle by not accepting half that figure. He is not dealing with "the robber baron" capitalistic cla.s.s. He is dealing with the humble householder who wants to build but can not afford workmen at eight dollars to five dollars a day, when he could afford workmen at four dollars to a dollar and fifty cents a day.

In 1800 only four per cent. of the United States population was urban, and ninety-six per cent. was rural. By 1910 only fifty-three per cent.

of the population was rural. Similarly of France and Great Britain.

Sixty-five per cent. of France's population is rural, and France is prosperous, and her people are the thriftiest and most saving in the world. They with their tiny savings are the world's bankers. In the United Kingdom, the rural population has decreased from twenty-eight per cent. to twenty-three per cent. of the total population. How about Canada? In 1891 thirty-two per cent. of Canada's people lived in towns and cities. By 1901 thirty-eight per cent. were town dwellers. By 1914 the proportion in towns and cities is almost fifty per cent.

The entire movement of population from country to city is reflected in the astounding growth of the cities. In 1800 Montreal had a population of seven thousand; in 1850, sixty thousand; by 1914, almost half a million. Similarly of Toronto, of Winnipeg, of Vancouver. From nothing in 1800, these cities have grown to metropolitan centers of three hundred thousand, and their growth is the subject of fevered civic pride. It ought to be cause of gravest alarm. In the history of the world, when men began to hive in a crowded cave life, those nations began to decline. The results are always the same--an extortionate rise in the cost of food, the long bread line, charity where there ought to be labor and thrift, food riots, terrible tragic contrasts of the very rich and the very poor, all the vices that go with crowded housing. When charity workers investigated in Toronto and Montreal and Winnipeg, they found foreigners living forty-three in five rooms, twenty-four and fifteen and ten in one. Wherever such proportions exist as to rural and urban population, ground rentals and values ascend in price like overheated mercury. Men begin to build perpendicularly instead of lat.i.tudinally. The cave life of the skysc.r.a.per takes the place of the trim home garden, and so greed of gain--interest on extortionate real estate values--takes its toll of human life and virtue, clean living and clean thinking. In one section of Canada during ten years, where there had been an increase of 574,878 in the country population, there was an increase of 1,258,645 in the city population. Between 1901 and 1911, where 39,951 newcomers settled in the country districts of Quebec, 313,863 settled in the cities. For one who chose life in the open, eight chose the tenement and the sweatshop. In 1901 Canada had 3,349,516 people living in the country, and 2,021,799 living in the cities. By 1911 there were 3,924,394 living in the country, and 3,280,440 living in the cities.

All this signifies but one thing to Canada--a swift transition from agricultural status to industrial life; and whether such an artificial transition bodes good or ill for a land whose greatest wealth lies in forest and mine and farm remains to be seen. For the time it has resulted in a cost of living almost prohibitive to the very poor. The sweatshop, the tenement, the Ghetto, the cave life hovel of Europe have been reproduced in the crowded foreign quarters of Canadian cities. It means more than physical deterioration and moral contamination and degeneration of national stamina. It means if Canada is to become a great manufacturing country, feeding the human into the hopper of the machine that dividends may pour out, then she, the youngest of the nations, must compete against the oldest and the strongest--Germany, England, France, the United States; but if she is to be a great agricultural country, then she has few peers in the whole world.

Neither need she have any fear. The nations of the world must come to her, as they went down to Egypt, for bread. The man on his own land, be his work good or ill owns his own labor and takes profit or loss from it and can blame no one but himself for that profit or loss. With the renting out of a man's labor to some other man for that other man's profit or loss come all the discontent and cla.s.s strife of industrial warfare. Of industrial strife, of labor riots, of syndicalism, of social revolution, of the few plundering the many, and the many threatening reprisal in the form of legislation for the many to plunder the few--of this dog-eat-dog, internecine industrial strife--Canada has. .h.i.therto known next to nothing; but she is at the parting of the ways.

The day that a preponderance of her population becomes urban instead of rural, that day a preponderance of her population must ask leave to live from some other man--must ask leave to work for some other man, must ask leave to put the collar of the industrial serf on the neck as the sign of labor owned by some other man. That day the preponderance of Canada's population will cease owning their own vested rights and will begin attacking the vested rights of other men. That day plutocracy will begin plundering democracy, and the unfit will begin plundering the fit, and the many will demand the same rewards as the few, not by winning those rewards and rising to the plane of the few, but by expropriating those rewards and pulling the few down to the level of the many. To me it means the sickling over a robust nationhood with the yellowing hue of a dollar democracy, the yellowing hue of gnas.h.i.+ng social jealousy, the yellowing hue of moral putridity and decadence and rot. Hitherto every man has stood on his own legs in Canada. There has been no weak-kneed, puling greedy mob bellowing for pap from the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a state treasury--demanding the rewards of industry and thrift which they have been too weak and s.h.i.+ftless and useless to earn. But Canada is at the parting of the ways. The day more men live in the cities demanding food than live on the soil producing it--which G.o.d forfend--that day Canada goes down in the welter of industrial war and social upheaval.

Hitherto no statesman has arisen in Canada who remotely sensed the impending evil, much less made an effort to avert the doom that has come like a cloud above the well-being of every modern country. The man who makes it a national policy in Canada to attract the settler to the soil rather than to the city hovel will in the future annals of this great nation be rated above a Napoleon or a Bismarck.[1] This to me is the crux of the very greatest and most acute problem confronting the Dominion's future destiny.

II

In a country where organized labor numbers only 176,000 out of 7,800,000, labor problems can hardly be set down as acute. They do not split society asunder as they do elsewhere. I am glad of it. I am glad that in Canada up to the present labor is only capital in the inchoate. I should be sorry if the day ever came when labor was the serf, and capital the robber baron, as--let us frankly acknowledge--it is elsewhere.

In this connection three points should be emphasized. Whether they should be praised or blamed I do not know; but the points are these:

The Senate in Canada being appointed for life has acted as a breakwater of adamant and reinforced concrete against all labor or capital legislation that has arisen from the pa.s.sions of the moment. More than once when labor or capital, holding the whip handle in the Commons, would have forced through hasty legislation as to compensation, as to liability, as to non-liability--the leaders in the Commons have said frankly in caucus to the Senate: We are dependent on the vote for our places here. You are not. We are letting this fool bill through, but we are letting it through because we know you will kill it. Kill it!

In the next place, "the twilight zone" between federal and provincial power in matters of labor has proved an unmitigated curse. When the syndicalists of Europe, known in America as the Industrial Workers of the World, succeeded in tying up railroad construction and almost ruining the contractors of two transcontinental systems in British Columbia a few years ago, endless delay in terminating an impossible situation occurred through the province trying to throw the burden of dealing with the matter on the Dominion, and the Dominion trying to throw the burden on the province. Both province and Dominion were afraid of the labor vote. The losses caused during that three months'

strike in the construction camps indirectly afterward fell on the Canadian people; for the embarra.s.sed transcontinentals had to come to the Dominion government for aid; and the Dominion government is, after all, the people.

"I pray G.o.d," said a Cabinet Minister in Ottawa to me at the time, "that Imperial Federation may never come; if it adds to our woes another 'twilight zone' as to Dominion and Imperial powers."

III

It seems almost ungracious in this connection to say that Canada's far-famed Arbitration Act has been overrated. That it has accomplished some good and settled many controversies no reasonable person will deny, but it is not a panacea for all ills.

Here is the difficulty as to arbitration. It is not unlike the situation of Belgium regarding Germany in the great war. Arbitration depends on "a sc.r.a.p of paper." What if some one tears up "the sc.r.a.p of paper"? What if one side says there is nothing to arbitrate? Twenty years ago--yes--wages, hours, conditions of labor--could have been arbitrated; but to-day the contest in the industrial world is often not for wages and hours of labor.

"Demand three dollars a day for an eight-hour day, to-day," I heard an Industrial Worker of the World shout in a Vancouver strike. "Demand four dollars a day to-morrow, till you secure four dollars a day for a four-hour day--till your ascending wages expropriate capital--take over capital and all industry to be operated for labor."

In the great struggle between the railroads and the I. W. W.'s in British Columbia, Canada's Arbitration Act fell down hopelessly simply because there was nothing to arbitrate. Labor said: We shall paralyze all industry, or operate all industry for labor's profit solely.

Capital said--you shall not. There the two tied in deadlock for months, and there all arbitration acts must often tie in deadlock in industrial warfare. That is why I hope industrial warfare will never become a part of Canada's national life. That is why I hope and pray every Canadian settler will become a vested righter by owning and operating his own acres till Death lays him in G.o.d's Acre.

IV

In a country where the public debt is only $350,000,000 or forty-five dollars per head, and the national income is $1,500,000,000 from farm, factory, forest and mine--or two hundred dollars per head and that fairly well distributed--for the present there is little to fear of social revolution. It is not the social revolution that I fear for Canada. It is the canker of social hate and jealousy preceding revolution. If fifty per cent. of the population can be kept owning and operating their own land, that social canker will never infect Canada's national life as a whole.

[1] Thomas Jefferson desired such a rural future for the United States and deplored the day of cities and industrialism. It came, nevertheless.--THE EDITOR.

CHAPTER XIII

HOW GOVERNED

I

Reference has been made to the facts that Big Business has up to the present been unable to get control of the reins of government in Canada, that the courts have been kept comparatively free of political influence and that the doors of underground politics are not easily pried open by corruption. Why is this? Canadians would fain take unction to themselves that it is owing to their superior national integrity, but this is nonsense.

Exuberant forest growth is always characterized by some fungus and dry rot. How has Canada escaped so much of this fungus excrescence of representative government? To get at the reason for this it is necessary to trace back for a little s.p.a.ce the historic growth of Canada's form of government. We speak of Canada's const.i.tution being the British North America Act. As a matter of fact, Canada's const.i.tution is more than an act--more than a dry and hard and inflexible formula to which growth must conform. Rather than plaster cast into which growing life must fit itself, Canada's const.i.tution is a living organism evolved from her own mistakes and struggles of the past and her own needs as to the present.

Canada's const.i.tution is not some pocket formula which some doctrinaire--with apologies to France--has whipped out of his pocket to remedy all ills. Canada's const.i.tution is like the scientific data of empirical medicine; it is the result of centuries' experiments, none the less scientific because unconscious.

One need not trace the growth of government to the days prior to English rule. When England took over Canada by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the main thing to remember is that the French-Canadian was guaranteed the free exercise of his religion. This--and not innate loyalty to an alien government--was the real reason for Quebec refusing to cast in her lot with the revolting American colonies. This was the reason for Quebec remaining stanch in the War of 1812, and this is the reason for Quebec to-day standing a solid unit against annexation. We must not forget what a high emissary from Rome once jocularly said of a religious quarrel in Canada--Quebec was more Catholic than the Pope.

Following the military regime of the Conquest came the Quebec Act of 1774.--Please note, contemporaneous with the uprising of the American colonies, Canada is given her first const.i.tution. The Governor and legislative council are to be appointed by the Crown, and full freedom of wors.h.i.+p is guaranteed. French civil law and English criminal law are established; and the Church is confirmed in its t.i.tle to ecclesiastical property--which was right when you consider that the foundations of the Church in Quebec are laid in the blood of martyrs. Just here intervenes the element which compelled the reshaping of Canada's destiny. When the American colonies gained their independence, there came across the border to what are now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and Ontario some forty thousand Loyalists mainly from New England and the South. These Loyalists, of course, refused to be dominated by French rule; so the Const.i.tutional Act was pa.s.sed in 1791 by the Imperial Parliament. The people of Canada were represented for the first time in an a.s.sembly elected by themselves, The Governor-General for Quebec--Lower Canada--and the Lieutenant-Governor for Ontario--Upper Canada--were both appointed by the Crown. The Executive, or Cabinet, was chosen by the Governor. The weakness of the new system was glaringly apparent on the surface. While the a.s.sembly was elected in each province by the people, the a.s.sembly had no direct control over the Executive. Downing Street, England, chose the Governors; and the Governors chose their own junta of advisers; and all the abuses of the Family Compact arose, which led to the Rebellion of '37 under William Lyon MacKenzie in Ontario and Louis Papineau in Quebec.

Judges at this time sat in both Houses, and Canada learned the bitter lesson of keeping her judiciary out of politics. As the power of appointment rested exclusively with the Governor and his circle, it can be believed that the French of Quebec suffered disabilities and prejudice.

Hopelessly at sea as to the cause of the continual unrest in her colonies and undoubtedly sad from the loss of her American possessions, England now sent out a commissioner to investigate the trouble; and it is to the findings of this commissioner that the United Kingdom has since owed her world-wide success in governing people by letting them govern themselves.

People sometimes ask why England has been so successful in governing one-fifth of the habitable globe. She does not govern one-fifth the habitable globe. She lets much of it govern itself; and it was Lord Durham, coming out as Governor-General and high commissioner at this time, who laid the foundations of England's success in colonizing. His report has been the Magna Charta and Declaration of Independence of the self-governing colonies of the British Empire.

First of all, government must be entrusted to the house representing the people. Second, the granting of moneys must be controlled by those paying the taxes. Third, the Executive must be responsible not only to the Crown but to the representatives of the people. It is here the Canadian system differs from the American. The Secretary, or Cabinet Minister, can not hold office one day under the disapproval of the House, no matter what his tenure of office.

The Act of 1840 resulted from Durham's report. Upper and Lower Canada were united under one government--which was really the forerunner of confederation in '67. The House was given exclusive control of taxation and expenditure. Nothing awakened Canada so acutely to the necessity of federating all British North America as the Civil War in the United States, when the States Right party fought to secede. Red River and British Columbia had become peopled. The maritime provinces settled by French from Quebec and New England Loyalists were alien in thought from Upper and Lower Canada. The cry "54-40 or fight," the setting up of a provisional government by Oregon, the Riel Rebellion in Manitoba, the rush of California gold miners to Cariboo--all were straws in a restless wind blowing Canada's destiny hither and whither. Confederation was not a pocket theory. It was a result born of necessity, and the main principles of confederation embodied in the British North America Act had been foreshadowed in Durham's report. Durham himself suffered the fate of too many of the world's great. He had come out to Canada to settle a bitter dispute between the little oligarchy round the royal Governor and the people. He sided with neither and was abjured by both. The sentences against the patriots he had set aside or softened. The royalists he condemned but did not punish. Both sides poured charges against Durham into the office of the Colonial Secretary in England, Durham died of a broken heart, but his report laid the foundation of England's future colonial policy.

II

By the British North America Act of 1867, pa.s.sed by the Imperial Parliament, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick came into the Union. Later Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories and British Columbia joined. Up to the present Newfoundland has stood aside. Under the British North America Act, Canada is ruled to-day.

There is first the Imperial government represented by a Governor-General.

The commandant of Canada's regular militia is also an Imperial officer.