MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12955, 26 August 1905, Page 1 (Supplement)

MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

No. 111. WHAT AN AUSTRALIAN SEES IN CANADA. BY W. IT. WTCIIBOT. An Australian, wandering across Canada, finds himself somehow least impressed by the very tilings of which Canadians are apt to be most proud. The scale of the Canadian map, for example, does not impress him, .Men; geographical bigness has no magic for the Australian; he is too familiar with it. And he knows in addition that the map of Canada is in a sense a fraud. Nearly one-half of it represents uninhabitable territory. Nor is he impressed by the architectural glories of the Dominion. It is true that the Parliamentary Buildings at Ottawa and the Town Hall at Toronto are noble examples of the architect's art, .surpassing anything to be found in Australia. But, on the other hand, the general type of buildings in Canada is commonplace; and over vast areas it tapers down to an unadorned crudity which to the Australian seems shocking. Canadian railways, again, are of strangely mixed qualities. Canada has in the C.P.R. probably the best-managed private railway in the world, but its own State-owned railway supplies the example of a line whose unprofitable performances sink below the lowest depths of even Australian railway failures. Canada is in many respect a country of paradoxes.

CANADA'S SECRET. The one broad, unmistakable, and most enviable fact about Canada at the present moment is its prosperity. This is written not merely on the landscape of the prairies and on the aspect of busy cities—it is written on the faces of the people. The thrill of it seems to be' in the very atmosphere. It is a prosperity conscious of its own existence and certain of its own future. "The wprid at large has discovered Canada," said Sir Wilfrid Laurier to the present writer in explanation of the new wave of Canadian prosperity. It is perhaps a- truer explanation to say that Canada, has discovered itself. It las awakened to a sense of its own resources. It has grown .suddenly and evenly exultantly self-confident. Some elements of Canadian prosperity are found, of course, in the gifts of Nature; but others are of human creation. It is a. happy accident for Canada that it is so near the great markets of the world and the overcrowded lands whence emigrants are swarming. It costs only £8 to take a farm labourer from Hampshire or from Ayrshire to Winnipeg. And the Canadians are making the most of these great natural opportunities. They have wit enough to understand 'that each new citizen is a new asset. So the culture of immigration has become for Canada almost more than an art. It is a science! And the- new population brought with .so much cam and energy into Canada is wisely distributed. The immigrants arc turned at once into producers. So Canadian .society has its roots in the kindly soil. It is a community with an agricultural basis. It is a land of broad farms rather than crowded cities.

Nothing is more, striking than the contrast betwixt Canada, and Australia at this point. The population of Sydney in 1903 was 511.030; that of Melbourne was 501,460. More than two-fifths of the whole population of Victoria, in a word, is found in .Melbourne. There is no other example of what may be called city congestion in the civilised world. But Montreal has only 266,826 inhabitants. Toronto has only 207,971. Toronto, that is —the capital of a province with almost double the population of Victoria less than half the population of Melbourne, The wider distribution of Canadian population is reflected happily in its politics. It does not offer the spectacle of single and separately organised class trying to capture the Parliaments and reshape society for its own ends. There is only one " Labour" representative in the. Dominion Parliament; and the vast mass of prosperous farmers (owning the lauds they plough), which lies at the basis of Canadian■■ society, makes it certain that Labour politics of the socialistic type will never flourish under Canadian skies. DEEP RACK DIVISIONS. But when the Australian visitor has sufficiently admired the. varied, deeprooted, and quick-growing prosperity of Canada, he begins to study the great twin fact of the, Canadian Dominion— the division of its population, Of its 6,000,000 people one-fourth are Frenchmen of the most persistent a.nd characteristic type. There are, it is calculated, another million and a-half people of French blood in the United States; but these have melted into the general population. In Canada we have the spectacle of one and a-half million French people dwelling together, undigested and unassimilated; and this is a, fact over which a. philosopher might dwell with very mingled feelings. There is one aspect of this fact which is complimentary to the British character. The freest, happiest, least burdened, and most contented" liit of "France"—-of living France—owes allegiance, not to President Loubet but to King Edward VII. It is not to be found beneath the tricolor but under the Union Jack. It illustrates the half-unconscious but stubborn independence of the typical Briton that not half a million people of Hie British stock can be found anywhere except under their own flag, and where their own speech is used ; and this though the English are the great wandering race of the modern world. But one and a-half million Frenchmen dwell in Canada; and, "if they were offered the choice of being dumped down in sunny Frame itself— say, in their native Brittany or Normandy they would energetically refuse the proposal.' For they certainly have lighter taxes, easier lives, a larger freedom, and a, more complete security for everything they hold sacred or precious under the British, flag than they could have, in Franco itself. There is no conscription in Canada and no revolution on the banks of tho St. Lawrence! No law for the dis- : solution of monasteries or for the shutting up of clerical schools is possible. These French Canadians plough their hinds in peace. Their taxes arc absurdly light. They have their own newspapers and schools. Their priests manage their affairs for them, They arrange their marriages, regulate their politics, fetich their children, choose their literature, and levy their own tithes, if necessary by process of civil law. And these one and a-half millions of Frenchmen enjoy the whole process; for these are Frenchmen of tin.) Bourbon times and type. They represent the one bit of successful emigration on a, large scale France has ever known. They came to Canada early in the seventeenth century with their priests and their seigneurs, and they settled together on half feudal terms. The Bourbons have gone. The seigneurs have been bought out. The red flag of England has taken the place of the white lilies of France.. But these little clusters of French immigrants have grown till they cover a, province; and the Church remains and rules them as absolutely as it ruled French peasants in the days of, say, Louis XIV. WHY THE RACES DO NOT UNITE.

The one notable, and puzzling thing about these Frenchmen in Canada is their curious scpai'ateue.ss. This is obstinate, conscious, and deliberate. They do not melt into the general population, and do not mean to do so. A hundred and fifty years after Hastings Normans and Saxons "had become one people. But a. hundred and fifty years after the capture of Quebec and the Treaty of Paris the French in Canada are as little British as if they had never left their native villages. They dwell together. They speak' their own language, and have their own schools and

newspapers, There are no inter-marriages with the rest of the population, and scarcely any intercourse. They grow fast; tor that curious shrinkage of the birth-rate which is the menace of modern France does not in the least apply to these transplanted French folk. They marry early, and the .scale of their families is a proverb throughout Canada. They do not move on to fresh districts, but they buy out or push out from their province settlers alien in race and faith to themselves. There are towns in lower Canada which twenty-live years ago were at least halfBritish and Protestant; to-day they are wholly French and Catholic. And these French are conscious of their separateness. They value it. They are jealous of it. They fly the tricolor on fete days as well as the Union Jack. They resent the suggestion that they may ever melt into the general, population. All the precedents of history seem to fail in their case. Time somehow has lost its unifying power. Under a common system of government, within the same geographical bounds, in the enjoyment of the same liberties, yet somehow the races remain as separate as oil. and water.

THE SEPARATING FORCE. And the one separating force, by universal consent', is the Roman Catholic Church. Sir Wilfrid Lauder 'himself, the frankest of men, admits this. " I am," he said to the present writer, "a Roman Catholic; but my faith in the doctrines of my Church does not mean that I accept all its ecclesiastical policy. And it is part of the policy of the Church to keep the French separate. The policy is nob courageous or noble. The faith that must be kept under a glass shade jo order to save, it from perishing is hardly of a robust type. But the policy oi the Roman Catholic Church in Canada is intelligible enough. The ... eaty of Paris guaranteed the French freedom iu the practice of their religion "as far as is consistent with British law;" but the "British law" for the French Canadian means that enacted by trie Provincial Parliament, which is itself French and Catholic almost completely. So the Roman Catholic Church enjoys privileges and rights in this little patch of the British Empire such as it does not possess in Italy or Spain. Church property is untaxed. The schools of the province are managed completely by clerical boards. The priests have the rights of tithing over their own Hocks, and (lie tithe is a civil debt, and can be enforced in the Civil Courts. It takes precedence over local taxes. In no other civilised land, in a word, can there be found so complete an example of the authority of the priests over their flocks— an authority which belongs almost to mediaeval times—such as exists in French Canada. And it is natural that the Church of Rome should seek to make the Hock, like the bride in Solomon's song, "a garden enclosed," and this is done by deliberate and sustained policy and with complete success. WILD DREAMS. Are these French Canadians loyal? This is a question of supreme concern, and the answer to it depends upon the sense attached to the word "loyalty." They are loyal to Canada. They do not want to see the tricolor or the Stars and Stripes Ily over Quebec. They know that of all who speak the French tongue they arc under the most enviable political conditions. But the roots of loyally that strike so deep in the heart of the Briton—pride of race and of history, the sense of common blood, the lie of common speech—-do not exist in the Canadian French. it would be unreasonable to expect them to exist. '

Would these Canadian French light for the British flag? They would not fight for it, it may be suspected, as a Hag. It was not Sir Wilfrid Laurier who sent the Canadian contingents to South Africa, but a wave of patriotic sentiment throughout non-French Canada which would have swept Sir Wilfrid Laurier out of political existence if he had resisted it. And there were not many Frenchmen in the, contingents, The largerminded French Canadians— like Sir Wilfrid Laurier and his colleagues in the Dominion Government—have, no doubt, a sense of the Empire as a whole, and would fight in any battle which seriously threatened it. But for the average French Canadian the political horizon is very narrow. He has, it may lie suspected, no loyalty" beyond his own province. Some of the younger French Canadians have, indeed, strange dreams. They cherish visions of an independent French State on the St. Lawrence, with Quebec as its capital! lias not Great Britain shown herself even carelessly magnanimous in regard to its ouilying provinces? Twice in the last century, after capturing the Cape, she gave it back to the Dutch." The French West, Indies arc a British gift. Java is under the Dutch flag by the same title. Great, Britain gave the lonian Islands back to Greece. Would she lire a shot to keep, say, Australia or Canada itself under the British ilag'.' Would sue send another licet up the SI. Lawrence and light another battle on the plains of Abraham to keep Quebec a. British province? Perhaps not. But it is grimly certain Canada would! Only a tiny and noisy section of the French Canadians, as a mallei' of fact, cherish any illusion about an independent French State on the Si. Lawrence, and the dream is a- lunacy. -Bui if exists, and it is an ugly fact in Canadian politics. But it is hardly a, good service which the Church of Pome renders to the Umpire or to Canada, oi even to the French Canadians themselves, iu keeping them thus separate. They are inevitably and for all lime within the circle of the Empire. They share its citizenship. They are guarded by its Hag. Why should the separating lines of race and speech be kept so carefully and sharply in evidence? But though wise men will regret the separafeness of the Canadian French they need not wonder at it. Suppose that, alter Hastings, Normans and Saxons had been parted by some profound difference of religious faith; that the Normans, say, had been Roman Catholics and the Saxons convinced and evangelical Protestants, or vice versa! Here would have been a separating force whoso effects would be visible to-day. Tiff; PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself, the Prime Minister of Canada, is a very interesting study. The present writer bad the choice between a chat, with President Roosevelt and lunching with Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and he deliberately chose the Canadian, lie is a real factor ill the, politics of the British Empire. His face is not combative; it is not the face of an enthusiast, or of a, man of action. It suggests rathei the face of a French professor, studious, abstracted, refilled; a little bit weary of wrestling with human stupidity. From the forehead a ridge of shining baldness runs back over the skull, leaving a thick pad of hair on cither side. The face is thin, pallid, deeply scribbled over with a network of line lines, the general effect, being thai id' a. slightly overtaxed gentleness. Sir-Wilfrid.Laurier has an exquisite courtesy of manner. His voice is soft, his English is easy and perfect. But his syllables have the care and finish of a, man who is speaking iu what is not his mother tongue. With all his apparent simplicity of manner Sir Wilfrid has the skill of a great diplomatist. He is said to have great gifts of mellifluous, if not of magnetic, speech; bill lie is hardly rich-blooded enough for a great orator. It cannot be said that his name is linked to any great and historyshaping measures. He is not a. leader after Chatham's type; an administrator of Palmerston's temper; debater of Chamberlain's edge and force. There is not enough iron in his blood or in his temper to rule in stormy times. But his charm of manner is a real force. tie represents admirably what may be called the decorative side of politics. Be always says the right thing, and says it at Ihe right moment and in the right way. There is nothing sordid about him, and he happily symbolises that federal of races which, enough It is not yet a, Jiving union, is the ultimate fact in Canadian politics. His air of gently bored and overtaxed patience suggests the question whether Sir Wilfrid Laurier regrets having devoted himself to political life, and he frankly says "Yes;" sometimes at least he regrets his vocation, lint Sir Wilfrid Banner's regrets have not the depth of Burke's bitter saying, "What shadows we are. and what shadows we pursue." Sir Wilfrid Laurier's indictment of public life is that it; is hard work, has few prizes, and leaves a, man at the end of his career quite certainly poor and almost cwijiia to be forcoftes