MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1746, 23 August 1905, Page 9

MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

r (By W. H. Fitchett.)

No. n.

{All. Rights Reserved.) WHAT AN AUSTRALIAN SEES IN CANADA. Some features of Western Canada, of which Canadians themselves seem most unconscious, are exactly those which most strike a visitor. Vauc. uver, foi example, has a climate winch, to the newly-landed Australian is a 'surprise. It is in open quarrel with its latitude. This is due to the great Japan current which flows along the coastline, and has Upon that edge of the American Continent the office the' Gulf Stream has on the south of Ireland. The result as far as Vancouver is concerned, is most singular. The running up from Cape Flattery to Vancouver itself, is like a Norwegian fiord, slightly flattened out; or what Sydney harbour would be if drawn out in an irregular and curving line 130 miles long. The' waters of the Sound immediately opposite Vancouver, as seen in the early morning, resemble those which sleep round Venice. They are calm as a mirror, softened with a faint haze of mist. A casual boat, a ship riding at anchor, seen through it has an absolutely fairy-like effect. But on the warm, level, haze-softened waters look down great hills that might 'have been plucked from the heart of the Swiss Alps. Their lower slopes are clad with pine forests, their peaks are silverwhite with snows. It is this combination of a certain Italian softness of air and sleepy calm of mirror-like waters, with the rugged grandeur of the frowning, high-lifted, white-peaked hills which make® the charm of Vancouver.

THROUGH A CARRIAGE WINDOW

But Vancouver itself is, after all, only the preface to what may he described as a sort of illuminated volume of natural beauty. The great C.P.R. line running through the Rockies from Vancouver to Calgary, a distance of nearly 650 miles, is, perhaps, the most wonderful railway journey in the world. It would be idle and as tedious as idle, to attempt any serious description of the scenery. To translate the glory of rushing river and shadowy canyon, of black forests and skypiercing peaks into literary terms is a feat which no one with- any sense of the limits and imperfections of human language will attempt. But there is one stretch of mountain scenery near Donald of special charm. For more than thirty miles the line runs parallel with the Selkirks. These are not a connected mountain range, but a series—or rather a procession—of huge and pyramidal hills almost equidistant from each other. They are in outline and position as separate as so many pillars; but their unifoam height and the regular intervals betwixt them give the effect of a great parade of granite and snow-clad giants. They are exactly at the distance from the line which makes the spectacular effect perfect. In the foreground—and in places close to the line—is the river, its waters a moving ribbon of deepest green. Then comes the foreground of black pine forest, running, a vast leafy floor, to the foothills'. The lower half of the mountains is black, too-; but distance, or some vapour in the air, creates a -bluish haze, which makes the great bills along their bases literally a blueblack, while their peaks are white with snow, white with the keen lustre of frosted silver.

And so from Bear Greek to the beginning of Kicking Horse Canyon, this great chain of sentinel hills stretches, •with a colour effect which ranges from blue-black to dazzling white; and all this is set against a background of clearest azure. t

Banff ~ls one of the pleasure resorts of the Rockies, and for its varied charms might challenge any rival on the Continent. The great hotel has in it the luxuries, and the perfect service only to be expected in crowded cities; but it is set in a framework of rugged and snow-cap-ped mountains. Two rivers, the Bow and the Spray, meet just beneath the window of the great dining-room, and from the hotel balcony one cannot look in any direction— east, west, north, or south—without seeing some white peak high in the blue depths of the sky. And these stern, far-withdrawn heights that wear siuch an aspect of unchanging majesty are found, as a matter of fact, to yield colour effects that change with every change of weather. A snowstorm sweeps through the valley; the air is filled with confused and eddying flakes of white. In an hour the storm is over; the air is still, the sky is clear. And lo! the storm has had upon every mountain peak the effect that a touch of chamois leather has upon silver. They have a new and glittering whiteness. The very air has a new purity, and every feature of the hills, black pines, naked granite, frosted white of snows — all seem to be nearer. Peaks that have hitherto cheated the sight show like halfseen ghosts over tho shoulders of the nearer bills.

At sunset, again, the white peaks glow with crimson caught from the sun lying low nn the hoviimi. The-changing colour

effects of the hills are past description. And all this to Australian eyes, familiar with the dull grey-green of Australian forests, the brown of Australian plains, the clear, level, sealike curve of Australian horizons, has a charm past speech. It only needs a swifter seaservice, bringing all these wild and matchless landscapes within say fifteen days’ sail of Sydney, to make Western Canada the great pleasure ground of the Pacific. A PAINTLESS LAND. But from the rugged majesty of the Rockies, with their Turneresque effects of light and shade, of height and depth, the traveller suddenly falls to the brown monotony of the prairies; and the descent in an ai'tistic sense is very “steep.” The prairies are absolutely treeless; and the vast level floor running almost without an undulation to the horizon has a sea-like effect. These huge plains are still pitted with “wallows,” they are faintly scored with the tracks along which for centuries the long files of buffalo herds have crossed from pasture to pasture. But they are now potential wheat fields, on which food for entire nations can be grown. A whole new community is visibly coming into existence on them; and, sitting in the railway "carriage, one can watch the whole process. Here are villages, towns, cities —all, so to speak, in the germ. Here, set in stages contemporaneous in point of time, but separated from each other by certain miles of space, are all the steps in the evolution of a western city. Its earliest stage consists of a windowless • store of unpainted pine boards, with a rough stable beside it. There are a few piles of cut timber; a few checquers of ploughed laud, with, no sign of a fence; two or three shanties, which do not seem on speaking terms with each other. In the foreground, flung at intervals from the passing train, are the entire domestic effects of such of the settlers as have reached the spot. Any one pile may be taken as a sample of all the rest. There is a stove, a “ table, a tench, or a couple of chairs, a grindstone, a battered looking chest, half a dozen coils of barbed wire, a few bundles of pointed stakes. The live stock is represented by a group of long-legged fowls or by a stray pig or two temporarily imprisoned on a triangle of three hurdles. Beside the scattered heap—collected apparently from secondhand furniture shops —is a cart with a tarpaulin thrown over it, which serves as a temporary homo for the settler and his wife. All this is the rough germ out of which will come to-morrow a huddle of shanties; then a village ; next a town.

As the train runs on, it passes through towns in a more advanced stage of development, and Winnipeg comes at last; the raw, crude, but giant capital of a wheat kingdom. But the whole landscape, human and • agricultural, is singularly destitute of any line of grace. The houses are unpainted shanties, usually of two; rooms each, sprinkled at irregular intervals over the measureless and treeless plains. The towns are huddles of such shanties, with a few big stores towering above their low roofs. As the older settled lands a/re readied the shanties grow into two stories; but the “shanty” effect remains. Paint, either as a decorative or as a preservative is almost unknown in Western Canada. The traveller is assured that there is a wonderful amount of prosperity hidden beneath the rough and unlovely surface of things, but never was prosperity so effectually disguised. It puts on all the airs of poverty. It is as unadorned as beggary itself. Speaking generally, no settler thinks of planting a tree near his house, or of growing a cabbage, still less a rose. The roads are streaks of mud which in winter would he absolutely impassable but for a temperature of 20 degrees below zero, which freezes them as hard as stone. 1 Tne latent wealth of these vast plains is undeniable. Great cities wiK yet spring into existence upon them. Nay, they are growing like mushrooms now. Australia may well envy Canada these hardy settlers who are turning the naked prairie into one of the finest wheat-fields the world knows. The second generation of these settlers will be, if not rich, yet well-to-do. But at present life on the new wheat lands ot Manitoba is stripped of almost every element of grace and is reduced to what may be called aboriginal terms. lhe spectator wonders how the stoves m these little pine shanties are kept burning . for in an area of a hundred square miles there is not a stone to throw at a coyote or a twig to boil a kettle. At one or two points the surface of the sealike plains is broken by coal deposits, and in some instances the outcrop is so abundant and accessible that the settler may fill his crop or waggon But the absolute want of fuel close at hand musu be one real hardship for the new settlers. In winter, again, the temperature falls to many degrees below zero. The ground i a frozen to the hardness of iron All farming work i© suspended. Across these unsheltered plains the blizzards sweep. The enow lies heavy and white upon them. For six months out of twelve the farmer can do nothing with his land. One has only to contrast the clear skies, the dazzling sunshine of Australia with the stern winter of these latitudes to realise how much easier are the conditions of life under which Australians live.

A WAVE OF IMMIGRANTS.

But the great feature of Canada at the present moment, is the wave of immigration which is pouring into it. The phenomenon is wonderful. It is simply transfiguring the land, and making what was yesterday a cluster of struggling, thinly-populated, and unrelated States, a nation. And this immigration is only in its earlier stages. What is to-day a stream, to-morrow will be a river. Op the pier at Quebec is a wide, low wooden door, or pair of doors opening into a long covered passage way; and in front of the doorway a philsopher might well stand to meditate. Through it passes every immigrant into Canada that enters by way of Quebec, and during the twelve months ending June 30th, 1904, an army of 45,987 persons marched through that tiny opening. For them it was the gate to a new life, a door of hope. For Canada those rough doors represent an artery through which pours unceasing jets of fresh blood. The total number of immigrants for the year was 130,000, an average of, say, 2500 a week. This means the addition of a population not far short of that of Tasmania or of West Australia every twelve months. It means the creation of a bigger city than Brisbane, or of two cities bigger than Wellington, or of three cities like Perth, or four cities like Hobart every year. It is the march of an army into Canada 130,000 strong; but it is an army of citizens and producers. And day and night can be heard the tread of the crowding feet. . And of the total number thus crowding into Canada, jiearly one-third enter by that low yellow-painted door on the Quebec'wharf. Over its portals might well be painted an inscription which inverts the terrible sentence Dante s imagination saw written over the gate of the inferno. Everything about ’ this Canadian immigration is wonderful —its ‘quality, it® cost, the speed and ease with which it is handled, the rapidity with which this crowding multitude of immigrants is turned into an orderly army of producers. Of this Canadian immigration, nearly one-half comes direct from Great Britain. There were 50,374 persons of British birth amongst the immigrants of last year, the very pick of the villages and the farm lands of the United Kingdom. They bring with, them strong bodies, clear heads, clever hands, and not seldom well-fUled pockets. In one detachment of Scots immigrants carried on the boat—the Lake Manitoba, on which these lines are wntten —there are at least half a dozen who possess more than £'2ooo each in cash. MIXED WATERS.

The immigration into the United States is, of course, on a much vaster scale. It is a sort of human Niagara emptying itself on America; but this living: Niagara is composed of very mixed and, in a sense, dirty waters. The total number of aliens received into the United States for the year ending June JO, 1904 was £40,714. This means the addition of a State with a bigger population than that of New Zealand every twelve months. But if the 840,000 immigrants were dumped together on a single patch of soil they would, taken as a whole, make a very piebald community with almost empty pockets, low social ideals, and heads even more vacant ot knowledge than their pockets are of coins. Mere than 18,000 are Slovaks, 17,000 are Croats, 65,040 are Hebrews, 44,882 are Poles, more than 151,000 are Italians. Of the whole mass 168,903 could neither read nor write. these 840,000 “aliens” brought with them nearly 21,000,000 dollars in cash, but this sum was very unequally divided. No less than 501,530 brought each less than 50 dollars. This vast horde of immigrants thus contributes a very indigestible mass. A curious fact, indeed, is tha/t the bulk or these aliens have no wish to be di-o-ested.” They do not propose to become citizens. They form communities apart, with, their own newspaper and trading arrangements and social ideals. The report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration declares it to “be beyond doubt that certain .European States had agencies in existence throughout the United States sent here to keep their own people together in isolated communities and to prevent them imbibing a knowledge of and affection for the institutions of the United States, which might result in their purchase of homes here and final absorption in the general population.” M]or© than half the total immigration is Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Slovak, or Magyar; and, says the American Commissioner-General “all the political and social, and occasionally religious, resources of those countries are being directed to one end—to maintain colonies of their own people in this country, instructing them through various channels to maintain their allegiance to the countries of their birth, to transmit their earnings here to the fatherland for the purchase of ultimate home® there and to avoid all intercourse with the people of this country that would tend to the permanent adoption of American ideals.”

Immigrants under such conditions resemble a foreign substance in the living body. They are at best a mere irritant; and tb©y are capable of becoming a direct menace to the welfare of the general community.

The direction in which the human stream flows is another evil feature in

American immigration. It no longer flows westward, to vacant, lands. The area of such lands, indeed, grows very narrow, and many of the older settled farm lands are exhausted: and these two factors help to explain the curious emigration to Canada which has begun and glows in volume steadily. Last year no fewer than 30,000 emigrants from the United States took up land in Canada. But the liarrowing of opportunities in the United States helps to

explain the evil fact that the bulk of immigrants gravitate, as a sort of human sediment, into the cities, and form vast slums there, with social and moral conditions cot much higher than can he found in Jewish quarters in many Russian towns, or such as once existed in the ancient Ghetto at Rome. HOW CANADA DOES IT.

It is to be noted that its immigrants cost Canada amazingly little to get. The average expenditure, for England, is about 15s lid per head, and this is spent almost wholly in advertising Canada, in the spread of maps and handbooks, and the employment of lecturers and agents. If to this is added the amount spent in caring for and placing the swarming settlers on the lands, the cost foa* 1903-4 was not quite 23s per head. For this is, in no sense, Stateassisted immigration.

The business of securing immigrants, however, is pushed with an energy, a completeness of organisation, and a wealth of practical skill altogether admirable. Canada is advertised throughout Europe as if it were a patent medicine or a new food. England, the Continent, and the United States are covered by a network of agencies, and each, agenoy is organised and run like a branch busiinessr'The tone of these agencies is not that of a State Department, but of a modern business office. N The agent® have the temper, the ideals, and the methods of so' many commercial travellers. They plainly feel about a family persuaded .to embark for Canada as an alert commercial traveller feels about a good order he has “booked.” The literature of the immigrant department is modelled on that used by a company running some well-known patent medicine. There are photographs of farms and crop® and cattle; facsimile letters from actual settlers, with stories of how little cash they had when they began, and how many acres, and head of cattle they own to-day, with photographs of the houses they have built, etc. When this literature has. been prepared,. it is emptied in what may bo called snow-storms over whole countries. It is posted to personal addresses of hundreds of thousands of farmers, small shop-keepers, etc.

HOW THE! IMMIGRANTS ARE CARED FOR, -

But there is no distribution of coins. Knowledge is distributed, net cash; and the incoming settler is made to. obtain from the outset everything he gets. He pays his own passage to Canada. He buys his own railway ticket to the north-west. He pays for all the food he eats on the road. The only thing given is—under certain conditions—a homestead block of 160 acres of land. But the machinery for the instruction and help of the immigrant is almost amusing in its variety and completeness. Aj shipload of say 1500 men, women, and children is landed on the Quebec wharf. They march through the brown door which, for them, is the actual gate of entrance into the Dominion. They defile in ordered procession betwixt narrow railings, and are medically inspected and passed, with scientific care and lightning-like speed, almost without knowing it. They emerge into a room hung round with pictures of Canadian scenery and farming life. On one side is a long, open stall crowded with everything, a newly landed immigrant may want to buy, all at lowest rates. The destination of the immigrant is already •known; but interpreters are there to answer every question. There is a broad platform on which their luggage is piled in separate lots; the railway agent® are busy supplying them with tickets ; the long line of comfortable railway carriages stands waiting to receive them. And they steam away, sitting in pleasant family groups, and find at every stopping-place food ready to be bought; while the rushing train itself has ita stove at which the food can be cooked. On reaching the district already chosen for the settlement, an office is there, with plans and maps of the whole neighbourhood. There are vehicles to drive the immigrants round, and guides to show them all the land available. And in a space of time that seems incredibly short the incoming settler has made his choice, has settled on his homestead block or on the section he has arranged to purchase. Everything he needs is brought to him. —timber to build his house, seed to sow his land, fuel to keep the stove burning. But he must pay for it all. Or if the settler is not prepared to take up laud at once, he finds waiting for him a list of farms where work can be had and honest wages earned. A sort of superintending Providence, in brief, takes charge of the settler. It keeps hold of him, and watches over him for the first two or three years of his residence, until he has taken root in the country. Letters oome inquiring about his difficulties; a friendly official visits him. He is made to feel he is in a friendly world. But the State does not spoon-ffeed him. It finds him work,

* and expects him to do it. It pjyv—.des *- him everything he can want, but expects • him to pay for it. _ , , # It is another wholesome and admirable feature of Canadian immigration that the newly arrived settlers are not dumped on the cities and left to float round their streets, and swell their needy classes. They are earned straight to the rich and fertile plains waiting for the ploughshare and the sickle, and they are taught to take root there. Something like nine immigrants out of every ten are made in this way tillers of the soil, and so increase the natural products* of the land. The great, cities near the coast—Montreal and Quebec — cry. out loudly indeed that tins army of, .stalwart immigrants is carried past them. The cities, they complain, are starved that the country parts may be occupied. But this exactly inverts the , policy of Australia, where big cities on the sea-coast represent empty fields and neglected products in the interior. OPPOSITE POLICIES.

All this is an example of what Australia ought to do, and is not doing. In a. : "sense, as will be shown later, Australia has" more to offer than even Canada; but nobody outside Australia believes this. Nobody, in fact, believes that Australia seriously wants immigration. The incident of the six hatters was, in effect, a picturesque and tremendous advertisement to the world, that Australia bad fallen into the hands of a community whose ideal it is to fence out the rest of. r the human race.... And! it is impossible to imagine a more picturesque and dramatic contrast than that betwixt Canada and Australia at this point. Canada received during the first five months of 1905, 28,000 immigrant® from Great Britain and Ireland. It welcomed them, found them work and land, and stands ready to receive 28,000 more on, the same terms. As a contrasting picture, we have the spectacle of. Australia starting up alarmed at the news that six hatters had arrived at her shores. They were not aliens or pauper®, they were British citizens arid expert artisans, with work waiting for them. But Australia put them under police guard, and anxiously counted the numDM’ .of hatters already in. the country before it allowed the six to enter. This is exactly one of those picturesque incidents which arrest the imagination of the world, and are remembered when bigger things are forgotten. And it cannot be denied that the two pictures stand for opposite policies, and for quite unlike futures. And which represents most of hope, or of courage, or of sanity, canrhardly be doubted.