MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1747, 30 August 1905, Page 9

MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

WHAT AN AUSTRALIAN SEES IN CANADA. (By Dr. W. H. Fitchett.) _■ ni '- (Aim Rights Reserved.) An Australian, wandering aoross Canada, finds himself, somehow least impressed by the very things or which Canadians are apt to be most proud. The scale of the Canadian map, for example, does not impress him. Mere geographical bigness has no magio 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 Do men ion. It is true that the Parliaments, v buildings at Ottawa and the Town Hall at Toronto are noble examples of -he 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 1 an unadorned prudity 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 worid; hut it’s one State-owned railway supplies the example of a line whose un{>rdfitable performances sink _ below the owest depths of even Australian railway failures. Canada is in many respects a country of paradoxes. CANADA’S

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 bo in the very atmosphere. It is a prosperity conscious of its own existence, and certa'n of its own future. £C The world at large has discovered Canada,’ A said Sir Wilfred Banner 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 has awakened to a sense of its own resources. It has grown suddenly and oven exultantly self-confident. Some elements of Canadian prosperity are found, of course, in the gifts of nature ' r hut 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 over-crowded 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 care and energy into Canada is wisely distributed. The immigrants are turned at once into producers. So Canadian society has its roots in the kindly so'l. 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 Austral 1 a at this point. The imputation 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 a city congestion‘in the civilised worid. 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—has less than half the population of Melbourne. The wider distribution of Canadian population is reflected Jbappily in its polities. 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 lands 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. WHAT A RAILWAY HAS DONE. It is curious, again, to note how much Canada owes to a single railway, and that of a type utterly mistrusted in Australia. The C.P.R. is the property of a> private company; it was built on the land-grant principle; and yet it is one of the greatest factors in the prosperity of Canada. It was generously endowed by the State, both with cash and land. It received no less than 25,000,000 acres of land in alternate blocks of one square mile. The construction of this railway was the only condition on which the Western States consented to enter the Dominion, and the results have amply justified that demand. The C.P.R., more perhaps th»» aother single fac-

tor, has made Canada a living unit. It has linked the east to the west, and so made the great wave of immigration possible. It has, for Canada, the offices of a spinal cord in the human body. It knits together with living fibres the widely scattered members. And exactly the feature which Australians would most suspect-—its land grants—is that which has made the C.P.R. most serviceable to the Dominion. Its lands were idle capital. . It must plant settlers on the 25,000,000 empty acres it owns in order to create freight for its cars. And so the great C.P.R. has brought business ability and energy of the highest order, and the resources of a great financial organisation, to the task of planting settlers along the whole course of its lines. In this policy it was concerned, of course, only for the creation of freight, but it could only create freight by manufacturing citizens. DEEP RACE 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 and 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 spectacles of one and a half million French people dwelling together, undigested and unassimilateu; and this is a fact over which a philosopher might dwell with very mingled feelings. There is one aspect of this tact which is h'ghly complimentary to the British character. The freest, happiest, least burdened, and most contented bit of “France”—of living France —owes allegiance not to President Loubert, but to King Edward VII. It is not to be found beneath the tricolour, but under the Union Jack! It illustrates the halfunconscious but stubborn independence of the typical Briton that not half a million people of the 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 France 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 France itself. There is no conscription in Canada, and no revolution on the banks of the St. Lawrence! No law for the dissolution of monasteries or for the shutting up of clerical schools is possible. These French-Can adians plough their lands in peace. Their taxes are absurdly light. They have their own newspapers and schools. Their priests manage their affairs for them. They arrange their marriages, regulate their politics, teach 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 the Bourbon times and type. They represent the one hit 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 separateness. 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-mar-riages with the rest of the population and scarcely any intercourse. They grow fast; for 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 new 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 twentyfive years ago were at least ~ half British and Protestant; to-day they are wholly French and Catholic.

A FRENCH PATCH IN THE BRITISH

EMPIRE.

The French., naturally, have the public affaire of the province, in which they

are a majority so overwhelming, in their own hands, and though the Montreal Legislature is one of the many Parliaments within the circle of the British Empire, yet all the debates are in French. Sir Wilfred Laurier, as all the world knows, is a typical Frenchman. In his boyhood he did not know a word of English, and still tells the story with much humour of how,' when he first went to school, the English boys would thrash him, in arrongant schoolboy fashion, for his ignorance of English. He is one of the half dozen men amongst whom is divided the business of ruling the British Empire; and yet his English has still running through it French cadences. It is an odd experience, indeed, to sit in the gallery of the Dominion Parliament and hear one Minister-of the British Crown after another rise and reply to some question in English which smacks so strongly of the latitude of Paris.

All this in a sense is very admirable. The Briton, at bottom and for all his insularity, has a fine magnanimity. He respects nobody so much as a gallant foe, and. after thrashing him soundly, he is willing to share with him, if not his last c'oin, yet all his political privileges and 1 rights. In this, as in many other unsuspected characteristics both of temper and policy, the Briton is but the Roman translated into modern terms. Did not Rome take frankly into the circle of her Empire all her conquered foes? A NOTABLE MONUMENT.

Tr heve is one monument on the Citadel Hill :n Quebec which is a parable in scone. It is the monument to the joint memory of Wolfe and Montcalm. A hundred and fifty years ago, from the very spot on which the monument stands, Montcalm’s batteries flashed angrily across the stream of the St. Lawrence against the British guns on Point Levis, and Wolfe’s guns flung back, day and night, their stern answer in flying iron. What would the red-coated British tillery men on Point Levis, or the bluecoated French gunners in the Quebec citadel, have thought had they been told that, a hundred and fifty years afterwards, a tall monument to both their leaders would stand on that very spot! In a bit of fine Latin the inscription runs: “Mortem virtus communem famam historia monumentum posteritas dedit.” “Valour gave them a common death, history a common fame, and posterity a common monument.” Not many such monuments—signs not only of ancient strife, but of the peace which obliterates the scars of strife —can be found in the world to-day. But the monument on the hill at Quebec is a smybol of the political peace in which, under the shelter of one political system, the descendants of both the races who contended on the plains of Abraham dwell to-day. It is another sign of the happy relation betwixt the races that it is a member and representative of the defeated side who to-day is Prime Minister of Canada. And yet it must count for something in Canadian affairs that every fourth inhabitant is French in race, in speech, in type, in political ideals. And these French are conscious of their seprateness. They value it. They are jealous of it. They fly the tricolour 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 Wilfred Laurier 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 not courageous or noble. The faith that must be kept under a glass shade in order to save it from perishing is hardly of a robust type. But the policy of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada is intelligible enough. The Treaty of Paris guaranteed the French freedom in the practice of their religion “as far as is consistent with -British law” ; hut the “British law” for the French-Canadian means that enacted by the 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 flocks, and the 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 he found so l 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-Oanada. And it is natural that the Church of Rome should seek to make its flock, 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 leyal? 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 tricolour, or the stars and stripes fly orer Quebec. They know that of all who speak the French tongue they are under the most enviable political conditions. But the roots of loyalty that strike so deep in the heart of the Briton—pride of race and of history, the sense of common blood, the tie of common speech—do- not exist in the Can-adian-French. It would be unreasonable to expect thorn to exist. Would these Canadian-French fight for the British flag? They would not fight for it, it may be suspected, as a flag. It was not Sir Wilfred Laurier who sent the Canadian contingents to South Africa, but a wave of patriotic sentiment throughout non-French Canada, which would have swept Sir Wilfred Laurier out of political existence if he had resisted it. And there were not 4 many Frenchmen in the contingents. The larger minded French-Canadians—-men like Sir Wilfred Laurier and hia 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 litical horizon is very narrow. He has, it may be suspected, no “loyalty” beyond his own province. Some of the younger French-Canad-ians have, indeed, strange dreams. They cherish visions of an independent French State on the St. Lawrence, with Quebec as its capital! Has not Great Britain shown herself ’even carelessly magnanimous in regard to its outlying provinces. Twice in the last century, after capturing the Cape, she gave it back to the Dutch. The French West Indies are a British gift. Java is under the Dutdh flag by the same title. Great Britain gave Hie lonian Islands back'to Greece. Would she fire a shot to keep, say, Australia or Canada itself under the British flag? Would she send another fleet up the St. Lawrence and fight 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 matter of fact, cherish any illusion about an independent French State on the St. Lawrence, and the dream is a lunacy. But it exists, and it is an ugly fact in Canadian politics. But it is hardly a good service which the Ohiirch of Rome renders to the Empire or to Canada, or even to the French-Canadians themselves, in keeping them thus separate. They are inevitably and for all time within the circle of , the Empire. They share its citizenship. They are guarded by its flag. Why should the separating lines of race ana speech be kept so carefully and sharply in evidence. But though wise men will regret the separateness of the Can-adian-French, they need not wonder at it. Suppose that, after 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 whose effects would bo visible to-day. THE PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA

Sir Wilfred Laurier himself, the Prime Minister of Canada, is a very interesting study. The present writer had the choice between a chat with President Roosevelt and lunching with Sir Wilfred Laurier, and he deliberately chose the Canadian! He is a real factor in 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 rather- the face of a French professor, studious, abstracted, refined; a little bit weary of wrestling with human stupidity. From the forehead a ridge of shining baldness runsl back over the skull, leaving a thick pad of hair on the sides. The face is thin, pallid, deeply scribbled over with a net work of fine lines, the general effect being that of a slightly overtaxed gentleness. Sir Wilfred Laurier has an exquisite courtesy of manner. Has voice is soft, his English is easy and perfect. But his syllables have the care and finish of a man who is speaking in what is not his mother tongue. With all his apparent simplicity of manner, Sir Wilfred has the skill of a great diplomatist. He is said to have great gifts of mellifluous, if not of magnetic, speech; but he is hardly rich-blooded enough for a great orator. It cannot be said that his name is linked to any great and history shaping measures. He is not a leader after Chatham’s type; an administrator of Palmerston’s temper; a 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.' Hie represents admirably what inay be called the decorative side of politics. He always says the right thing, and-says it at the right moment, and in £s% right way. There is nothing sordid’ about him, and he happily symbolises that federation of races which, though it is not yet a living union, is the ultimate fact in Canadian politics. His air of orentlv bored and over-

taxed patience, suggests the question whether 1 Sir,- Wilfred Laurier regrets having devoted himself to political life and he frankly says ‘"Yes” - sometimes at least he regrets his vocation. But Sir Wilfred Laurier’© regrets have notthe depth- of Burke’s bitter saying What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue.” Sir Wilfred 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 certain to he forgotten.