MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1748, 6 September 1905, Page 11

MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

THE TWO GREAT RIVALS. CANADA AND AUSTRALASIA. - No. IV. ' • (By W. H. Fitchett.) (All Rights Reserved.) Canada at the present moment is the great rival of Australasia. Which of tiie two mighty provinces of the Empire i>s richer in resource, and to wnich of the two does the future belong? The'present writer took great pains as he travelled across Canada to understand its policy, make some fair estimate of its resources, and to get a clear mental picture of the agreements and differences of the two lands and of the future to which each ia moving. The result is to confirm exultantly his faith in the resources and future of Australasia. Australia and New Zealand have some things to envy in Canada; but they have nothing to fear from its rivalry, and in many respects they are vastly in advance of it. CANADIAN ADVANTAGES. The advantages of Canada lie on the surface, and are soon reckoned up and told. One obvious advantage is found in the nearness of Canada to the overcrowded lands of the Old World. A family can be carried from a sleepy village, say, in Lincolnshire, or from a crowded lane in Leeds or Glasgow and put down on a quarter section of prairie land in Manitoba for less than onethird the oo&t of reaching Australasia. But the newly landed settler finds himsolf under colder skies, on a less friendly soil, and with a narrower range of possible* resources than in Australasia. The conditions oi life are harder in Canada than in Australasia. The whole of Western Canada has not yet reached what may be called the decorative stage, eleven the «tag© of comfort. It is a land of unpainted shanties. Nobody thinks of planting- a tree, still less a flower; hardly even of growing a vegetable. It is held to be the sign of a good farmer when his barn is bigger and better than his house; and even the barns are rough and scanty. The strain of work is higher than in Australasia, the standard of comfort is lower. As a compensation, however, society is certainly built on safe and wholesome lines. It is an inversion of .the true conditions of a new land when the country is empty and the cities are crowded. But Canada is a country of small towns and wide wheat fields. The majority of the population belongs to the producing class; and this is a condition which ensures a sure and rapid growth of wealth for the whole community. A GREAT WATER SYSTEM. Canada, again, Has an immense natural advantage in its water system. From the great central watershed flow a thousand streams eastward, growing fuller and deeper as they hasten to the great lakes (which are, as a matter of fact, vast inland seas) and thence by the St. Lawrence, the greatest navigable river in the world, to the Atlantic. The almost universal and costless motive power supplied by this great river system, the cheapness of transit it ensures, its effect on the climate and the soil —all this is for Canada a source of immense wealth. If we could transfer the water system of Canada to Australia, it would make that continent the garden and wonder of the world! WHERE AUSTRALASIA GAINS. But Canada, when measured against Australaeia, hag three tremendous handicaps: its climate, its divided population, and the fact that it is squeezed' in betwixt the frozen latitudes of the north and a tremendous commercial and political rival, in the shape of the United States with its population of 80,000,000, to the south. Australia need not envy Canada its mere area; for we possess a geographical area, nearly as great, with fewer barren spaces in it, and fewer political and climatic entanglements about it. And we certainly need not envy Canada its climate, for ours is incomparably better. And climate is an asset whose value cannot be expressed in terms of arithmetic. Who would exchange even our droughts, which come once in seven years, for the iron winters of Canada; where, for at least one-third of every year the soil is frozen almost to the consistency of granite. Canada is a land vexed with blizzards and storms. Throughout the rich wheat fields in the North-West territories, work on the farms is, possible for only eight—and in gome parts only six—months out of the twelve. Contrast with these the sunfilled landscapes, the clear horizons of Australasia. Life has, and always must have, easier conditions in Australia and New Zealand than it can have in Canada. Easy conditions of life have, of course, their characteristic risks. The Canadian ia sturdier, hardier, more enduring than the Australasian. The frosts and hitter, winds of his prairies harden him. The ooM of his winters indeed will keep the household fir© burning and perhaps give him a better family life than in Australasia. The Australasian is, and alvays will bar quicker and more alert

than the Canadian. He will have gifts of leadership and of initiative which the slower Canadian will lack. But the Canadian outworks him and may even outlast him. A RICHER LAND. We need not envy the mineral resources of Canada, for our 9 are a hundredfold greater. All Canada, with Alaska thrown in, has only produced as yet £40,000,000 of gold, while out of Australasian mines £640,000,000 have been dug, and another £640,000,000 no doubt still waits the miner’s pick. We need' not envy Canada/ again, either its wheat fields or its forests. The forests of Canada will pass and are passing. Its wheat fields will be exhausted as the wheat fields of New England are; or they will suffer by competition with other lands. Its vast prairies, in one sense, indeed, make Canada a fiddle with one string, and twenty years hence Siberian competition will lower the market value of Canada’s chief product. Australasia has over its rival, and as one of the results of its superior climate, the advantage of an incomparably greater variety of products. Cana.da, no doubt, has the immense advantage of its nearness to the markets of the West; but we are nearer to the great markets of the awakening East. Moreover in trade geographical space must be translated into commercial terms. The distance betwixt a product and its. market is to be measured not in miles but in cost of transit. As the conditions of sea travel improve that cost shrinks. And as far as Australasian products are concerned the margin of profit is wide enough to make the cost of transit irrelevant. A HIGHER HUMAN TYPE.

Australasia, it may be added, has one advantage over Canada in the human type she is producing. If a typical Australasian be compared with the typical Canadian the contrasts are instantly visible. The Australasian has more of the look of race and breed about him. He is quicker; more disposed to take the lead; has greater gifts of initiative than his rival. If a.score of young men, half of them Australasians and half of them Canadians, were east ashore on a desert island, an Australasian would almost in certainty emerge as the leader. And there are forces in history which help to explain these qualities. The Canadian represents not only a greater mixture of races than the Australasian ; lie is the product of a lower type of immigration. A farm labourer is the type of immigrant for which Canada longs, and it is largely populated by immigrants of the farm labourer type. This type has many virtues; it is industrious, sober, honest. But it is not adventurous, nor even highly intelligent. Australia, in the main, was populated with immigrants who answered to the call of the great gold discoveries of the fifties, and they were certainly of a higher type than the farm labourer class. They had more money in their pockets, more courage in their blood, and more brains in their heads than the typical Canadian immigrant. It took more of courage and more of cash to emigrate to Australasia in the fifties than to emigrate to Canada to-day. And starting with a higher humantypethe Australasian has lived under more radiant skies and has dealt with a wider range of natural conditions than the Canadian. To-day he has certainly more of sunshine in his nature, more of brightness in his intelligence and of cheerfulness in his life than his Canadian rival possesses. The Canadian, it may be frankly admitted, has some compensations, but the superiority of type on the part of the Australasian can hardly be denied. DIFFERENT IDEALS. The supreme difference between betwixt Canada and Australia is to be found not in what Nature has given or withheld, but in what man has done and is doing. Canada knows that it wants population, and has set itself, with the utmost energy and with the highest business skill, to set the ploughs going on its empty prairies. H covers Europe with its immigration agents. It even invades the United States, and last year an army of nearly 50,000 American farmers, with their ptbughs and teams, came across the boarder into Canada. The first measure passed by the Australian Federal Parliament, on the other hand, was the Immigration Restriction Act, and the world outside interprets this as meaning that a handful of people, having got possession of a continent, intend to “warn off” the rest of the human race! They are not themselves occupying the continent, or improving it; but they mean to keep everybody else out. That notion of Australian policy is, of course, absurdly mistaken. But it exists; it colours the judgment of the outside world.

Canada, too, is building up a community which, with all its complex interests, is rooted in the soil and is enriched by products which spring directly from the soil. The farms grow faster than the cities. The towns on the seaboard complain, indeed, at the top of their voices that the streanu of immigration .runs past them to the prairies. Their streets are left empty that the prairies may be peopled. But in Australia that policy is inverted. We are trying to substitute Acts of Parliament for the spade and: the plough. . The political and social ideals of the

two lands, it cannot be denied, are in sharp contrast with each other. The idea of more population has captured Canadian politics. It burns there like a flame. Every new arrival, it is believed, means a new customer and producer. The Australian ideal, on the other hand, it can hardly be denied, is not more population but fewer competitor’s. There is one class at least in Australia in whose eyes an immigrant is nothing better than an unwelcome rival who will still further reduce the already mcurful inadequate sum total of work to be divided.

WHAT EACH COUNTRY SEEKS. The Canadian ideal is to increase the general volume of trade; then every one may prosper. The Australian dream is to artificially divide the amount of trade which happens to be in existence, and in the’ process of dividing we fall out amongst ourselves. In Canada the rush is inland to- the distant farm lands of the West. The prairies are more than the cities. In Australia we build upi two or three gigantic cities on the sea coast, congest them with the unemployed, and then act and legislate as if these, and only these, were “Australia.” The Canadian ideal is a belt of farm land with a family on every 160 acres; a railway station with a gigantic grain elevator every twenty miles and a line of steamers, loaded to their Plimsoll marks with wheat, running across the Atlantic to European ports. The Australian ideal is a factory, with a big duty for the employer, and short hours and high wages fixed by law for the employees; an ,d—not yet arrived but logically certain —high prices, also fixed by law,' for the consumer. These, it must -be confessed, are sharply contrasted political ideals and must profoundly effect the political future of both countries. Labour troubles are not unknown in Canada, and haveleft their scars upon it. On the east the long empty wharves of Quebec bear melancholy witness to this fact. The various unions and stevedores and' wharf labourers imposed unreasonable conditions on the trade. According to one story they objected to the use of steam winches, and trade, which is shy and elusive beyond what most people imagine, has fled the port and the unions have vanished With it. On the west coast the shut mines of British Columbia are the scars of similar labour troubles, which have ruined both miners and mineowners. But in Canada the labour unions have not been able to capture the Parliaments and turn them to class ends. It is improbable they will ever be able to do this, as the bulk of the population will always consist of persons in actual touch with the soil and owners of their own farms.

Australian policy will in process of time readjust itself to natural conditions ; for the world to-day possesses no saner or more practical type than the Australian when once his common sense is alarmed, but, meanwhile, Australian polities are sorely perplexing the imagination of Great Britain. Our blunders are exaggerated. Our ideals are misread ; and we suffer badly as the result. TWO GREAT RIVALS. Canada and Australasia are the two great competitors, not merely for the affection as for the business confidence and the business investments of the Motherland ; and just now Canada has the lead. Until an Australian talks with men of all classes in England—members of Parliament, editors of newspapers, bankers, great merchants, etc.—it is impossible to realise the cloud of discredit under which Australia lies. We are locked at through the lens of the six hatters, of the white ocean policy, of the crude socialism of Mr Tom Mann, etc., and the effect is like looking at the sun through a bit of smoked gliass. All the brightnes is quenched. Capital is curiously sensitive; and, if Canada and Australia put a loan of the same' amount, and on the same terms, on the London market to-day, the difference in British judgment betwixt the Dominion and the Federation would be registered in very definite arithmetic. If an Australian sits at a dinner-table with a cluster of alert British politicians and enterprising London merchants —the most capable men of their type ii? the world—and listens to their version of Australia and its performances the experience for him is very uncom-, fortable. ' “You are a handful of people,” they say, “who have got possession of a continent. You could not hold it for twentyfour hours without the shelter of the British flag; yet you deliberately shut out from it. even your British fel-low-citizens, as witness the immortal six hatters. You want to turn a continent into a private park for some 5,000,000 people who cannot occupy it themselves, and are not occupy ing it, and will not allow other people to com© in and share it with them. You treat an immigrant not as an asset but as an enemy. Your “White Australia” policy if applied universally would smash up the British EJmpire. Of the 400,000,000 subjects of King Edward 350,000,000 are coloured people, and you refuse to let your very letters be carried across the sea by ships which employ a pair of coloured hands to make a curry! You undertake, that is to paint the seas of the planetwhite, as well as Australia. You would break the race asunder throughout the planet on a colour line. And this policy for an Empire which has 350,000,000 of coloured subjects and counts Ghoorkas

and Sikhs amongst its bravest soldiers is impossible. If you exclude, lor example, the Japs, it would raise a tremendous question of which not Australia but Great Britain must pay the price.

It has to be added that John Bull believes profoundly in the freedom of the individual and the sanctity of private property. These are deep foundations on which he builds his scheme of life; and he is uneasily - suspicious that the Australasian Parliaments have been captured by an army bent on strange social-’ istic adventures. THE AUSTRALASIAN REPLY:

To all this _ the Australian replies that the business of the.six liattersAvas. no doubt, a blunder, due to the loitering helplessness of . the incapable Prime Minister with whom Australia has ever been afflicted. But it does not represent a settled policy. Australasia knows that her great need is immigrants, and she is prepared to give them as free and generous welcome as Canada herself. The “White Australia” policy as applied to mail contracts is, of course, beyond sane defence. It makes Aus*tralia a laughing stock to the outside world; hut, after all, it represents only the exaggeration of what is a noble ideal. The desire to keep Australia as the home of a white race is entitled to respect; and, for socialistic experiments, the Australian contends with energy that there is no part of the British Empire—.not London itself—.where property is safer than in Australia and New. Zealand. Australasians are the most absolutely British community outside Great Britain. They have the inextinguishable good sense of the race. They are moreover a community ruled by Christian ethics and under no other sky are the Ten Commandments so little likely to be abolished. WHICH LAND DOES THE MOST BUSINESS? It has commonly the effect of a surprise an English critics when the Australasian proceeds to show—as he can show—that Australasia, when measured .by the tests of the import and export tables, is worth vastly more to Great Britain than is Canada. The figures of the Canadian Year Book prove this. The total imports from Canada from all countries in 1902 was 202,791,595 dollars; the corresponding imports for Australia and New Zealand were 388,374,594 dollars. Australasia, in a word, with its smaller population, has nearly twice the volume of foreign trade that Canada has. The test again may be tried of . the direct trade of the two countries with Great Britain. The total imports from Great Britain in 1903, were, for Canada 49,206,062 dollars; for Australia and New Zealand the corresponding

figures ar© 156,293,577. Australasia* it at is, buys three times as much from Great Britain as Canada does. The total exports to Great Britain were, for Oar ada of the value of 109,347,345 dollars ; Australasia during the same period, sent 167,762,966 dollars worth of goods to the Motherland, thus exceeding Canada by more than 50 per cent. The greater commercial value of Australasia to Great Britain is made clearer if we take details. Thus Victoria alone, in spite of the handicap of greater distance, and with not one-fourth the population of Canada, sends as much butter to British breakfast-tables as aH Canada does! Queensland sends more than seven times as much beef to Great Britain as Canada does; New South Wales sends more than ten times as much nressed mutton to Bi wish. ports. And, while Canada, does not send one poor leg of frozen mutton to British dinner-tables, New Zealand sends more than 14J. million dollars’ worth of the finest mutton in the world to feed the hunger of Great Britain, According to some figures again which Mr Ooghlan has just supplied to the London papers, Australasia last year beat Canada in her own special line, having actually sent 3,000,000 cwt of wheat mote to the hoppers of British mills than Canada was able to send!

The suspicious mood! of British opinion towards Australasia will pass away; for at bottom Great Britain is proud of her children on the other side of the world, and is willing to take - all risks for them and to share her utmost farthing with them. But there are few Lessons which Australasia has more need to learn than the disastrous effect which political follies of a certain type have on its political reputation and its commercial credit with the outside world.