PARADISE FOR WORKERS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 10629, 5 December 1910, Page 2

PARADISE FOR WORKERS.

ENGLISH JUDGE'S IMPRESSION OF THE. DOMINION OF CANADA.

(By Mr Justice Grantham.)

The following is part of a speech..delivered by Mr Justice Grantham at the Barcornbe Agricultural Association s meeting:.—- .. You all desire me to say something about Canada, the country I have ]ust visited. It is a working man's question before all others, for it is a working man's country. No idlers there, no unemployed or unemployable. There is work and high wages for all, for while the- country is a strpng Protectionist country, the effect of that Is that the wages'of the laboring man are more than proportionally increased. There is work waiting for all, and if a man js found not at work he is treated as a vagrant, taken before the magistrates, and given three months, and if that does not cure him, six months nest

time. , ■ , It is a paradise for the honest worker. Everv man in regular work lives in his own house; a separate house,

mind, on its own plot, no two houses built together, much less rows of ugly built, at high rents, but all of wood, and many quite pretty. Two dollars' to 2J- dollars, i.e., 8s to 10s, a day can be earned by any laborer, but much more by skilled men. I felt Canada had been to some extent neglected by English people. I heard of great lawyers and great men going to the United States and being feted there. I never heard of their going to Canda. So far I always felt deeply the gratitude we owed the Canadians for coming to our assistance in the South African War, and I was anxious to know tor mvself whether it was true, as alleged,/, that they T eally did not care whether we gave them any special advantages, commonly called preference, or not, and having always refused invitations to the States till I had been to Canada, I determined to go there with a message of goodwill from the old country. I went there expecting to find a colony, but I found the inception of a nation—a nation claiming to be part and parcel of our Empire, and, what is more, of our kingdom. 1 found a people, strangers to me, but loyal to the backbone. But their future is not assured; it is as much in our making as in theirs; they mean to live under the British flag if we will help them; but if we do not help them, if we treat them no better than we treat foreign' nations, there may be difficulties in their way and in ours in the future. When you land at Quebec or at Montreal yon land apparently in a foreign countrv, and you find yourself among an alien race, French, French-speaking, and Roman Catholics to the backbone. The whole province of Quebec practically belongs to them. In Montreal they are very powerful, and in, a majority, but not so numerous or powerful as m Quebec. ',,.,/-," i Further West, in Mid-Canada, a space of about 1800 miles wide, you find Britons and Protestants predominate, but with a large portion of settlers of every nations under the sun among them," Germans, Russians, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Galicians. To these a most important element has recently to be added, viz., 100.000 Americans, who have sold their land in the States, and bought cheaper and better land in Canada. For .the last 1000 miles you find the dominant race strongly recruited from Britain, but then to some of the other nationalities just mentioned' you must add thousands of Japanese. Chinese, and men from the Pacific Islands, who make splendid workmen. Canadians complain that the Mother Country will do nothing to assist them in their economic difficulties and financial arrangements. She treats them, ' they sav, no better than she treats foreigners or even commercial enemies. How can they appeal to these discordant elements to be. loyal to the Empire if the Empire has done nothing for them? The message they sent through me to England was this: Why should your statesmen refuse to help us and refuse to acknowledge us as your offspring for the sake of a shadow, for the sake of a name —the name of Freetrade —for vou have not got the substance now— It was useful once, but those days of your manufacturing supremacy have passed. You are risking your own future and ours.

Why not haggle with other nations as to fiscal duties? We have to do it, and are doing it now. Why not treat them as "they treat you? Do not go bodily from one fiscal reform to another; do not go from Freetrade to Protection; hut so arrange your tariff that you can give one better terms than another if one treats you better than others. I am well aware that Sir Wilfrid Laurier has been masquerading in Freetrade clothes this autumn to the amusement of the Canadians, but they knew his speeches were for foreign consumption, to please his quondam Liberal friends. After the death of Sir J.

Macdonald and Sir Charles Tupper, Sir

Wilfrid stole their clothes and came out as a Protectionist, got many of the Conservative Party to vote with him, and

getting the Liberal Party to support him, many of whom were French-Cana-dians, carried the elections, and has been as strong a Protectionist ever since as the Conservative Party itself. In. fact, there is no meaning in the term Conservative and Liberal in Canada to-day; they are all Protectionists to the backbone. To show the position of a working man in Canada, I cannot do better than tell you the lifestory, as he told me, of a man who remained a working man to the last. He was a copying-clerk in a solicitor's office in Chancery Lane at 30s a week. He was not satisfied with the future before him, as his education was not good enough to become a solicitor; and as his father was a, farmer and he thought ho knew a good deal about it, he and a friend determined to go out to Canada in the early eighties. When they got there they found they knew nothing about farming that would he anv good there, and his friend' re-

turned home disgusted. He stopped, determined to work at whatever same along. He got work on the CanadianPacific Railway, which was then being just begun, and worked as a navvy, or at anything the managers or foremen asked him to do.

From one billet he got promoted to a better one from yeaT to year, till ho became storekeeper over the whole undetermined to work at whatever came five to thirty years' service lie had just retired, never having been anything but a working man, with an income from his savings of nearly £SOOO per annum. •