CANADIAN PROSPERITY.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIX, Issue 3151, 3 September 1892, Page 2 (Supplement)

CANADIAN PROSPERITY.

The Toronto Empire, of a recent date, says : —Nowhere else within the bounds of the British Dominion-*, nowhere amongst foreign nations,is there a country in which the citizens, are so generally prosperous, so evidently progressive, and ■ so widely satisfied as Canada. In the United States to the south of our Dominion there is immense wealth and iuteuse poverty; millionaires accumulating money by hundreds of millions, and miners, laborers, and working women of all kinds living upou the merest pittance and amid scenes of suffering and turmoil. There are the palaces of the wealthy side by side with the huts where the anarchist and outcast conceals the bombs and weapons of his warfare against the rich. In the Northern States w« see the oppression of wealth iu the mines owned by meu like Andrew Carnegie, who today crushes his employes to starvation wages, and to-morrow writes a cauting article upon the moral elevation of young men or some kindred topic. Throughout the Southern States we find that terrible inequality of color aud condition,a wholesale oppression and murder of men who happen to be born with a dark complexion instead of a white. Upon all sides are evidences of luxury and poverty, and they are ever growing greater. Turn to Great Britain and we see the siirns of a tremendous economic struggle. Bread riots in the North of England, the great coal miners' strikes ; people starving in Went Hartlepool rather than accept that pauper rnlief which would I prevent them voting iu the ooimnir [ election ; foreign competition ia manu-

factured goods to tho extent of 300,000,000 dollars per annum striking at tho very root of industrial power ; profits upon manufactures at the lust point of attenuation ; and an immense movement and undercurrent of sentiment amongst the working men, which may grow into an advocacy of the interests of labour and of labour alone, unless the other classes are very careful. We find the distance between the rich and the poor marked as it is elsewhere, but ameliorated to an extent not always appreciated abroad by the fact that the upper classes of England feel that they have a duty to the poor to perform, and do noble service in raising and helping in every way those who otherwise would have no chance. It is far different in the Republic, where the rich are essentially selfish, and apt to be snobbish into the bargain, and where, in the opinion of many, tho mere act of speaking to a poor man woul-l involve some sort of sooial degradation. A.»d withal we see in lin<rlu.ud a steady declining tr.ide and a dying agriculture, No wouder that the Marquis of Salisbury should advocate Protection, and all things (•eem to woi'k together for its ultimate adoption, . 1