Canada: the Empire of the North | Page 5

were serfs wearing an iron collar with the brand of the lord
who owned them. With us no stigma is attached to work. Your menial
expects to be a menial all his life. With our worker, just as sure as the
sun rises and sets, if he continues to work and is no fool, he will rise to
earn a competency, to improve himself, to own his own labor, to own
his own home, to hire the labor of other men who are beginners as he
once was himself."
"Then you have no social classes?"
"Lots. The ups, who have succeeded; and the half-way ups, who are
succeeding; and the beginners, who are going to succeed; and the
downs, who never try. And as success doesn't necessarily mean money,
but doing the best at whatever one tries, {xii} you can see that the ups
and the halfway ups, and the beginners and the downs have each their
own classes of special workers."
"That," she answered, "is not democracy; it is revolution." She was
thinking of those Old World hard-and-fast divisions of society into
royalty, aristocracy, commons, peasantry.
"It is not revolution," I explained. "It is rebirth! When you send your
émigré out to us, he is a made-over man."
But it is not given to all émigré's to become great capitalists or great
leaders. Some who have the opportunity have not the ability, and the
majority would not, for all the rewards that greatness offers, choose
careers that entail long years of nerve-wracking, unflagging labor. But
on a minor scale the same process of making over takes place. One case
will illustrate.
Some years before immigration to Canada had become general, two or
three hundred Icelanders were landed in Winnipeg destitute. From
some reason, which I have forgotten,--probably the quarantine of an
immigrant,--the Icelanders could not be housed in the government

immigration hall. They were absolutely without money, household
goods, property of any sort except clothing, and that was scant, the men
having but one suit of the poorest clothes, the women thin homespun
dresses so worn one could see many of them had no underwear. The
people represented the very dregs of poverty. Withdrawing to the
vacant lots in the west end of Winnipeg,--at that time a mere town,--the
newcomers slept for the first nights, herded in the rooms of an
Icelander opulent enough to have rented a house. Those who could not
gain admittance to this house slept under the high board sidewalks, then
a feature of the new town. I remember as a child watching them sit on
the high sidewalk till it was dark, then roll under. Fortunately it was
summer, but it was useless for people in this condition to go bare to the
prairie farm. To make land yield, you must have house and barns and
stock and implements, and I doubt if these people had as much as a
jackknife. I remember how two or three of the older women used to sit
crying each night in despair till they disappeared in the crowded house,
fourteen or {xiii} twenty of them to a room. Within a week, the men
were all at work sawing wood from door to door at a dollar and a half a
cord the women out by the day washing at a dollar a day. Within a
month they had earned enough to buy lumber and tar paper.
Tar-papered shanties went up like mushrooms on the vacant lots.
Before winter each family had bought a cow and chickens. I shall not
betray confidence by telling where the cow and chickens slept. Those
immigrants were not desirable neighbors. Other people moved hastily
away from the region. Such a condition would not be tolerated now,
when there are spacious immigration halls and sanitary inspectors to
see that cows and people do not house under the same roof. What with
work and peddling milk, by spring the people were able to move out on
the free prairie farms. To-day those Icelanders own farms clear of debt,
own stock that would be considered the possession of a capitalist in
Iceland, and have money in the savings banks. Their sons and
daughters have had university educations and have entered every
avenue of life, farming, trading, practicing medicine, actually teaching
English in English schools. Some are members of Parliament. It was a
hard beginning, but it was a rebirth to a new life. They are now among
the nation builders of the West.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that Canada's nation builders
consisted entirely of poor people. The race movement has not been a
leaderless mob. Princes, nobles, adventurers, soldiers of fortune, were
the pathfinders who blazed the trail to Canada. Glory, pure and simple,
was the aim that lured the first comers across