The Canadian Commonwealth | Page 6

has Canada for measuring her strength with the nations of the world? Having remained almost stationary in her national progress from 1759 to 1859, what reason has she to anticipate a progress as swift and world-embracing as that which forced the United States to the very forefront of world powers? It takes something more than high hopes to build empire. Has Canada a foundation beneath her high hopes? No nation ever had a more passionate patriotism than Ireland. Yet Ireland has lost her population and retrogressed.[2] Why will the same fate not halt and impede Canada?
It may be acknowledged here that Canadians have no answers for such questions and short shift for the questioner. They are too busy making history to talk about it. It is only the woman insecure of her social position who prates about it. It is only the nation uncertain of herself that bolsters a fact with an argument. Canada is too busy with facts for any flamboyant arguments. It is an even wager that if you ask the average well-informed business man in Canada how many miles of railways the Dominion has, he will answer on the dot "almost thirty thousand." But if you ask if he knows that Germany, for instance, with nine times denser population has barely twice as much trackage--no, your Canadian business man doesn't know it. He is too busy building his own railroads to care much what other nations are doing with theirs. Likewise of the country's trade increasing faster almost than the Dominion can handle it. He knows that imports have increased one hundred and sixty-three per cent. in ten years, and that exports have increased almost fifty per cent.; but he doesn't realize in the least that the Dominion with seven million people has one-fourth as large a foreign trade as the United States with a hundred million people.[3] He knows that immigration has in ten years jumped from 49,000 a year to 402,000; but does he take in what it means that his country with only five million native born is being called on to absorb yearly a third as many immigrants as the United States with eighty million native born?[4] He has been so busy handling the rush of prosperity that has come in on him like a tidal wave that he has not had time to pause over the problems of this new destiny--the fact, for instance, that in two more decades the newcomers will outnumber the native born.
II
Unless the edifice be top heavy, beneath it all must be the rock bottom of fact. Beneath the tide is the pull of some eternal law. What facts is Canada building her future on? What pull is beneath the tide of four hundred thousand homeseekers a year? What has doubled population and almost doubled foreign trade?
It is almost a truism that the farther north the land, the greater the fertility, if there be any fertility at all. There is first the supply of unfailing moisture, with a yearly subsoiling of humus unknown to arid lands. Canada is super-sensitive about her winter climate--the depth and intensity of the frost, the length and rigor of her winters; but she need not be. It should be cause of gratitude. Frost penetrating the ground from five to twelve feet--as it does in the Northwest--guarantees a subterranean root irrigation that never fails. Heavy snow--let us acknowledge frankly snow sometimes banks western streets the height of a man--means a heavy supply of moisture both in thaw and rain. There is second the long sunlight. An earth tilted on its axis toward the sun six months of the year gives the North a sunlight that is longer the farther north you go. When the sun sets at seven to eight in New York, it sets at eight to nine in Winnipeg, and nine to ten in Athabasca, and only for a few hours at all still farther north. It is the long sunlight that gives the fruit of Niagara and Quebec and Annapolis its "fameuse" quality; just as it is the sunlight that gives western fruit its finest coloring, the higher up the plateau it is grown. It is the long sunlight that gives Number One Hard Wheat its white fine quality so indispensable to the millers. So of barley and vegetables and small fruits and all that can be grown in the short season of the North. What the season lacks in length it gains in intensity of sunlight. Four months of twenty-hour sunlight produce better growth in some products than eight months of shorter sunlight.
These two advantages of moisture and sunlight, Canada possesses.[5] What else has she? It doesn't mean much to say that Canada equals Europe in area and that you could spread Germany and France and Austria and Great Britain