Читать книгу Canada at the Cross Roads - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 5

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Sir William Van Horne, one of the great builders of Canada, began life as a boy helping to transport troops for Carl Schurtz in the American Civil War. It was then he first met Jim Hill, the great builder of the wheat empire in the American North-West. Once crossing the continent, a group of us, all North-Westerners, were sitting in his stateroom listening to his racy reminiscences of those early days, when he delivered himself of this somewhat astonishing dictum: "It wasn't Jim Hill who built the wheat empire of the North-Western States; and it wasn't Strathcona, or Mount Stephen, or any of the rest of us, who opened the Canadian North-West! It was the inevitable force of events. Nor was it English bondholders who opened all the West! I'll tell you what poured the population into the West. It was the Civil War. The boys from Vermont and New Hampshire and Pennsylvania served shoulder to shoulder with the boys from the new territories—from Minnesota and the Dakotas and Missouri. They learned in camp talk of the wonderful new world lying West of the Mississippi. They heard of the free land in millions of acres and what that land would raise; and when the war was over, they would not go back to be farm hands in the East, or to slave on the old homesteads. They were restless and the urge drove them West. That is what built the West up. It wasn't any of us. We were just lucky—created by the force of circumstances."

If he were alive to-day, I wonder what he would say about the reaction of the Great War on the Canadian West; for the analogy is very similar, only on a huger scale. Between 400,000 and 500,000 Canadian boys were called to the colours. Over 400,000 went overseas. Over 300,000 fought on the firing line continuously. The other 100,000 were held in reserve in English training camps for replacement. While the casualty list of wounded and dead took a terrible toll—almost 25%—between 300,000 and 400,000 have returned to Canada with a new vision of their own land, with a new sense of their own power, with a national consciousness and unity of purpose hardly articulate to themselves yet, but in a ferment potent for the future of Canada.

"I went over there awed with a sense of Old World traditions," said a young officer to me, "and I lost a lot of illusions. I know now Canada in man power and national wealth is a giant compared to pigmies lined up with those nations we fought to save. Except for minor wounds and some fever I got in Gallipoli and India, I came through alive; and I came through as I know the most of the fellows did, prouder of Canada than I had ever been and determined to put Canada on the map. We met the American fellows, and while we scrapped as members of the same family are apt to do till an outsider butts in, we somehow got the hang of the fact that Canada is not making the progress she ought. She is as big and as rich as the United States. She is chuck full of opportunities. She is as old as the United States. Yet she seems to stall. There they are with a population of 105 millions. Here we are only seven or eight millions. Why don't we go ahead? Our foreign commerce is great for our population—over two billions, to their thirteen or fifteen. We've got the stuff in us. We've got the goods. Yet there they are going ahead of us. What I want to know is—What is the matter with us? Why do we stall, and go ahead in fits and starts?

"Well, why?" I asked him.

He stopped his motor car and sat thinking.

"I don't know—at least not yet," he answered. "But I am going to know. We didn't fight that War for nothing. I am not sure yet; but I think it is because we don't hang together—lack of a feeling we are a nation and going ahead on our own as a nation; and I'll bet you hear the same from 90% of the boys who have come back. We have come alive through that hell. Now, we are going to start something. They will hear from us in Parliament before we are ten years older—"^[1]

And it cannot be gainsaid—that young officer expressed the sentiments of an army of youths old in thought and experience.

"What is the matter with us?"

It is useless at this stage of reconstructing a ruined world to take up time expressing opinions. The world is so full of wind to-day instead of work, of opinions instead of facts, that opinions are not worth one hoot as a foundation on which to rebuild a shattered world.

You have to use solid facts for solid foundations; and not hot air. The world is so full of hot air to-day, that it would take only a match to kindle a universal explosion; and what a match applied to hot air will do—you have best illustrated in conditions in Russia, in conditions in Mexico—which I have witnessed with my own eyes—in conditions in Germany, in conditions in Austria; and Canadians have not the slightest desire to see Canada emulate those conditions.

The world knows what Emma Goldman said when she sailed from New York—that she and her revolutionaries would come back and light a flame that would blow civilization off the face of the earth for a newer and better civilization. Now there is not one of us who does not want and hope and pray and work for a better and better type of civilization to that perfect day, of which the prophets and poets have dreamed; but the present structure of civilization has taken 6,000 years to build; and some of us think if you find a rotten brick or a crumbling stone in that civilization, it is wiser and safer to pull out the bad brick and replace it with a good one than blow the whole structure to hell.

So does Emma Goldman now. You know what she said after she had been in Russia for three months. That it was absolute hell—that three-quarters of the people were starving—and that conditions in America were heaven compared to the conditions she found in a liberated Russia.

And so Canada must build a new world on facts, not opinions.

The wisest teacher the world ever had said, "The Truth shall make you free."

The mathematical fact that 2 and 2 equals 4 is just as much a revelation of God as the proclamation—"The Truth shall make you free."

You can't modify the fact that 2 and 2 equals 4.

The trouble to-day is that a lot of us are trying to prove that 2 and 2 plus hot air will equal 6. It won't. The ends won't meet, as we are finding in breakfast bills, in tax sales, in interest on municipal and provincial and federal bonds.

You can't break an eternal law. It breaks you.

And eternal law is built on facts.

The wisest financier I know in America to-day, a man who began a penniless newsboy in a Middle-Western city twenty years ago, and built up his personal fortune by selling fuel, light and heat to a community of ten million people in the Middle West at a cost of $35 a year, where the community had formerly been paying from $150 to $300 a year—when asked the secret of his marvellous spectacular success, answered very slowly and very thoughtfully:

"Believe what you find to be true;

"Build on facts and hell can't beat you."

And I consider that financier's answer in no wise different from the Scriptural dictum—"The Truth shall make you free."

Only after a moment's reverie, to his formula for success he added—"Yes, and don't forget—if the postman stopped to kick every dog that barks at his heels, he would never get his mail delivered," which is not so different from that other Scriptural injunction—"Turn not to the right hand, nor to the left." "Winnow not with every wind."

And in considering Canada's present and future—let us keep anchored to eternal facts; for it is only on facts we can build up to the nation she ought to be and the destiny which ought to be hers.

Some of the facts will be agreeable.

Some will be disagreeable; but you can't dodge a fact by ducking your head. You get hit just the same.

In area, Canada is one of the largest nations in the world. She is equal in area to European Russia, or to the United States.

Everyone knows that.

In natural resources, Canada is one of the richest nations in the world.

She has unscratched timber areas; she has wheat lands capable of producing a billion bushels a year; she has coal beds, anthracite and bituminous, to supply all her own needs and all South America's; she has mines of the precious metals, promising a future Transvaal; she has oils which may prove a second Mexico; she has fisheries, the best in the world, both on the Atlantic and the Pacific; she has furs—to supply the whole world's demands.

What distresses Canada is—if we have the goods for which the whole world is clamouring, why aren't we delivering them?

If we have the timber areas, the wheat lands, the coal beds, the precious metals, the oils, the fisheries, the furs, why aren't we supplying the demands of a world market, famished for these things and ready to pay the highest price for them known in all time?

Don't dodge the question! Face it!

The objection may be raised—that is not a fair question: we are doing the biggest foreign trade ever known in Canada's history: we—seven-and-a-half million people—are the second biggest buyers the United States have—a nation of one-hundred-and-five millions: we—a nation of seven-and-a-half millions—are the second biggest sellers to the British Empire.

We applaud those totals.

They are magnificent; but don't forget two facts:

Those totals are big because the dollar value is inflated to three times its normal value. If you want those totals in pre-war terms, divide them by three.

Secondly, no matter how big those totals are, they are only a fourth to a fifth the famished world demands.

One dislikes to bore readers with figures; but we want to build on facts.

Take wheat!

Take oil.

Take pulpwood.

Take coal.

Before the War, Europe's average demand for foreign wheat was 500,000,000 bushels a year. Of this demand, Canada supplied in good years over 200,000,000 bushels; in poor years, over 100,000,000 bushels. The deficit was made up by Russia, by India, by Argentina. Since the War, Russia is off the map for ten years. She cannot feed herself. She is starving; starving for the wheat Canada might be selling to her. In time of War, India is far away from Europe; and in the present conditions of industrial unrest no one can tell how long India can be depended on for a wheat surplus. While Argentina has been an enormous exporter of corn, she has seldom exported more than 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 bushels of wheat; and before the War much of that was going to the United States, because the United States were not raising enough for their own milling requirements. You will find the full report of wheat imports from Argentina in the U.S. Agricultural Statistics for 1908 to 1913; and if you want to know how far the biggest United States crop will go, figure six bushels per head for one-hundred-and-five million people, 100,000,000 bushels for seed, and see how much is in ordinary years left for export.

To be sure, Canada's crop will bring her at high and yet higher prices, perhaps an average of $300,000,000 a year, but if she could fill the whole world demand, it would bring her a billion dollars instead of $300,000,000; and leave her bank accounts bulging. Why is she not doing it?^[2]

Or take oil!

The United States in 1919 were using 70,000,000 more barrels a year than they were producing. In 1920, they will be using 100,000,000 more barrels than they are producing. For that oil they will pay $200,000,000 to $300,000,000. There is no use discussing whether Canada has the oil or not. I have on my desk before me specimen oils from Alberta, of as high a basic fuel content as Mexico's, of as high a gasoline content as Pennsylvania's. Why is Canada's oil development not going ahead?^[3]

Or take pulpwood!

In ten years there will not be a stick of pulpwood left East of the Mississippi. In fact, in ten years the paper mills of the Eastern States must either get their raw supplies of pulpwood from Canada, or move their mills to the Forest Reservations in the Rockies. Yet Canada is supplying only two-fifths the United States' yearly demand for pulpwood. Why is she not supplying the entire demand?

Or take coal.

Alberta's lands are literally bulging with coal deposits; and this coal sells for bunkering purposes in South America, in Italy, in Sweden at $30 to $37 a ton; yet Alberta is producing barely enough coal for her own use, and next to none for export purposes. Why?^[4]

Now approach your facts from another angle.

When I went to New York eighteen years ago, the population of the United States was about 90,000,000. To-day it is 105,000,000. New York's population was between three-and-four million. It is to-day between five-and-six millions. Canada's population was close on six millions. It is to-day seven-and-a-half millions. In other words, Canada's population increases one-and-a-half millions in the period the American population increases fifteen millions, and the population of New York alone two millions.

We may say it is better that Canada should develop slowly; but that is only camouflaging her own disappointment. It is better to develop slowly than not to develop at all, but it is only fooling ourselves not to recognize the fact that we are not developing fast enough to enter on the destiny that is opening before us like an open road.

We are not developing fast enough to satisfy the world's demands on us.

We are not developing fast enough to carry our War debts lightly without danger of breaking our backs with taxation.

We are not developing fast enough to carry our local burdens of taxation; and this applies to every centre from Winnipeg to Vancouver. If there were more burden-bearers, the burden would be lighter for each; and when you come to pay your tax bill, think along those lines.

There is no use condemning the tax system; and there is no use condemning the Government for assessing taxes to pay national and municipal bills. The Government in a self-governing country is you and I. The Government is ourselves. The Government is your representative; and Canada pays both her provincial and federal ministers less than a corset fitter on Fifth Avenue earns, less than a woman buyer of children's underwear on Sixth Avenue earns, less than a coal miner in Alberta mines earns, less than many a farm boy will clear on his wheat crop during 1920 in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Alberta. Canada pays her representatives less than any one of them could earn in private life: and then throws the slime and the mud at them free. If Canada answers she pays them more than they are worth—as a cynic suggested to me—then I answer—the joke is at Canada's expense, for it is Canada they represent and it is Canada who elects them; a river never rises higher than its fountain spring; and the fountain spring of all representative government is the people—you and I, who cast the votes. Is it any wonder that two of the best leaders in Canadian public life—one a great Conservative, one a great Liberal—who did their duty all through the War, disregarding alike praise and blame—resigned as soon as the War was over and exchanged $7,000 a year positions as Cabinet leaders, for $40,000 a year posts as managers of private businesses—men without the shadow of a charge of graft against their administration? I refer to the former premier of Quebec, and the former Minister of Finance in Canada.

Not thus do private corporations pick and pay their managers.

They pick the best, most experienced and efficient man money will buy. Then they pay them all they are worth, independent of race, complexion, creed, and they hold them responsible for putting business "over the top."

Canada is to-day doing a two-billion-a-year business. Her foreign trade is over two billion. Her War debts are over two billion.

Does Canada do the same for her public men as successful corporations do for their managers; or does she "winnow with every wind" and elect her managers on sectional, race, class cries?

Think it over and answer that question honestly.

While on the question of population, consider one more set of facts, not opinions, and ponder them deeply!

From the time of the Klondike-Yukon boom to the War, Canada received more than 1,300,000 American settlers through her ports of entry. In April of this year, 1920-21, only 450,000 American settlers were tabulated as remaining in Canada. What became of the other 800,000? Every settler is worth to Canada in work, or crops, in lumber, in minerals, at least $1,000 a year. Why did we lose 800,000 possible settlers, who came in and went out again, and were worth to the country at least $800,000,000 a year?

Take a quick retrospect of Canada's past history!

Quebec fell in 1759.

It was 1842—almost a hundred years—before Upper and Lower Canada came to a working arrangement as to government—almost a hundred years wasted in National Progress, while factions sparred for petty advantages, forgetting, or not conscious, that Canada had not only her destiny but her duty as a nation.

Stalled for almost a hundred years, because the nation had not yet settled down to team work, or developed national consciousness!

Confederation came and almost thirty more years of stalling, while East rooted for East, and West rooted for West, and Quebec played anti-Ontario, and Ontario played anti-Quebec, and High Tariff shrieked it was the only salvation of the country, and Low Tariff shrieked it was the only salvation of the country, six different teams pulling in six different directions, and everybody wondering why the country didn't go ahead.

Then came the Yukon boom, which literally kicked Canada into prosperity, with such an overland rush of gold seekers as opened the Western States after 1848, followed by such land seekers as inundated the Western States after the Civil War.

This brings us down to our own time, when Canada has written her record in the War on the stars, when her fame has gone in a flame to the ends of the earth.

It is easy with a nation as with an individual to look back and see how mistakes were made in the past.

Canada didn't get down to team work quick enough. She sparred away and wasted almost a hundred-and-fifty years of national life—in sectional differences and race cries. She didn't develop a national consciousness of destiny as a nation soon enough.

Let that explanation stand! The tragedy is not in making a mistake. The tragedy is in not learning wisdom from the mistake. Experience can be either a rear light, or a head light. If it is a rear light, it keeps the other fellow from bumping into your blunders. If it is a head light, it keeps you from bumping into the same blunders twice.

Canada has stalled in the past.

Is she going to stall again in the future?

Is she stalling now?

I answer—Canada cannot stall now if she wants to.

Canada to-day is like a great motor car drawing a heavily loaded truck to the top of a steep hill.

The load behind her is her War Debt.

If she stalls now, the load behind will send her to the bottom with a smash.

Canada has contracted War Debts at a currency inflated almost three times above normal.

Have you contemplated what it would mean to a man personally if he had to pay those War Debts with only a third his current earning power?

He would be in exactly the same position as a man buying a house on credit for $6,000 with a salary of $1,500. Suddenly the earning power drops to $500. The debt remains at $6,000. Where it would formerly have taken the buyer four years to pay his debt, it will now take him twelve years; and in those twelve years his house might decrease in value from $6,000 to $2,000; but the debt remains at $6,000.

Or a man has bought a farm at $100 an acre. Currency deflates two-thirds. His farm costs $100; but he might have to sell it under pressure for only $33. That happened to the land values of the Eastern States after the Civil War; and those land values have not yet gone back to the value they had before the Civil War.^[5]

There is little danger of that happening to Western Canadian land values for two reasons:

First, the era of free land accessible to transportation is gone forever in America's history. Land values in Western Canada are bound to increase as they have increased in the Western States from $60 and $75 an acre within ten years to $200 and $300 an acre.

Second, farm products are bound to bring high and higher prices for the next twenty years, no matter how much the dollar deflates, no matter how much temporary slumps and bumps jolt the calculations of the producer, for the simple reason there is not enough food being produced for the needs of the world. Neither is there enough gold, nor coal, nor oil, nor timber, nor pulpwood.

And Canada is literally bulging with all these sources of wealth, with a huge War Debt, which she has to pay, but unable to deliver more than one-third, one-fourth, or one-tenth of what the world needs and would pay the highest prices for.

Face the facts and don't evade them—What is the matter with us?

A Canadian may answer—How can we produce more wheat, more coal, more oil, more timber, more pulpwood, when there isn't a farm, or factory, a coal mine, a pulp mill in Canada to-day which has all the help it needs?

An outsider might come back to you with the counter question—

How do you expect to have full crews for farms, or mills, for mines or factories—if out of 1,300,000 American settlers you lose 800,000?

How do you expect to have full crews if one faction in Canada says, "We don't want American settlers?" and another faction says, "We don't want Italian labourers?" and another faction says, "We don't want foreigners?" while another says, "We don't want any people who haven't money?" And yet another puts up the sign on his shop—"No Englishman need apply." (This Canadian may have had experience with English home-brewed agitators.)

How do you expect to get people with money, if one faction attacks Capital, and another faction attacks Labour? Labour and Capital are in Canada one and the same thing. The contractor of yesterday—the Manns, the McKenzies, the Van Hornes—are the capitalists of to-day; and the contractor of yesterday was the labourer of the day before yesterday. Each of these men—great powers in the railroad world—began life with manual toil at less than $1.50 a day. Canada is the last country on earth to tolerate the growth of class consciousness, of class hatred, in her democracy. Canada gave 400,000 of the flower of her Canadian youth, 60,000 of whom sleep in Flanders' Fields, 100,000 of whom are maimed for life—to defeat German autocracy in War. It would be a tragedy unspeakable, having helped to win the War, to be conquered in times of peace by the Karl Marx German theories of mobocracy, of class hatred, of class envy. There is no capitalist in Canada who is not a labourer. There is no labourer in Canada who cannot be a capitalist, if he accumulates savings and pools them with other labourers' savings, for investment in establishing new railroads, new factories, new paper mills. Capital is not—as the Karl Marx school of thinkers would have us believe—an aggregate of gold filched away from labour and put in the strong boxes of Wall Street by modern robber barons. Capital is an aggregate of many small savings from labour. If I work eight hours and can just earn enough for my needs with no surplus over, I am a labourer. If I work sixteen hours, and save in a bank the surplus of eight extra hours, do I cease being a labourer? Am I cloven asunder by a chasm of hatred, the saving part of me hating the labouring part of me, the labouring part of me hating the saving part of me? I refuse to be so split apart by such fictitious lines of cleavage. So must Canada as a nation. Especially must Canada, because always the great preponderance of her population must be, not middlemen, but essential producers of something from nothing, creators of wealth, from farm, from timber limits, from the mines lying fallow in the earth. In Germany, an essentially industrial factory nation, conditions were different. Karl Marx had his facts; but Canada is not Germany. Her conditions are not Germany's conditions. Each man may become a vested righter by the labour of his own hands. His incentive is reward to him if he works, not to some man who does not work and sits on his shoulders as the royalists of Germany sat on the shoulders of their subjects; and we should beware how we destroy that incentive to the Canadian worker, by adopting in peace German theories of class hatred which we defeated in war.

Factional class cries have hurt Canada in the past. They must not be allowed to retard her in the present, or wreck the machinery of production just as the big national car with its motor load of War Debt reaches the crest of the hill.

It is immaterial whether such factions mask under the name of Capital or Labour, of East or West, of Catholic or Protestant, of Manufacturer or Farmer, of Loyalty or Anarchy.

Canada has just one job on hand for the next century; and that is to go over the top in time of Peace with the same glory and unified aim with which she went over the top in time of War.

It would be a tragedy if Canada lost in Peace what she gained in War; and she is in greater danger of that than she ever was of losing the War.

I suppose since I came back to revisit Canada in detail from Atlantic to Pacific, I was asked a dozen times what I thought of the Irish problem; and I have answered as I answer now—though there is not one drop of blood in me that is not Scotch-Irish-Welsh—that I considered the Irish problem is none of Canada's business.

Canada's business to-day is Canada—Canada first, Canada second, Canada third, Canada from first to last, from beginning to end and all through the middle—a unified Canada, with her eye on just one star—her national destiny, as one of the three great world democracies, Great Britain, the United States, Canada.

And then I have been asked with an air of truculence if that didn't imply disloyalty to the Empire.

Disloyalty to the Empire! After Canada's War Record?

The question is—to laugh!

What is the greatest service Canada can do the Empire to-day?

To increase her production.

To pay her War Debts.

To hold fast forever in bonds of eternal unity the three great democracies of the world against the onslaught of the subtlest foe that ever menaced democracy. There is no need to add that I refer to the anarchy which is to-day hurling three-quarters of all Europe over the edge of a precipice and seething like a volcano under the thin crust of civilization in Asia. As Archbishop Matheson replied most pithily to a questioner at the recent Lambeth Conference, when, as Primate of all Canada, he was asked by English bishops what he thought of the League of Nations, "the two great Anglo-Saxon democracies must hang together now, or be hanged separately." Nations that have not proved their fitness for self government by winning it and demonstrating it are arrayed against the great democracies in Asia and in Europe. United, they are safe. Divided, the very foundations of civilization—religious belief, personal liberty, personal possession, law, order, literature, art—are in peril. Half the world has been reduced to the verge of starvation by anarchistic experiments in untried theories that have failed of all promises and ended in the lawless tyranny of mobocracy. Of this, Russia, Austria, Mexico are examples that should be warnings.

If the three great democracies do not hold together now, in spite of a thousand factional voices paid to drive a wedge of hate through their friendship, it is "Good-bye, civilization." Roll up the map; and Canada's car smashes to bottom in a financial wreckage from which she will not recover in a hundred years.

Why play into the hands of the enemy you defeated in War, by stirring up ill-feeling internationally by a policy of even pin pricks?

I asked a dear friend of mine, who was jibing at Americans, what she thought would happen if American bankers—of whom an enormous proportion are German—called the loans of the Allies from the United States.

She said they would never do that because it would bankrupt the world; and the bankers wanted their money too badly to do that.

I then asked her what she thought would happen if her policy of pin-pricks produced such a reaction from friendship South of the Boundary, that the United States might erect a high tariff wall against exports from England. Where would England sell her goods to pay her War Debts? What would happen to England?

She said she hadn't thought of that.

I said I thought it would be a first class thing to think about for the next twenty years.^[6]

I suppose while I was in Canada I was asked a hundred times did I believe in the One Big Union.

Don't shiver. Brace yourselves! I wasn't even lady like. I was just plain woman and I broke into our rich Western vernacular. I answered—You bet I believe in One Big Union; but the One Big Union I believe in is the One Big Union of Capital and Labour, of East and West, of Imperialist and anti-Imperialist, the One Big Union of a unified Canada with her eye on only one Star—her national destiny to hold in Peace that freedom which she gained in War.

Any One Big Union smaller than that was simply another of the old factional cries in another guise; and factional cries have been the hindrance in Canada's progress in the past.

I have been asked didn't I think we should eliminate "the profit system" in Canada; and I answered that question was couched in terms of Karl Marx and Germany, not in terms of Canada; and I can best illustrate the case by the examples of two men I met on farms near Lake Winnipeg late in July. One was an English agitator steeped in German theories. He said if the miners and the lumber men and the factory hands were not going to work more than eight hours a day and five days a week, he would be blowed—only he used a stronger term—if he would work more than eight hours a day to feed them; so he went to his fields at nine in the morning and watched the clock to come in at five in the afternoon; and as the late spring and early frosts and sunlight didn't work on an eight hour day—I am not quarrelling with the sunlight for this, I am just stating the fact—he got only enough crop in to feed his milk cows; and as his wife milked the cows and his youngsters delivered the milk at the creamery, he made just enough to keep his family alive, though I noticed all the younger children ran barefoot and the broken window panes were stuffed with paper. But he lived up to his theories. He had eliminated "profits" all right. Right over the barbed wire fence next door to that man was a Canadian boy, who didn't know anything about theories of "eliminating profits." He watched the sunlight and he watched the frost and he hustled from four in the morning to nine at night to beat the weather, and he had over 200 acres in A1, waist high Marquis wheat, which promised to yield him 40 bushels to the acre. That boy told me he expected his crop in 1920 to pay off all his debts and yield him enough profit to build a house for his English bride. Now if you ask me do I think the man on one side of the barbed wire fence should be allowed to step over the wire and eliminate that boy's profit, or share them, I don't.

I don't hard! I would advise the boy to resist such a theory with a pitch-fork.

Again and again, I was asked "oughtn't we to nationalize this, or nationalize that?" and I have answered in the words of Mr. Roosevelt's famous guide. You remember—the Colonel was out hunting. They were fording a particularly bad mountain stream. The spray got in the Colonel's eyes exactly as a lot of yeasty half-baked theories are getting in our eyes now. He called out to the guide—"Say, old man, don't you think we ought to ford this stream a little higher up?" The guide yelled back over his shoulder—"Boss, we ain't dealing with ought-tos on this trip. We're dealing with half-tos."

And that is exactly Canada's position to-day. Canada had taken the plunge; and she has to ford the financial stream, or get swamped.

As to nationalization, deal with facts, not theories! Nationalization of railroads cost the United States in two years two-and-a-half billion of a deficit. Is Canada prepared to put her hand in taxpayers' pockets and pay-wages and incomes to make up such a deficit? If so, go to it; but let her be sure she knows in terms of fact, not theory, exactly what she is undertaking to do.

And so I have just one message for Canada—

Down with factions that have stalled Canada's progress in the past!

Down with catch-cries out with promise of honey to catch the voting flies!

Down with every disruptive voice playing old tricks under a new guise!

Lack of unified aims has hindered Canada in the past. Let her experience be a head light to the open road, not a rear light over failure.

Canada has only one job for a century, and that is to build up in Peace what she has won in War—to go over the top to her destiny as one of the world's greatest democracies.

[1]

This boy has made good his prophecy. In his home city the two old parties put up their approved candidates with party backing and funds, and beat all the tom-toms of the old cries to rally the clans. A soldier—blind—ran without funds and without backing as an independent. He was elected by an overwhelming majority.

[2]	It need hardly be explained here, the temporary slump in wheat prices is the result of adverse European exchange, not the result of an over-production of wheat. Europe cannot pay $4.86 for $3.60 worth of wheat.

[3]	The panic of 1921 decreasing demands of oil for the summer of 1921 does not change the facts. Soon as motors resume their abnormal growth and output and use, the shortage is bound to be repeated.

[4]	Yet in 1921 more than half the coal mines of the West were shut down, or on half time. When the drought hit the crops of two provinces, coal orders fell off. Demand for coal was great as ever, but operators could not finance wages without orders.

[5]

The best example I know of this was in the drought areas of the West in 1921. When production fell off owing to crop failure, land values in those areas fell to $30, $2 and $1, with no buyers under foreclosed mortgage sales. While Canada cannot control the rains, she can control and retain her wheat producers by permitting them to remit homesteads in arid sections and take new homesteads in better sections not subject to drought. Arid lands in the United States are homesteaded in 320-acre blocks. Why not in Canada?

[6]	She realizes that now, for cattle values in her own province have fallen from $100 to $3 a head on the mere prospect of a tariff against Canadian exports.