Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThe Stringency and the collapse of the
land boom—Farewell to Eureka Park
FOR all the Sturm und Drang over Parliament Hill, for all the confusing and contradictory reports from abroad about the imminence or impossibility of war, the country had other things to think about. During the previous twelve months Stephen Leacock had published his delightful Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Robert Service had written Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, and the new verses of a wide-eyed Indian maiden named Pauline Johnson had caught the country’s imagination more vividly than either Leacock or Service.
But it was not Parliament, not culture, not even the Kaiser, that bulked most prominently in the ken of most Canadians in the year 1913. The biggest and certainly the most intimate news was the Stringency. A few editors of the less responsible kind came right out and used the word “depression.” But “stringency” was the accepted euphemism.
Whatever the name, the reality was felt everywhere. During the year ninety-eight leading stocks dropped an average of 17 per cent. C.P.R. slumped from a high of $2.66 to a low of $2.15, and even bank stocks were down an average of seven points. New building was down by a quarter.
No two people agreed exactly on all the causes. That most of the world was undergoing a minor recession was apparent; it was equally apparent that Canada’s was a major one. The more or less universal factors affecting most nations were wars and threats of wars in the Balkans, revolutions and threats of revolutions in China and Mexico, and a nervous tendency to hoard gold almost everywhere.
All this made money hard to come by, and Canada, with an adverse trade balance of $300,000,000 and a record intake during the year of 412,000 immigrants, most of them with no visible resources but their health, stood in particularly pressing need of money. The swift mushrooming of the West left scores of towns and cities without adequate streets, waterworks, and sewers; many of them, convinced there was no end to their growth, not only borrowed to meet their current needs but tried to borrow to meet the needs of a boundless future. Other causes, symptoms, and effects, real and imagined, met and reinforced one another at a dozen other points; the recklessness of the banks, the cowardice of the banks, the rapacity of the railroads, profiteering in farm machinery, the inefficiency and laziness of labor, general extravagance.
The most memorable outcome of the Stringency was the collapse of the land boom. Since 1897 a million people from the British Isles, nine hundred thousand from the United States, and seven hundred thousand from other parts of the world had come to live in Canada, most of them in the booming West. For forty years the government had been offering a free homestead of 160 acres to anyone who would keep it under the plow for three years. With this went an option to buy the adjoining quarter section at giveaway prices. The railways, which had been given millions of acres of farmland along with their franchises, had been hawking prairie wheatland at bargain rates all over the world; to them empty land was worse than useless along their rights of way and every settler was an asset. In the intermediate stages of the land rush private colonization companies had been paid up to five dollars for every person they could set down in the West. Now the best of the cheap land and the free land were beginning to run out. About the same time a vision caught fire—the vision of five, ten, fifty million people transforming the Canadian West into a kind of agrarian World of Oz, with seas of gleaming, unfailing wheat stretching interminably from one vast spired city to another.
In 1901 the village of Saskatoon had a population of 113. Ten years later its residents were investing their savings in a projected industrial suburb to be called Factoria, which was expected to be as large and important as Detroit or Pittsburgh in a very short time. In the wake and sometimes in the van of hopes like these, real estate speculators became as thick in the West as the whisky traders of forty years before. Get-Rich-Quick Wallingfords fanned across the lonely plains with wondrous stories, and some of their stories were partly true. Land jumped ten and twenty times in price if not in value almost overnight. When word went around that a new block of the diminishing reserves of homestead land was being opened up, the eager takers sometimes lined up for as much as two weeks in front of the government offices. The fever of land speculation spread to the East, to Montreal and Toronto. Every big city was encircled by its own nimbus of subdivisions, identifiable only on the maps of the real estate agents, distinguishable from the two million square miles of still unsettled Canada only by the fancy and artificial price tags.
Then, when money started to grow scarce, everybody began to unload land at once. Some of the dream subdivisions were to be revived and become real years and decades later, but for the time being the Eureka Parks, the Grand View Heightses, the Lakeshore Gardenses, the Maple Vales, the Dunvegan Terraces, the Inglewoods, and the Cobble Hills lay forgotten among their hillsides, ravines, poplar bluffs, and sweeps of naked prairie.
Thus the nation’s preoccupations, although not altogether pleasant, were on an intimate and domestic scale as the year turned into 1914. On Christmas Eve of that year it would be a hundred years since the end of the War of 1812. The accusations and insults of the last election had now had two years of cooling out, and everyone was looking forward to celebrating a century of peace along the famous undefended border.
