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weekly newspapers, endless booklets, exhibitions at state and county fairs, excursions for farmers' delegates and press representatives, commissions to agents in every likely State, ready assistance in making the trek to the North, brought them in their thousands. In 1897 seven hundred settlers came to Canada from the United States; in 1900, fifteen thousand; in 1911, one hundred thousand.

Still greater in numbers was the British migration. The fact that tens of thousands of American settlers preferred Canada even to their own wondrous land was an argument of telling weight elsewhere. There had always been a fairly large immigration from Great Britain, some ten thousand a year in the nineties, but the United States had secured three or four times as many. Now an active campaign reversed the proportions. From ten thousand in the nineties British immigrants to Canada increased to fifty thousand in 1904, and to a hundred and twenty thousand in 1911.

In the fifteen years from 1896 to 1911 over two million men and women sought homes in Canada. Of these thirtyeight per cent. came from the British Isles (more English and Scotch, and fewer Irish, than of old), twenty-six from continental Europe, and thirtyfour from the United States. Not all stayed, and the migration of Canadians to the South, while slackening, did not wholly cease, though the fact that in the decade from 1901 to 1911 the ratio of increase in population was greater in Canada than in any other country made clear the magnitude of the net gain. Of those who stayed, not all found Canada the land of promise they had hoped, nor did Canada find in them all the stuff of whom good citizens could be made; yet with all shortcomings, the first great task of peopling the vacant spaces was well achieved.

The land policy did not undergo such great change. The new Government, like the old, continued to grant quarter sections of prairie lands to every homesteader who would fulfil the residence and breaking requirements. Procedure was simplified, fees were lowered, and preëmption privileges extended. The

practice of tying up large areas in land grants to railways was brought to an end immediately after the Liberals took office, though the sale of farm lands to colonization companies and of timber limits continued, leading in more than one instance to charges of speculators' gain and politicians' graft. The homesteader, not the railway-builder, dominated the land policy of these years; from eighteen hundred in 1896, homestead entries rose to forty-four thousand in 1911. Throughout the world there was meanwhile much discussion of the trend, assumed inevitable and universal, toward state ownership and state socialism; unregarded, the contrary trend was shown in the passing of vast areas in Canada from state to individual control. In 1906 the homestead entries covered an area equal to Massachusetts and Delaware combined; in 1908 a Wales was given away; in 1909 five Prince Edward Islands; while in 1910 and 1911, between homesteads, preëmptions, and veteran grants, a Belgium, a Holland, a Luxemburg and a Montenegro passed from state to settler.

The opening of the West required not only a vigorous immigration policy and a liberal land policy; it required an adequate transportation policy. At this stage of development, transportation meant railways. River and canal still played their important part, notably in the transport of bulky freight; the extension of the St. Lawrence canal system, the improvement of the lower St. Lawrence, and the construction of public harbors throughout the dominion were features of the Government's policy. The public highway, again, sorely needed improvement, and with the development of motor transport was about to come into new importance. Yet, after all, the railway and the railway alone. could meet the nation's fundamental needs, linking the far distances together. River and canal and road were local and localized; only the railway could be national.

It was in the regulation of railways that the Laurier government scored its most complete success. The attempt to regulate railway service and operation through a committee of the cabinet had proved a failure. In 1903 the Govern

ment established an independent Board of Railway Commissioners, with wide powers. Its freedom from the constitutional restrictions which hampered the Interstate Commerce Commission, the ability of the men who headed it in turn, the absence of legal formalities in the board's procedure, combined to make it the most popular and effective regulating body in any land.

In the planning and building of new roads success came, but not without serious drawbacks. It was a time of great activity in railway construction. In the fifteen years that followed 1896, nearly ten thousand miles were built, with many more thousands under construction. Two great transcontinentals were built, a network of branch lines developed, old roads double-tracked, grades lowered, curves straightened, equipment modernized, great terminals constructed, and steamship and hotel connections formed. In the prairie West the Canadian Northern grew rapidly from small beginnings, staking out the Saskatchewan country the Canadian Pacific had passed by. In the East the old Grand Trunk, burdened by overissue of securities and hampered by the attempt to operate a Canadian road from London, took on a new lease of life with the accession to control of Charles M. Hays and his American methods. The Canadian Pacific, which for some years had marked time, was stimulated by the new rivalry and the new opportunities to assert its old-time primacy.

It is easy to see to-day that when the Grand Trunk and the Canadian Northern, in 1902 and 1903, began to make definite plans for transcontinental expansion to rival the Canadian Pacific, the wisest policy would have been to compel them to join forces. The Canadian Northern had staked out a splendid territory in the prairie West; the Grand Trunk had access to every industrial center in the East. United, it would have been easily possible to construct a joint road north of Lake Superior and through the Rockies, and to build up a strong system capable of holding its own with the Canadian Pacific. It was not so easily seen in 1903, and each road was allowed to go its separate way.

The other great economic issue was the

tariff. For a score of years the fiscal policy of the country had been the chief bone of contention between the two political parties. The National Liberal Convention held in 1893 had denounced protection, called for a revenue tariff and reduction of rates on the necessaries of life, and urged a fair and liberal reciprocity treaty with the United States. In very great degree these promises were carried out. The tariff of 1897 lowered or abolished the duties on an important range of primary products. The preference granted in the same year to British goods, increased by 1900 to an abatement of one third of the regular tariff rates, was designed to lower costs to the Canadian consumer as well as to encourage the British producer. An attempt was made in 1898, through the Joint High Commission, to secure reciprocity with the United States, but the negotiations failed because of dissension on one of the other issues concerned, the Alaska boundary. In the next ten years occasional further reductions were made. But there was no doubt that after half a dozen years of office the freetrade fervor of the Government cooled. The country was prosperous as never before; why make unsettling changes? The protectionist forces were highly organized; the freer trade sentiment diffused and less concerned. The fact that the Conservative opposition was still more protectionist removed any stimulus to further effort. Revision upward in the textile schedules, bounties on iron and steel manufacture, the passing of an anti-dumping measure, evidenced the compromise with protection which the country seemed to demand. Toward the end of the régime freer trade sentiment revived, and it was in an earnest effort to effect a sweeping reciprocity agreement with the United States that the Laurier government went out of office.

The opening of the West brought a new prosperity to the industrial East. Factories multiplied. Banks were opened in every village. The scale and complexity of business grew yearly. Exports doubled and trebled, and imports grew still more rapidly. "Mushroom millionaires, country clubs, city slums, suburban subdivisions, land booms,

grafting aldermen, and all the apparatus of an advanced civilization grew apace." A new spirit of self-confidence and selfreliance became the dominant note alike in private business and in public policy.

National unity was harder to secure than national prosperity. Much was achieved. The new prosperity at home and the new activity abroad made Canadians of every region proud of their name. Railways and increasing intercourse linked them together. Between East and West a certain tendency to cleavage developed. The break in settlement caused by the Laurentian wilderness south of Hudson Bay, the diversity of origin of the settlers in the prairie provinces, the divergence of economic interest between the farming, free-trade West and the industrial, protectionist East prevented complete harmony. Yet still stronger ties held East and West together. Eastern Canadians and their sons filled most of the strategic posts in the West; railways, banks, political parties, and churches were organized on a national basis. Between Quebec and Ontario there was no little friction. Clerical leaders who wanted isolation for their flock, imperialists who emphasized the ties and sentiments the FrenchCanadian could not share, petty politicians who found their opportunity in stirring racial fires, intensified the problems inherent in wide differences of speech and creed.

There was no object Wilfrid Laurier had more at heart than lessening this friction and misunderstanding. Day

in and day out he preached and practised toleration, urged each to learn the others' ways, emphasized the common Canadianism that transcended provincial limitations. He set his face strongly against the Nationalist movement led by Henri Bourassa, on the ground that it was really provincialism rather than nationalism, and that it aimed at racial and religious isolation. In these tasks hé attained a notable measure of suc

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there was a considerable body of opinion in Canada in favor of political union with the United States. It rapidly died away in face of the hostile tariff attitude of the United States, reviving prosperity at home, and the deep-seated national and imperial consciousness evoked by the danger of annexation. The high-handed action of President Cleveland in the Venezuela dispute killed what was left of annexationist sentiment, and the recoil drove many Canadians into imperialist paths.

Laurier was strongly convinced of the necessity of maintaining good relations with the United States. He considered this imperative not only for the welfare of Canada herself, but in order that Canada might be able to play a part in maintaining the close and friendly relations between the larger English-speaking countries on which rested the hope of the peace of the world. From the first days of assuming office he made it a guiding principle to endeavor to settle every outstanding issue and possible source of friction, and while maintaining Canada's interests and her national self-respect, to lose no opportunity of increasing good-will.

In the Joint High Commission of 1898 an attempt was made to settle accumulated issues alien labor laws, bonding privileges, pelagic sealing, tariff conflict, the Alaska boundary dispute. A tentative conclusion was reached on the minor issues; despite Senator Fairbanks' preoccupation with Indiana lambs and Nelson Dingley's care for Gloucester's cod, a reciprocity agreement was in sight, but the negotiations finally broke off on the Alaskan issue. The Canadian claims were considered by most Americans to have been trumped up after the discovery of gold in the Yukon; the persistence of the United States in barring Canadians access from the sea to her inland territories was held in Canada to be a dogin-the-manger attitude. Reference after tangled diplomatic controversies to a commission consisting of three Americans and two Canadians and one Englishman, led to the upholding of the United States' contention on most points. There followed a violent outburst of discontent on Canada's part, directed not

against the United States, but against the British representative who had delivered judgment against his own expressed conviction, once more "sacrificing Canadian interests on the altar of Anglo-American friendship."

More success was reached in settling by arbitration the northeast Atlantic coast fisheries question and the dispute as to pelagic sealing in the Pacific. But the outstanding achievement of the era of good neighborliness was the solution of the boundary-waters difficulty. The growing importance of many boundary waters not only for navigation and fisheries, but for irrigation and power, led to the establishment of a permanent joint high commission of three members from each country to determine all disputes as to use, obstruction, or diversion of border waters. The friendly relations between the two portions of this body, the common-sense procedure adopted, the unique permission granted private persons in either country to appear before the commission direct without their Government's interposition, the important, though as yet unused, provision for the service of the commission as a miniature Hague tribunal to decide any question whatever at issue between the two countries, were a lasting evidence of the statesmanship of Laurier and of the Canadian lawyer who was mainly responsible for working out the plan, Sir George Gibbons.

The chief remaining source of friction was the customs tariff. Each country had put up high barriers to keep out the products of the pauper labor of its neighbor. Now protectionist sentiment in the United States was declining, after the orgy of the McKinley and Dingley tariffs. Growing cities were demanding cheaper food, manufacturers who had reached the export stage cheaper materials, and newspapers cheaper paper. The tariff profiteer was one of the obvious victims of the muck-raker, then in his prime. On the other hand, protection sentiment was stronger in Canada than in the early nineties. peated rebuffs from the United States, the vested interests of manufacturers, the coming of wide prosperity, induced content with things as they were.

Re

Then came the controversy over the retaliatory clauses of the Payne-Aldrich tariff, and as a sequel the endeavor of President Taft to secure a wider reciprocity agreement which would conciliate the growing freer trade sentiment in his country and make for friendlier relations on the whole continent.

The Laurier government staked its fortunes on the reciprocity agreement worked out in 1911 between Mr. Fielding and representatives of the State Department. Neither the prime minister nor any of his colleagues had doubted that this wide and generous measure of reciprocity, conforming as it did to the demands of both Canadian parties in the past, would be accepted. gladly by the American people. They proved to have gaged opinion wrongly and went down to defeat. The issue was determined not in a referendum, but in a general election where many minor issues entered. The Government was burdened by the accumulated errors of fifteen years of office; the opposition desperate with the hunger of fifteen years' exclusion from the treasury bench. The manufacturers, railways, and financial interests threw their weight heavily against the pact, fearing the thin edge of the wedge of free trade and the danger of diverting East and West traffic from Canadian roads. The industrial cities outweighed or outshouted the country. In country districts many red herrings were drawn across the trail; in Quebec, where the Conservatives entered into what Laurier termed an “unholy alliance" with the Nationalists under Bourassa, Laurier was pictured to the habitant as a bad Catholic and a rampant imperialist; on the concession lines of Ontario a whispering campaign pictured him as a scheming anti-Protestant devotee. Everywhere the flag was waved, reciprocity pictured as a long step toward annexation, and unwise United States expressions of opinion to that effect given widest currency. To let well enough alone, and to get even with the United States for the repeated contemptuous rejections on its part of Canadian overtures for reciprocity in earlier years, were motives weighing heavily with many electors.

In the perspective of the years that have passed, that decision by the majority of the electors has not found approval. Many of the reductions in the duties on Canadian goods offered by the treaty were made later by the United States, applying of course to all countries, not to Canada alone, by the Underwood tariff; they proved of economic advantage to both peoples and did not bring the bogy of annexation a step nearer. The Conservative government itself was forced to move toward reciprocity in wheat and wheat products. Financial and industrial relations between the two peoples multiplied; Canadian railways continued to expand in American territory, United States investors bought Canadian bonds and manufacturers established branch plants, but without bringing any of the dire consequences foretold. Laurier waited patiently for the sober second thought of the people, and was justified by it long before the end came.

With foreign countries in other continents Canada came into increasingly close contact throughout these years. The threatened wave of Oriental immigration made it necessary to pass legislation or negotiate understandings with Asiatic governments in order to check the flow. With European powers the growth of commercial intercourse brought the need of appointing Canadian trade commissioners, consuls in all but name, and negotiating tariff and trade agreements. Increasingly Canada therein assumed a greater measure of control of her foreign affairs. In some instances the negotiations were carried on with the formal intervention of British diplomats, but in other cases conventions signed in Canada by the Canadian finance minister and Italian and Dutch consuls-general marked the steady advance toward full nationhood.

But it was mainly on imperial relations that Laurier set his mark. During his years of office Canada was passing through an important transition time. The principle of self-government which had been developed by Canada's leaders two generations before, and slowly applied to one area after another of national concern, now received its most significant extension. Wilfrid Laurier

might truly have declared that he found Canada a colony and left her a nation.

But

For many a year there had been wide dispute as to the ultimate political destiny of Canada. Laurier himself had fluctuated in opinion. At one stage he considered independence inevitable. Later, he dallied for a brief space with the dream of imperial federation. with the passing of time and the teaching of office he came to the conclusion that for the present at least Canada's destiny did not lie along either path. He believed it possible to work out a policy which would reconcile national and imperial sentiment for the present, and keep the way open for whatever conclusion might seem desirable in the future. More than any other man he developed and put into force the conception of the British Empire as no longer an empire, but a loose league of free and equal states, united under a common king. He was of course a practical politician, a responsible head of a government, not an apostle of any creed, and therefore so far an opportunist that he never formulated sweeping doctrines, or tried to anticipate situations; he simply met each concrete issue as it arose.

This conception involved in the first place asserting Canadian control and Canadian responsibility in all external affairs, and in the second place developing machinery for intercourse between the various parts of the Britannic League, on the basis of conference be tween his Majesty's several and independent governments. As has been noted, Canada gradually took over more and more the determination of her foreign policy in matters of tariff, immigration, and trade relations. Particularly in the case of the United States, though halting short of the logical step of sending a Canadian minister or high commissioner to Washington, control came steadily in fact and in form to Canada's own Government. The issues of peace and war and of defense gave greater difficulty, and when Laurier left office the question of Canada's position in this field had by no means been fully faced or solved. Imperial sentiment dominated in Canada's participation in the Boer War, but her achievements in

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