of Montreal. Of Italians at last report there were fully 60,000 in
Canada. In one era of seven years there took up permanent abode in
Canada 121,000 Austrians, 50,000 Jews, 60,000 Italians, 60,000 Poles
and Russians, 40,000 Scandinavians. When you consider that by actual
count in the United States in 1900, 1,000 foreign-born immigrants had
612 children, compared to 1,000 Americans having 296 children, it is
simply inconceivable but that this vast influx of alien life should not
work tremendous and portentous changes in Canada's life, as a similar
influx has completely changed the face of some American institutions in
twenty years. Immigration to Canada has jumped from 54,000 in
1851-1861 to 142,000 in 1881-1891, and to 2,000,000 in 1901-1911. It
has not come in feeble rivulets that lost their identity in the main
current--as in the United States up to 1840. It has come to Canada in
inundating floods.

Chief mention has been made of the races from the south of Europe
because the races from the north of Europe assimilate so quickly that
their identity is lost. Of Scandinavians there are in Canada some
fifty thousand; of Icelanders, easily twenty thousand; and so quickly
do they merge with Canadian life that you forget they are foreigners.
I was a child in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and their
rise has been a national epic. I do not believe the first few hundreds
had fifty dollars among them. They slept under high board sidewalks
for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties on vacant lots the
next day. In these they housed the first winter. Though we
Winnipeggers did not realize it, it must have been a dreadful winter to
them. Their clothing was of the scantest. Many were without
underwear. They lived ten and twenty to a house. The men sawed wood
at a dollar and a half a day. The women worked out at one dollar a
day. In a few weeks each family had bought a cow and rudiments of
winter clothes. By spring they had money to go out on their
homesteads. During winter some of the grown men attended school to
learn English. Teachers declared they never witnessed such swift
mastery of learning. To-day the Icelanders are the most prosperous
settlers in Manitoba. The same story could be told of German
Mennonites driven from Russia by religious persecution and of
Scandinavians driven abroad by poverty. Of course, the weak went to
the wall and died, and didn't whine about the dying, though