first editions of their paper to
customers on a hand sled. The four men who are to-day the greatest
powers in the railroad world of the Dominion began life, one as a stone
mason, another as a lumber-jack, a third as a store keeper, a fourth as
a telegraph operator. I do not think I am wrong in saying that the
richest wholesaler in Canada reached the scene of his present
activities with his entire earthly possessions in a pocket handkerchief
and a tin lunch pail. Of two of the most powerful men who ever came
out of the maritime provinces, one swept a village store for his living
at a dollar and fifty cents a week; another reached St. John, New
Brunswick, from his home in the backwoods, dressed in a home-made suit,
which his mother had spun and carded from their own wool. The fact
that the door of opportunity is open to the talented tends to prevent
the opening of a chasm of hatred between capital and labor, though it
must be admitted that the warfare of capital and labor in the States
was developing in the era when Rockefeller and Carnegie were lifting
themselves from penury to the heights of financial power.

Infinitely more important is the second reason. For a long time at
least the stanchest, strongest and stablest part of Canada's people
must be rooted to the soil. Up to the present half her population has
been rural, and less than three per cent. absorbed by the factory, the
railway, the labor union. Of her population of 7,800,000, only 176,000
workers belong to labor organizations, and ninety per cent. of these
have never been on strike. These figures alone explain why class
hatred has never widened into a chasm dividing society in Canada.

Why Big Business has never dominated government in Canada will be dealt
with in a later chapter, but if Big Business can not violate law with
impunity at one end of the social scale, it may be safely said that
anarchy will never violate law at the other end of the scale.

At the same time there are symptoms appearing in the industrial
conditions of Canada as gravely dangerous as anything in her
immigration problems. These need only be stated to be apparent. Where
wages have increased only ten per cent. in a decade, the cost of living
has increased fifty-one per cent.--according to an official commission
appointed by the Ottawa government to report. Though Canada is an
agricultural country, in food products alone, she pays ten million
dollars duty yearly. In one f