possible nor safe with men of
Saxon blood, with German, Scandinavian or Danish immigrants, for
instance.

III

It is futile to talk of the poor and ignorant foreigner as a Goth or a
Vandal--to talk of excluding the ignorant and the lowly. The floating
"he-camps"--as these floating immigrants are called in labor
circles--are to-day doing much of the manual work of the world.
Canadian railways could not be built without them. Canadian industrial
and farm life could not go on without them. They are needed from
Halifax to Vancouver, and their labor is one of the wealth producers
for the nation.

And do not think for a moment that the wealth they produce is for
capital--for the lords of finance and not for themselves. When
Montenegrins, who earn thirty cents a day in their own land, earn
eleven dollars a day on dynamite work constructing Canadian railroads,
it is not surprising that they retire rich, and that the railroad for
which they worked would have gone bankrupt if the Dominion had not come
to its aid with a loan of millions. Likewise of Poles and Galicians in
the coal mines. When Charles Gordon--Ralph Connor--was sent to
investigate the strike in these mines he found foreigners earning
seventeen dollars a day on piecework who had never earned fifty cents a
day in their own land. I have in mind one Galician settler who has
accumulated a fortune of $150,000 in perfectly legitimate ways in ten
years. Even the Doukhobors--the eccentric Russian religious
sect--hooted for their oddities of manner and frenzies of religion--are
accumulating wealth in the Elbow of the Saskatchewan, where they are
settled.

From the national point of view Canada needs these foreign settlers.
She needs their labor. Every man to her is worth fifteen hundred
dollars in productive work. The higher wages he earns on piecework the
more Canada is pleased; for the more work he has done. But at the
present rate of peopling Canada these foreign born will in twenty years
outnumber the native born. What will become of Canada's national
ideals then? In one foreign section of the Northwest I once traveled a
hundred miles through new settlements without hearing one word of
English spoken; and these Doukhobors and Galicians and Roumanians and
Slavs were making good. They were prospering exceedingly. Men who had
come with less than one hundred dollars each and lived for the first
years in crowded tenements of Winnipeg or under thatch-roo