uses of Parliament? In Germany, they say--once an army
man always an army man; for though the pay is ridiculously small,
social prestige and recognition are so great that the army is the most
desirable vocation. Canada's teachers in the schools among foreigners
are doing for the Dominion what the German army has aimed to do for the
empire. Do the Canadian teachers receive the same recognition? The
question needs no answer. They receive so little recognition that the
majority throw aside the work at their twenty-first year and crowd into
other over-crowded professions. Meanwhile time moves on, and in twenty
years the foreign vote will outnumber that of the native born.

CHAPTER VIII

THE COMING OF THE ORIENTAL

I

If the coming of the foreigner has been Canada's greatest danger from
within, the coming of the Oriental has been one of her most perplexing
problems from without. It is not only a perplexity to herself. It is
a perplexity in which Canada involves the empire.

Take the three great Oriental peoples! With China, Great Britain is in
friendly agreement. With Japan, Great Britain is in closest
international pact. To India, Great Britain is a Mother. Yet Canada
refuses free admission to peoples from all three countries. Why? For
the same reason as do South Africa and Australia. It is only
secondarily a question of labor. The thing goes deeper than that.

Consider Japan first: Panama is turning every port facing west into a
front door instead of a back door. Within twenty years, the combined
populations of American ports on the Pacific have jumped from a few
hundreds of thousands at San Francisco and nothing elsewhere to almost
two million, with growth continuing at an accelerated rate promising
within another quarter of a century as many great harbors of almost as
great population on the Pacific as on the Atlantic. The Orient has
suddenly awakened. It is importing something besides missionaries. It
is buying American and Canadian steel, American and Canadian wool,
American and Canadian wheat, American and Canadian machinery, American
and Canadian dressed lumber. Ship owners on the Pacific report that
the docks of through traffic are literally jammed with goods outward
bound--"more goods than we have ships," as the president of one line
testified.

When the reason for building Panama has been shorn of highfalutin
metaphors, it concentrates down to the simple bald fact that the United