nto, of Winnipeg, of Vancouver. From
nothing in 1800, these cities have grown to metropolitan centers of
three hundred thousand, and their growth is the subject of fevered
civic pride. It ought to be cause of gravest alarm. In the history of
the world, when men began to hive in a crowded cave life, those nations
began to decline. The results are always the same--an extortionate
rise in the cost of food, the long bread line, charity where there
ought to be labor and thrift, food riots, terrible tragic contrasts of
the very rich and the very poor, all the vices that go with crowded
housing. When charity workers investigated in Toronto and Montreal and
Winnipeg, they found foreigners living forty-three in five rooms,
twenty-four and fifteen and ten in one. Wherever such proportions
exist as to rural and urban population, ground rentals and values
ascend in price like overheated mercury. Men begin to build
perpendicularly instead of latitudinally. The cave life of the
skyscraper takes the place of the trim home garden, and so greed of
gain--interest on extortionate real estate values--takes its toll of
human life and virtue, clean living and clean thinking. In one section
of Canada during ten years, where there had been an increase of 574,878
in the country population, there was an increase of 1,258,645 in the
city population. Between 1901 and 1911, where 39,951 newcomers settled
in the country districts of Quebec, 313,863 settled in the cities. For
one who chose life in the open, eight chose the tenement and the
sweatshop. In 1901 Canada had 3,349,516 people living in the country,
and 2,021,799 living in the cities. By 1911 there were 3,924,394
living in the country, and 3,280,440 living in the cities.

All this signifies but one thing to Canada--a swift transition from
agricultural status to industrial life; and whether such an artificial
transition bodes good or ill for a land whose greatest wealth lies in
forest and mine and farm remains to be seen. For the time it has
resulted in a cost of living almost prohibitive to the very poor. The
sweatshop, the tenement, the Ghetto, the cave life hovel of Europe have
been reproduced in the crowded foreign quarters of Canadian cities. It
means more than physical deterioration and moral contamination and
degeneration of national stamina. It means if Canada is to become a
great manufacturing country, feeding the human into the hopper of the
machine that dividends m