Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (973 page)

‘I can’t pay a girl’s passage in order to have her married in three months. Besides, she wouldn’t work. They won’t when they see Chinamen working.’

‘Do you object to the Japanese, too?’

‘Of course not. No one does. It’s only politics. The wives of the men who earn six and seven dollars a day — skilled labour they call it — have Chinese and Jap servants.
We
can’t afford it.
We
have to think of saving for the future, but those other people live up to every cent they earn. They know
they’re
all right. They’re Labour. They’ll be looked after, whatever happens. You can see how the State looks after me.’

A little later I had occasion to go through a great and beautiful city between six and seven of a crisp morning. Milk and fish, vegetables, etc., were being delivered to the silent houses by Chinese and Japanese. Not a single white man was visible on that chilly job.

Later still a man came to see me, without too publicly giving his name. He was in a small way of business, and told me (others had said much the same thing) that if I gave him away his business would suffer. He talked for half an hour on end.

‘Am I to understand, then,’ I said, ‘that what you call Labour absolutely dominates this part of the world?’

He nodded.

‘That it is difficult to get skilled labour into here?’

‘Difficult? My God, if I want to get an extra hand for my business — I pay Union wages, of course — I have to arrange to get him here secretly. I have to go out and meet him, accidental-like, down the line, and if the Unions find out that he is coming, they, like as not, order him back East, or turn him down across the Border.’

‘Even if he has his Union ticket? Why?’

‘They’ll tell him that labour conditions are not good here. He knows what that means. He’ll turn back quick enough. I’m in a small way of business, and I can’t afford to take any chances fighting the Unions.’

‘What would happen if you did?’

‘D’you know what’s happening across the Border? Men get blown up there — with dynamite.’

‘But this isn’t across the Border?’

‘It’s a damn-sight too near to be pleasant. And witnesses get blown up, too. You see, the Labour situation ain’t run from our side the line. It’s worked from down under. You may have noticed men were rather careful when they talked about it?’

‘Yes, I noticed all that.’

‘Well, it ain’t a pleasant state of affairs. I don’t say that the Unions here would do anything
to
you — and please understand I’m all for the rights of Labour myself. Labour has no better friend than me — I’ve been a working man, though I’ve got a business of my own now. Don’t run away with any idea that I’m against Labour — will you?’

‘Not in the least. I can see that. You merely find that Labour’s a little bit — er — inconsiderate, sometimes?’

‘Look what happens across the Border! I suppose they’ve told you that little fuss with the Japanese in Vancouver was worked from down under, haven’t they? I don’t think our own people ‘ud have done it by themselves.’

‘I’ve heard that several times. Is it quite sporting, do you think, to lay the blame on another country?’

‘
You
don’t live here. But as I was saying — if we get rid of the Japs to-day, we’ll be told to get rid of some one else to-morrow. There’s no limit, sir, to what Labour wants. None!’

‘I thought they only want a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work?’

‘That may do in the Old Country, but here they mean to boss the country. They do.’

‘And how does the country like it?’

‘We’re about sick of it. It don’t matter much in flush times — employers’ll do most anything sooner than stop work — but when we come to a pinch, you’ll hear something. We’re a rich land — in spite of everything they make out — but we’re held up at every turn by Labour. Why, there’s businesses on businesses which friends of mine — in a small way like myself — want to start. Businesses in every direction — if they was only allowed to start in. But they ain’t.’

‘That’s a pity. Now, what do you think about the Japanese question?’

‘I don’t think. I know. Both political parties are playing up to the Labour vote — if you understand what that means.’

I tried to understand.

‘And neither side’ll tell the truth — that if the Asiatic goes, this side of the Continent’ll drop out of sight, unless we get free white immigration. And any party that proposed white immigration on a large scale ‘ud be snowed under next election. I’m telling you what politicians think. Myself, I believe if a man stood up to Labour — not that I’ve any feeling against Labour — and just talked sense, a lot of people would follow him — quietly, of course. I believe he could even get white immigration after a while. He’d lose the first election, of course, but in the long run.... We’re about sick of Labour. I wanted you to know the truth.’

‘Thank you. And you don’t think any attempt to bring in white immigration would succeed?’

‘Not if it didn’t suit Labour. You can try it if you like, and see what happens.’

On that hint I made an experiment in another city. There were three men of position, and importance, and affluence, each keenly interested in the development of their land, each asserting that what the land needed was white immigrants. And we four talked for two hours on the matter — up and down and in circles. The one point on which those three men were unanimous was, that whatever steps were taken to bring people into British Columbia from England, by private recruiting or otherwise, should be taken secretly. Otherwise the business of the people concerned in the scheme would suffer.

At which point I dropped the Great Question of Asiatic Exclusion which is Agitating all our Community; and I leave it to you, especially in Australia and the Cape, to draw your own conclusions.

Externally, British Columbia appears to be the richest and the loveliest section of the Continent. Over and above her own resources she has a fair chance to secure an immense Asiatic trade, which she urgently desires. Her land, in many places over large areas, is peculiarly fitted for the small former and fruit-grower, who can send his truck to the cities. On every hand I heard a demand for labour of all kinds. At the same time, in no other part of the Continent did I meet so many men who insistently decried the value and possibilities of their country, or who dwelt more fluently on the hardships and privations to be endured by the white immigrant. I believe that one or two gentlemen have gone to England to explain the drawbacks
viva voce
. It is possible that they incur a great responsibility in the present, and even a terrible one for the future.

THE FORTUNATE TOWNS

After Politics, let us return to the Prairie which is the High Veldt, plus Hope, Activity, and Reward. Winnipeg is the door to it — a great city in a great plain, comparing herself, innocently enough, to other cities of her acquaintance, but quite unlike any other city.

When one meets, in her own house, a woman not seen since girlhood she is all a stranger till some remembered tone or gesture links up to the past, and one cries: ‘It
is
you after all.’ But, indeed, the child has gone; the woman with her influences has taken her place. I tried vainly to recover the gawky, graceless city I had known, so unformed and so insistent on her shy self. I even ventured to remind a man of it. ‘I remember,’ he said, smiling, ‘but we were young then. This thing,’ indicating an immense perspective of asphalted avenue that dipped under thirty railway tracks, ‘only came up in the last ten years — practically the last five. We’ve had to enlarge all those warehouses yonder by adding two or three stories to ‘em, and we’ve hardly begun to go ahead yet. We’re just beginning.’

Warehouses, railway-sidings, and such are only counters in the White Man’s Game, which can be swept up and re-dealt as the play varies. It was the spirit in the thin dancing air — the new spirit of the new city — which rejoiced me. Winnipeg has Things in abundance, but has learned to put them beneath her feet, not on top of her mind, and so is older than many cities. None the less the Things had to be shown — for what shopping is to the woman showing off his town is to the right-minded man. First came the suburbs — miles on miles of the dainty, clean-outlined, wooden-built houses, where one can be so happy and so warm, each unjealously divided from its neighbour by the lightest of boundaries. One could date them by their architecture, year after year, back to the Early ‘Nineties, which is when civilisation began; could guess within a few score dollars at their cost and the incomes of their owners, and could ask questions about the new domestic appliances of to-day.

‘Asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks came up a few years ago,’ said our host as we trotted over miles of it. ‘We found it the only way to fight the prairie mud. Look!’ Where the daring road ended, there lay unsubdued, level with the pale asphalt, the tenacious prairie, over which civilisation fought her hub-deep way to the West. And with asphalt and concrete they fight the prairie back every building season. Next came the show-houses, built by rich men with an eye to the honour and glory of their city, which is the first obligation of wealth in a new land.

We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards and avenues, all sluiced down with an air that forbade any thought of fatigue, and talked of city government and municipal taxation, till, in a certain silence, we were shown a suburb of uncared-for houses, shops, and banks, whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the shoulders of loafers. Dirt and tin cans lay about the street. Yet it was not the squalor of poverty so much as the lack of instinct to keep clean. One race prefers to inhabit there.

Next a glimpse of a cold, white cathedral, red-brick schools almost as big (thank goodness!) as some convents; hospitals, institutions, a mile or so of shops, and then a most familiar-feeling lunch at a Club which would have amazed my Englishman at Montreal, where men, not yet old, talked of Fort Garry as they remembered it, and tales of the founding of the city, of early administrative shifts and accidents, mingled with the younger men’s prophecies and frivolities.

There are a few places still left where men can handle big things with a light touch, and take more for granted in five minutes than an Englishman at home could puzzle out in a year. But one would not meet many English at a lunch in a London club who took the contract for building London Wall or helped bully King John into signing Magna Charta.

I had two views of the city — one on a gray day from the roof of a monster building, whence it seemed to overflow and fill with noises the whole vast cup of the horizon; and still, all round its edge, jets of steam and the impatient cries of machinery showed it was eating out into the Prairie like a smothered fire.

The other picture was a silhouette of the city’s flank, mysterious as a line of unexplored cliffs, under a sky crimson — barred from the zenith to the ground, where it lay, pale emerald behind the uneven ramparts. As our train halted in the last of the dusk, and the rails glowed dull red, I caught the deep surge of it, and seven miles across the purple levels saw the low, restless aurora of its lights. It is rather an awesome thing to listen to a vanguard of civilisation talking to itself in the night in the same tone as a thousand-year-old city.

All the country hereabouts is riddled with railways for business and pleasure undreamed of fifteen years ago, and it was a long time before we reached the clear prairie of air and space and open land. The air is different from any air that ever blew; the space is ampler than most spaces, because it runs back to the unhampered Pole, and the open land keeps the secret of its magic as closely as the sea or the desert.

People here do not stumble against each other around corners, but see largely and tranquilly from a long way off what they desire, or wish to avoid, and they shape their path accordingly across the waves, and troughs, and tongues, and dips and fans of the land.

When mere space and the stoop of the high sky begin to overwhelm, earth provides little ponds and lakes, lying in soft-flanked hollows, where people can step down out of the floods of air, and delight themselves with small and known distances. Most of the women I saw about the houses were down in the hollows, and most of the men were on the crests and the flats. Once, while we halted a woman drove straight down at us from the sky-line, along a golden path between black ploughed lands. When the horse, who managed affairs, stopped at the cars, she nodded mysteriously, and showed us a very small baby in the hollow of her arm. Doubtless she was some exiled Queen flying North to found a dynasty and establish a country. The Prairie makes everything wonderful.

They were threshing the wheat on both sides or the track as far as the eye could see. The smoke of the machines went up in orderly perspective alongside the mounds of chaff — thus: a machine, a house, a mound of chaff, a stretch of wheat in stocks — and then repeat the pattern over the next few degrees of longitude. We ran through strings of nearly touching little towns, where I remembered an occasional shack; and through big towns once represented by a name-board, a siding, and two troopers of the North-West Police. In those days men proved that Wheat would not grow north of some fool’s line, or other, or, if it did, that no one would grow it. And now the Wheat was marching with us as far as the eye could reach; the railways were out, two, three hundred miles north, peopling a new wheat country; and north of that again the Grand Trunk was laying down a suburban extension of a few thousand miles across the Continent, with branches perhaps to Dawson City, certainly to Hudson Bay.