1912] Immigration. 3 



Any tendencies that are at work in Canada to-day will date from about 

 the year 1896; and sixteen years is a very short period in which to study 

 any change. It is the more difficult, inasmuch as the first volume alone 

 of the 1911 Census has been published, and that volume tells us very 

 little. From it we learn that between 1901 and 1911 the population 

 classified as "urban" increased by 62.33%, while the population classi- 

 fied as "rural" increased by only 17.53%. Since the statistics of popu- 

 lation at present available give no hint of the racial composition of these 

 people, we cannot watch the results of this great change. In order to 

 know what is going on in Canada, we must study the same tendencies 

 in some other country, whose statistical records are less absurdly in- 

 adequate than those of the Dominion, and attempt by comparison of 

 our similarities and differences to estimate what is going on in our own 

 midst. 



At this point the student of immigration naturally turns to the 

 United States. Not only has the Census Bureau at Washington pro- 

 vided the most elaborate statistical tables to be found in the world, 

 but also those tables relate to conditions very like our own. A part of 

 the North American Continent, approximately equal in area to Canada, 

 subject largely to the same climatic conditions, developed by men of 

 the same race as our own, growing, as we do, the foodstuffs of the world, 

 and, like ourselves, boasting of the worst and the best features of demo- 

 cratic government, presents a good many points of similarity with our 

 country. Wages and opportunities of investment and the cost of living, 

 the scale of life in the cities and other differences there may be, but 

 these unlikenesses are of a less magnitude than the likenesses already 

 mentioned. So if certain forces, now at work in the United States, can 

 be seen to produce certain definite results, it is probable, in view of the 

 points of resemblance between the two countries, that if those forces 

 are at work in Canada, they are producing these results here also. 



The development of our own country dates, for present purposes, 

 from about 1896. In that year the comparative stagnation of several 

 decades seems suddenly to have ended. For many reasons — mainly, no 

 doubt, because of the rise in the price of wheat after 1894 — continuous 

 streams of capital and labour have been pouring into Canada; and the 

 native Canadian has prospered. The corresponding period in the United 

 States appears to have begun some thirty years earlier. The end of the 

 Civil War, the formation of the joint-stock corporation, the use of the 

 steel rail, and of the triple expansion engine — these things together 

 transformed the continent. We may study American tendencies in 

 immigration as a whole, from the census of 1870 to that of 1910: and 

 just as the present large scale immigration into Canada began only 



