CHAPTER XIII 



RUBAL DEPOPULATION AND URBAN OVERPOPULATION 



It was inevitable that some relationship either real or acci- 

 dental between those distressing family affairs of which he had 

 so recent experience and the political, economic and social 

 movements, which had become for him so absorbing a study, 

 should impress itself upon the mind of Mr. Joseph Keeler, the 

 hitherto even flow of whose life had never given him occasion 

 for serious thought on such matters. He unconsciously com- 

 pared the full, bounding and successful rural life of Upper Can- 

 ada before the "Sixties, " when not more then 17 per cent of the 

 people were in towns with the high pressure of present-day com- 

 mercial life and the restless, artificial and expensive habits of 

 society, and could not fail to realize that many occurrences, 

 social and moral, such as the irregular habits of his son, were the 

 logical and inevitable results of the false standards which society 

 had set up, and to which the young men and women of today 

 in especially the higher circles were expected to conform. Not 

 only so, but he also saw that such were largely destructive of the 

 teaching and example of personal effort through self-denial, 

 which in his boyhood had been constantly inculcated as primary 

 requisites to success in life. It became further apparent to him 

 that the phenomenal material development of recent years in 

 Canada, making in many cases successful speculation possible 

 for young men, whom he knew to be wholly untrained in busi- 

 ness methods, merely through taking the gambler's chances and 

 showing in their plunging foolish irresponsibility for results, 

 was exercising wide-spread baneful and most disastrous effects, 

 not only upon the stability of business, but, what was much 

 more important, also upon the moral fibre of the whole people. 



Young men whom he had known a few years before of no 

 account or standing in business circles were now the most prom- 



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