HISTORY AND PRESENT OPPORTUNITY. 



The beginnings of flax culture in Canada date from the time of the pioneers. The 

 flax plant accompanied their footsteps to help furnish apparel as naturally as wheat 

 came with them to furnish food. Flax has played that very role with every migrating 

 race in history. 



Until the advent of machinery and rapid transportation, all the operations 

 required on flax between sowing the seed and weaving the cloth were performed by 

 hand, as is the case in certain communities even to this day. This wa& true of Ontario 

 farmers, as of all others. The farmer was his own grower and manufacturer. 



An idea of how extensively flax has been cultivated for fibre in Canada may be 

 gathered from the following table: 



PRODUCTION OF FLAX AND LINEN IN CANADA 



For various reasons that need not be discussed here, machinery has been slower in 

 displacing hand-labour in flax working than in the case of most other products of the 

 soil. The result is that the least progressive of the great nations (judged on the score 

 of machinery), is by all oddb the greatest producer of flax fibre. That country is 

 Russia. Russia supplies over 80 per cent of the flax fibre that enters commerce. 



The duTation of the pioneer, or home-manufacturing, stage in flax culture was 

 very short in Ontario. What with the age-old, peculiar prejudice against flax as a soil 

 exhauster, the lack of machinery for harvesting flax, and the growing preponderance 

 of machine-woven as against homespun garments, the Ontario farmer commenced to 

 grow flax for seed production, approximately on the scale and after the manner of 

 cereals, that is, in a rotation, or else grew no flax at all. 



At this point some enterprising men built flax mills in small centres in the south- 

 western peninsula of Ontario, and thereby made it possible for the farmer to continue 

 growing flax for fibre. These mills proved so successful in the early stages that by 

 1871 they had increased in number to about thirty -five, and by 1891 to probably forty. 

 Among the advantages they offered to the farmer were : 



(a) quick cash returns guaranteed on rentals; or 

 (&) a ready market for flax straw in the sheaf. 



In spite of crude methods, rough machinery, and lack of adaptability to- 

 changing conditions, these flax mills prospered so long as there remained plenty of 

 flax workers of the first and second generations of immigrants from flax-working- 



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