Canada and the West Indies. 113 



Canada was now paying a subsidy of £75,000 for the Canadian steamship 

 service, and something like £120,000 on the Canadian Pacific railway, and 

 he had recently heard it stated that there was a desire to pay a bigger 

 subsidy here for a better service. 



Control of Local Markets. 

 If it was good policy to pay £75,000 as a subsidy for the Canadian 

 Steamship service, and £120,000 on the Pacific, could tbey possibly think 

 of a better investment than to get control of the markets of British 

 Guiana, so that Canadian markets would be their markets and vice versa, 

 and the population doubled in British Guiana and the hinterland developed 

 all for £50,000, two-thirds of what Canada was paying as a steam- 

 ship subsidy. They had just given §25,000,000 as a loan 

 to Bumania, and $25,000,000 had been offered to Italy and another 

 $25,000,000 to Greece with the restriction that the money should be ex- 

 pended on Canadian produce. Canada felt the need of foreign trade, 

 and if it could be shown that she would have any of the advantages he 

 had pointed out, the Government might advance one-half leaving them 

 to provide the other. 



The Population Question. 

 The next question t*iat would be brought up, however, was that the 

 building of a railway was not populating a country, i.e., where were they 

 to get their population ? He had given a great deal of thought to this 

 aspect of the question although he did not pretend to know as much as 

 they did of the subject, and it seemed to him that there were laro-e 

 sources of population in other places that they could tap. He would 

 suggest for instance from the West Coast of Africa and he would also 

 like to see a good set of Chinamen coming in. Perhaps in stating this 

 he was treading on somebody's toes. He knew that they had had some 

 difficulty with the Imperial Government on the subject of immigration 

 but he felt that if Canada was with them on the matter and Canada 

 volunteered to take the responsibility, the trouble would not be as great. 

 It seemed to him that they would miss the chance of their lives if they 

 did not make the railway the means of settling the country too. When 

 the Panama Canal was in course of construction great numbers of siugle 

 men were taken over and put on to work, and as soon as the work was 

 completed they scattered to the four corners of the world. The mere 

 cost of building the railway was in his judgment a secondary thing to 

 the settling of the land, and if possible all immigrants should come in 

 both sexes and in equal numbers, so that they would have an eye to the 

 future. If they had followed this policy in years past with the immigration 

 from India, he ventured to say that to-day they would not have been 

 faced with the labour problem they had to pay attention to. 



Mr. Macaulay further said that they might possibly be able to get 

 Chinese women, and as a general policy the man's family was worth twice 

 as much as the single man. Another thing it seemed to him that they 



