The Canadian Commonwealth by Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
page 75 of 266 (28%)
page 75 of 266 (28%)
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in permanent tenure by the land. The drifters, the floaters, the
disinherited of their share of earth became landowners, proprietors of Canada to the extent of one hundred and sixty acres. From 1897 to 1911 the Canadian government spent $2,419,957 advertising Canada in England and paying a bonus of one pound per capita to steamship agents for each immigrant; so that each colonist cost the Dominion something over three dollars. I have heard immigration officials figure how each colonist was worth to the country as a producer fifteen hundred dollars a year. This is an excessive estimate, but the bargain was a good one for Canada. In 1901, when Canada's population was five millions, there were seven hundred thousand people of British birth in the Dominion; so that of Canada's present population of 7,800,000, there are in the Dominion a million and a half people of British birth.[1] Averaging winter with summer for ten years, colonists of British birth have been landing on Canada's shores at the rate of three hundred a day. Canada's natural increase is under one hundred thousand a year. British colonists are to-day yearly outnumbering Canada's natural increase. Only two other such migrations of Saxon blood have taken place in history: when the Angles and Jutes and Saxons came in plunder raids to English shores at the dawn of the Christian Era; when in the seventeenth century Englishmen came to America; and both these tides of migration were as a drop in an ocean wave compared to the numbers of English born now flooding to the shores of Canada. Knowing the Viking spirit that rode out to conquer the very elements in the teeth of death, it is easy to look back and realize that these Angles and Jutes and Saxons were bound to found a great sea empire. So, too, of the New England Puritans! Men who sacrificed their all for |
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