which they worked would have gone bankrupt if the Dominion had not come
to its aid with a loan of millions. Likewise of Poles and Galicians in
the coal mines. When Charles Gordon--Ralph Connor--was sent to
investigate the strike in these mines he found foreigners earning
seventeen dollars a day on piecework who had never earned fifty cents a
day in their own land. I have in mind one Galician settler who has
accumulated a fortune of $150,000 in perfectly legitimate ways in ten
years. Even the Doukhobors--the eccentric Russian religious
sect--hooted for their oddities of manner and frenzies of religion--are
accumulating wealth in the Elbow of the Saskatchewan, where they are
settled.

From the national point of view Canada needs these foreign settlers.
She needs their labor. Every man to her is worth fifteen hundred
dollars in productive work. The higher wages he earns on piecework the
more Canada is pleased; for the more work he has done. But at the
present rate of peopling Canada these foreign born will in twenty years
outnumber the native born. What will become of Canada's national
ideals then? In one foreign section of the Northwest I once traveled a
hundred miles through new settlements without hearing one word of
English spoken; and these Doukhobors and Galicians and Roumanians and
Slavs were making good. They were prospering exceedingly. Men who had
come with less than one hundred dollars each and lived for the first
years in crowded tenements of Winnipeg or under thatch-roof huts on the
prairie now had good frame houses, stables, stock, modern implements.
The story is told of one poor Russian who, when informed of the fact
that the land would be his very own, fell to the earth and kissed the
soil and wept. Such settlers make good on soil, whatever ill they work
in a polling booth. Except for his religious vagaries, the Doukhobor
Russian is law abiding. The same can not be said of the other Slav