in perfect English with flower gardens below the window kept by
themselves--the little girls learning sewing and housekeeping in upper
rooms, the boys learning technical trades in the basement. All this is
good and well; but how about the recognition Canada gives these
teachers who manufacture men and women out of mud, who do more in a day
for the ideals of the nation than all the eloquence that has been
spouted in Houses of Parliament? In Germany, they say--once an army
man always an army man; for though the pay is ridiculously small,
social prestige and recognition are so great that the army is the most
desirable vocation. Canada's teachers in the schools among foreigners
are doing for the Dominion what the German army has aimed to do for the
empire. Do the Canadian teachers receive the same recognition? The
question needs no answer. They receive so little recognition that the
majority throw aside the work at their twenty-first year and crowd into
other over-crowded professions. Meanwhile time moves on, and in twenty
years the foreign vote will outnumber that of the native born.




CHAPTER VIII

THE COMING OF THE ORIENTAL

I

If the coming of the foreigner has been Canada's greatest danger from
within, the coming of the Oriental has been one of her most perplexing
problems from without. It is not only a perplexity to herself. It is
a perplexity in which Canada involves the empire.