ence overseas, as though they had contracted their wisdom when they expanded their knowledge. There are whole Downing Streets of head offices of business houses in London and Liverpool and Manchester. In truth, the burden of Mr. Grigg's appeal to the British trader is only a variant of the official intimations, of a political sort, which in a thousand different forms have been sent to Downing Street from all the corners of the Empire.

In families, in trade, and in politics, there come times when the parent must openly confess that his offspring has grown up. Where there is talk of marriage in a debatable quarter there is tenfold need of common-sense. The report shows clearly that, as to trade, geography is against the Britisher in Canada; chiefly because of the speed with which orders to United States manufacturers are filled. The British disadvantage extends occasionally to imports from Canada. Last September I was at Chicoutimi, at the head of the Saguenay, that wonderful arm of the St. Lawrence in which all the navies of the world could be hidden, in what, as you ascend the river, looks like a chain of lakes. In deep water, eight miles below the town, I visited a steamer loading pulp for Queenborough. The captain was chafing because he had waited three weeks for a cargo, and seemed as far from sailing as when he arrived. The explanation was that pulp had risen five dollars a ton in the United States, and it was profitable for the Chicoutimi manufacturers to pay the demurrage on the vessel, and to ship the freight over the Quebec and Lake St. John Railway. Again, this same railway has opened a branch to La Tuque, on the St. Maurice River, mainly because a United States syndicate, which has bought waterpower and timber lands, has guaranteed a yearly minimum of 9000 cars of outbound freight for nine years. The proposed export duty on pulp and pulpwood will not materially affect the general situation for British trade in Canada; except so far as it tends to compel paper manufacturers to establish mills here. But it will contribute to the more complete trade independence of Canada, which does not improve the prospect of enlarged exports from Britain.

In the long run, the expansion of British trade in Canada will be commensurate with the expansion of Canada's trade. Even if it were not so, the development of Canadian manufactures would not be retarded out of deference to British interests. The most affectionate preference could never suppress an ambition to become a manufacturing nation. 'Canada first' is the immutable foundation on which every Canadian, by birth and adoption, stands. So that, with the increasing competition of the United States and of Canada, the British manufacturer must always have in view the possibility of becoming, to some extent, a Canadian manufacturer also. He would prefer, of course, to remain as he is. But he may not do that and prosper. Increase of British trade with the Dominion

VOL. LXIII-No. 374

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follows increase in emigration. There must inevitably be emigration of commercial mechanisms, as well as of human material. The firms that succeed do not wait till they are compelled to decentralise. Half the instinct of the great business man is in recognising the inevitable before it puts its nose round the corner.

The day on which this is written, the papers give a cable announcing the scheme of the Beyer-Peacock Company, to establish works for the production of locomotives in Montreal. The report points out that locomotives for Canada cannot be manufactured profitably in England. The Beyer-Peacock enterprise is comforting to British-Canadians, who have for years hoped for something of the kind, because they would rather see their kinsmen precede than follow the United States trust-man in the Canadian field. The establishment of branch works in Canada need not be confined to those industries which cannot possibly compete from the British factory. They may be entirely subsidiary to the home concerns, but they will be found important as time goes on. For iron and steel products, for example, Western Canada will yearly be a bigger market, most available for manufacturers with plants near at hand.

Within three hundred miles east of Winnipeg there is being worked an iron deposit that will rival the Mesaba range, just across the Minnesota border, which largely supplies Cleveland and Pittsburg with ore. Already a smelter has been established at Port Arthur, where coal, limestone, and ore can most conveniently be assembled. The smelter was not running when Mr. Grigg was in Canada. Indeed, as he suggests, it is quite a task to keep track of what is being done across four thousand miles of matchless territory. The Board of Trade, with commendable enterprise, publishes, with the report, a map of the transcontinental railways in Canada, which, though it was printed in January 1908, and is a reproduction of a map issued by the Department of the Interior, shows construction as it was in 1905; puts long sections of proposed lines in parts of the country which have been forsaken for better routes, and, generally, leads the inquirer to suppose we are not so advanced in transcontinental railway building as

we are.

Keeping pace with Canadian evolutions means keeping pace with United States evolutions. Though Canada is not, and is not likely to be, as Americanised as some sections of the peerage, the impingement of United States practices upon ours must, from every cause, be considerable; even if there were not the remarkably heavy investments in branch factories to which attention is called. The proposed correspondents of the Board of Trade are very necessary. pigeonholing genius in Whitehall must be permitted to nullify their work, as passed upon by a competent live man on the spot, for whom it will be vitally necessary to keep in close touch with American plans for retaining pre-eminence in this market.

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But that is not all. Nothing can replace the initiative, courage, and innovation that should belong to every British firm that means to become notable in Imperial trade. And, when intelligence and action have been secured, only a beginning will have been made in the re-creation of mutual appreciation that will make this country a primary factor in a readjustment of inter-Imperial relations, and in the destiny of the English-speaking race. Mr. Grigg, in his spirited letter transmitting his report to Mr. Lloyd George, laughs at and reprobates the notion that mercantile houses can serve their interests when they send a son or nephew, not long from school, on a trip to Canada which is designed to combine pleasure, education, and business, which is admirable as far as the first two objects are concerned, and useless, or worse than that, as regards business. As in politics, as in businessthe flying trip; the conversation in a Toronto club, the application of Canadian statements to the pre-conceived ideas which the visitor brought across the Atlantic; the happy certitude with which one diagnosis after another, reached by the most delightfully empirical methods, is set forth in imperturbable type-these things are part of our summer hospitality, our autumn ponderings, and our winter expectations for next holiday time.

Blessed is the man who seems to see, to hear, to understand. Most blessed is he who, knowing much, knows there is still much to learn. It is delightful to be in Canada in summer, to meet the eminent men in the large cities, to cross the continent in a private car, and more delightful still to feel that now you have found the abiding ground for your Imperial faith. There cannot be too much interchange of ideas, too much coming and going. But the intersection of King and Yonge streets, Toronto, is no more Canada than Piccadilly Circus is England. Of course, the eminent man in the metropolitan city is of capital importance in sizing up natural conditions, especially if, like most of our eminent men, he was a practical agriculturist in his boyhood. But the real extent of this country's interest in the Empire is the extent to which it is realised by the man in the sweaty shirt who saws lumber, and stocks wheat, and drills the everlasting rock. Or, if you want to see the average man (the supreme elector), you will do well to haunt the smoke-room of the Pullman; and becoming, for the moment, as un-English as a glorious heredity will permit, listen to the talk of drummers who travel twenty thousand miles a year in a country which the newly arrived immigrant, who, until now, has never been outside his native country, describes as belonging to us.'

In time, you will be struck by what will seem like an ungodly indifference to things at home.' If you have been in Australia and South Africa, the sound of that incomparable word will have been a continual refreshment to you. I remember, on the parched karroo, spending a day with Olive Schreiner, on whose political temperament the war had laid a grievous hand; but who still, native of

that land as she was, and of German parentage, spoke of England as 'home.' In Canada it is not so. Sometimes you will hear an intelligent-looking man, who should know better, declare that the Englishman is no good. Now, all this is distressing, until it becomes amusing, and you call to mind the amazement excited in a Wiltshire village by the incursion of a youth from Tyneside. And then you conceive that these light afflictions of apparent indifference are but for a moment, and you think of loyalty, and the South African contingent, and the splendid optimism of the Governor-General, and the brilliant speeches of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. But the feeling of puzzlement comes back. It will recur for years; because geography is geography, and Canadians do not breathe an English air.

The Englishman nowhere feels himself a stranger on unfamiliar ground. They are all 'oot o' step but oor Jock.' He looks for a second-fiddle England in Canada, and does not find it. A member of the Saskatchewan Legislature-perhaps the most original thinker in the House-who is a thorough Westerner, albeit his utterance is always reminiscent of a London postal district, confesses that he was eight years learning that the mental meridian of the Saskatchewan Valley is essentially different from that of Hampstead. After sixteen years he loves the old land as much as ever; but he loves Saskatchewan more. Sometimes he speaks of 'home,' but it is only because his dead are there. For all living things he is Canadian-Western Canadian; for the East, except as it is reflected in the qualities of the Easterners in the West, is unknown to him. If he had returned to England ten years ago, his discourse of Canada would have been pitched in a totally different key from that in which he talks this day. He is one of many. He has proved that in citizenship a man may love his mother, and his spouse also.

If that is what befalls a typical Britisher of the brainier sort, what about the scores of thousands of immigrants for whom the Upper Canada Bible Society has printed the Scriptures in fifty different languages? To them the Government is an ever-present entity that has given them fertile land, without obligation to call any man lord. But the House of Commons at Ottawa is merely an abstraction to them, the House of Commons in London scarcely a curiosity. On the Pacific Coast there is the perilous yellow conundrum which the East, served by a few scattered Chinese washermen, only dimly appreciates. You leave the busy street in Vancouver, where knickerbockers and gaiters are as congenial as they are singular in Montreal, and in five minutes can be inside a Chinese theatre watching the most pathetic movements and hearing the most distressing elocution that Anglican man can endure. In Eastern Ontario the Lord's Day Alliance make of Sunday a Sabbath indeed. In a Toronto hotel a guest cannot buy fermented liquors with his Sunday dinner. In the Caribou every day is regarded alike. Sunday is on the almanack, and that is all. The

French are two millions in Quebec; the last literal observers, in this hemisphere, of the injunction to increase and multiply. To the miraculous shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré thousands of the halt and blind repair, and leave crutches, sticks, and other paraphernalia of infirmity piled before the sanctuary door. In a thousand villages the curé is the managing director of half the business of the parish. The oldest French settlements of the New World are in Nova Scotia. There are fishermen along the South Shore of that province whose names are inherited from grandees of whom Richelieu would have been proud to be an ally. Further east, on the same coast, are Canadians of the sixth generation whose mother speech is Gaelic, and who have never seen a locomotive. Lunenburg is a German town, and the oxen used everywhere in the peninsula are yoked as their forefathers were by the Germans who came to Nova Scotia as the result of immigration literature distributed in Hanover before Wolfe stormed Quebec. Everywhere the American tourist spreads himself and his money, during the summer, rejoicing in the last right of every man-to obtain what he is willing to pay for.

There must be nothing casual in the study of a market compounded of such a variety of elements. We have passed the season of muddling through crises in trade and Imperial politics. Lord Rosebery once said the Continental peoples disliked England because the Englishman treads Europe as if it were his quarter-deck. Obviously, there is something else for the Englishman to do than to perambulate Canada as if it were his backyard. That is true of trade. It is true of politics. As soon as due heed is given to the kindly, searching admonitions of Mr. Grigg about trade, fruit will begin to ripen in the more sensitive

field.

The ripening will be as distinctive as the climate in which it takes place. The multitude of racial and social elements that are unconsciously working out their own salvation are evolving a political individuality as easily recognisable from that of the United States as it is from that of the British Isles, even if there were not the same basic predisposition towards the British idea in government that impels Australasia and South Africa. The extent of what the eloquent French Postmaster-General has called the intellectual preference is differently estimated by different people. The editor of the only Canadian journal which calls itself a national weekly has been much impressed by the demand for information about British men and affairs. The doyen of native journalists told the British pressmen who toured the country last summer that their newspapers were greatly superior to ours. The interest in British things is growing, without any tinge of subservience. But let an interesting fact be noted. Although hundreds of thousands of Britishers have come to Canada within the last seven years, and are entitled to vote much sooner than a man who has changed his abode from Kent to Lancashire can