The Outlook for Canada

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen,--Allowance must always be made for a public speaker by the good offices of his Chairman. I remember very many years ago when the late Dr. Edward Everett Hale happened to be my guest, in the first days of my ministry, when I dealt, with entire satisfaction to myself, with the immensities and eternities, and did not hesitate to instruct my gray-haired leaders in doctrines which they had imbibed with their mothers' milk. He said, "Hodgins, let me give you a sound piece of advice; never you refuse to speak when anybody is fool enough to ask you." (Laughter)

I remember at this time the sound advice of Sidney Smith--"In times of doubt take short views." The world at the present time is a veritable kaleidoscope. That is the difficulty and danger at this time; that even the sharpest witted publicists are all at sea, owing to the startling changes which are taking place in the psychology of the different peoples. We

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Mr. Hodgins is the pastor of the Unitarian Church, Jarvis Street, Toronto, and the editor of "The Onlooker"--a literary journal of independent critical opinion on public affairs. He is a broad scholar, a thoughtful preacher, an inspiring interpreter of great poetry and a close observer and candid critic of public affairs and opinions.

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don't know where the fire is going to break out next. I remember once when I made a pilgrimage to the church of North Lea in Oxfordshire to look at a Roman pagan and to gaze in awe at the pulpit from which John Wesley preached his first sermon. Afterwards I found a little hole in the ground in the form of an inn, and went in to get something to eat, and sitting there was the largest man I think I have ever seen, a typical English peasant, well up to ninety. I shared with him my bacon and eggs, and whatever else it may have been, and he was very grateful, and he said to me in his broad Oxfordshire dialect, "And wot brought ye 'ere?" I said, "Oh, I came out to gaze at the pulpit from which John Wesley, then a poor Fellow of Lincoln, preached his first sermon." He paused at that and said, "John Wesley? Who wore he?" (Laughter) I replied, "He founded the great Methodist Church, numbering millions." That sort of posed him. He was silent quite a while, then a dim recollection came over his aged brain and he said, "Oh, aye, John Wesley, I've 'eard o' 'im; 'e were a great man, wern't 'e?" I said, "Yes, a very great man." "Yes, 'e wor a great man; but, mind ye, I don't 'old with them disturbers." (Laughter)

Gentlemen, when it comes to cutting the painter with an organization which Colonel Seeley has truly described as the greatest single beneficent agency in this world for good, namely, the British Empirewhen it comes to giving up the policy under which this country has prospered for a half-century of time in favor of a vague benefit somewhere in the distant future, and when it comes to the overturning of law and order by violence, we "don't 'old with them disturbers." (Applause)

I am going to lay some ghosts. I think we have had enough pessimism. I have been a sort of an enforced pessimist myself. You will not expect me to speak on politics--I have just escaped from that briar-patch, and I am still using linament. My only consolation is that all the others were scratched, too. But there are some things that at the present time we should clearly envisage. If at the signing of the Armistice the whole world stood in fear and awe of a resuscitated and reinvigorated Germany, then the logical conclusion is that Germany won the war. Unfortunately, that nameless fear has been in the hearts of nearly all modern statesmen--what might be called the German menace of the future.

I want to point out something to you; I want to lay a ghost. The German mark is worth today, on the last quotation, one-thirteenth of a cent. At the signing of the Armistice it was possible to transmit gold to Germany and take advantage of German labour to produce goods at an incredibly low figure, and those goods did flood the British market, so that in sheer self-protection Britain, for the first time in many years, was forced to pass legislation imposing a duty of thirty-three and a half percent, plus five percent at the source of supply, in order to keep her industries alive. That went on for some time. German salesmen covered the entire world, and it looked as though Germany were coming back with the roll of drums. That menace is laid. It is one thing to take orders, and it is another thing to deliver the goods.

The situation in Germany is this; by the most gigantic bluff in -history, by the use of mere paper with nothing to back it, and the faith of the German people among themselves, she has been enabled to virtually reconstruct her internal condition; that is unquestionable. By issuing an enormous number of marks for foreign sale she has swindled the general public, and I have no sympathy for them, for they expected to get something for nothing. What is going on is simply the march of the German Government into sheer bankruptcy, and I think it is bankrupt at the present moment; but Germany remains, and the people remain.

Now, there is the great danger. The French economists are wise to what is going on. France will not disarm; she stands there in loneliness, determined that she will get back what she has lost; and when the German Government finally goes into bankruptcy she will say, "I will have nothing whatever to do with you-but you Rathenau, you Krupp, you Stinnes, you come on the carpet; you own Germany, and by the living God you will pay." (Applause) That is why France generally will not disarm.

Now the ghost is laid. Germany has lost her colonies, part of Silesia, part of Holstein-Friesian; has 140 billions of marks in circulation, and proposes to issue 2,200 billions; she owes her own people about 45 billions of dollars; she owes the allied indemnity; she is no longer to be feared; she is stripped of raw material, and can only get it by exchanging gold or manufactured products, and the markets of the world are closed to her, particularly the markets of the United States. Now that ghost of tyranny has been definitely laid, at any rate for the next twenty-five years. That is something to console us; we have got rid of that fear.

Turn, again, to the United States. According to the last accounts the United States Senate is going to go one better than the Fordney Bill, and completely shut out all our agricultural products. The United States is in the position of a man closing every door, stopping up the ventilator, and turning on the gas. (Applause) The United States, Gentlemen, in five months can supply all its own internal demands by shutting out the rest of the world and refusing to recognize the fundamental law that all trade is barter. It is then in a position of being forced to cut down its productive energy by at lease fifty per cent. It has committed hari-kari. Further than that, it is demanding the payment of the allied debts from Europe, and refusing to accept the only things in which those debts can be paid-which are manufactured articles. It knows that if Europe were to pay it in gold, it would be destroyed by the Pactolian stream. I ask you, then, for your comforts, to bear in mind this fact, that as a serious competitor the United States has deliberately put itself out of the running. There is no instance parallel with it in the entire history of finance.

England always treats gold as a flowing river. When the great English bankers want more gold they raise the rate, they close the gates. When the gold accumulates in London they take the surplus they want, and immediately open the gates again so that the gold may flow to the ends of the earth. The theory of the United States is the theory of a sink-hole. It has the gold, almost half of the world's gold, and they are losing interest on it every day. They dare not put it into circulation, because that would inflate the currency and produce high wages and high prices, and make the last state worse than the first. They are asking the foolish question, "What shall we do with it?" England, if she had it, would take it in her open, ready hands and scatter it all over the world. (Applause) The pathetic and the tragic thing is that a nation so clever should be so parochial.

They have lost what we, the whelps of the lion, have never lost--the spirit of the Elizabethan adventurers. We are not afraid to go on the high seas.

Now, I am one of those who are inclined to believe that in enacting the Fordney Bill and the infamous additions to it in the Senate, the United States has conferred on us a lasting benefit. I am old enough to remember what happened when the McKinley Bill was enacted and our barley industry was destroyed over night. What happened? We turned to cheese. Let two names be held in high honour--William Ballantyne and Maclaren of Ingersoll. (Applause) We turned to cheese, and we captured the cheese market of the world, and Canadian cheese today is the standard of the world. If they shut out beef we will raise better beef; we will turn Ontario into another England when it comes to stock-breeding. They have shut us out. Very well; our Canadian National Railways need traffic east and west, don't they? They are going to help us out of a hole. We are going to stand on our own feet. I will tell you why.

Nothing is so appalling to me as the utter ignorance of Canadians of their situation. Take your map and look at it. How is this northern continent shaped? Look at the top, then see how it spindles away to the Isthmus of Panama. We have the broadest part of the North American Continent. We are nearer Asia and we are nearer Europe. We are the great land-bridge between the East and the West. We are the keeper of the marches. We are on what political economists call the horizon of trade. It is up to us to find our destiny upon the high seas; and I am glad that there is a delegation of Canadian manufacturers at this moment gunning up trade with the West Indies. I want to see delegations like that in China, Japan, and at the ends of the earth. (Loud applause)

I shall not forget the thrill when I stood in a little shop in Aylmer in that first unfortunate experience, which has since been retrieved, when a little chap called "Sid," who only employed thirty-five men making pumps and scales, pointed out a whole lot of boxes beautifully packed and said to me, "Those are going to South America." I said, "That's the stuff; that is what I like to see"--thirty-five men in the town of Aylmer building up an export business in pumps with Buenos Ayres; what do you think of that ? The simple fact of the matter is, Gentlemen, that if you will study the trade returns you will discover that we have beaten the United States in the matter of foreign trade for a great many years. There have been some years when we have exported almost three times what the United States exported, on a per capita basis. Nothing annoys me more-I will even say, maddens me more--than the cheap, wretched talk to which I have had to submit, for my sins, from the advocates of the U.F.O. in their talks on the Canadian business man. I don't believe he can be matched in the wide world.

Take the situation of the Province of Ontario. We have no coal; we have no, or very little, workable iron ore; we have no crude oil, or a negligible amount in Petrolia, fast fading away; we don't begin to supply ourselves with all we need of copper; our splendid business men in Ontario are far from tide-water, with the handicap of rates against them; and yet, notwithstanding that, Canadian manufacturers are found at the ends of the earth. It puts me in mind of a little boy who came in one night to his father and said, "Father, don't you think it is a darned mean shame for that hound to keep on howling against God's beautiful big moon?" (Laughter)

Why, Gentlemen, all this talk about the city draining the life of the country is pure rubbish-pure rubbish. The city is a god-send to the country. If it were not for the safety-valve of the city our farms would be cut up as they are in Ireland, down to the minimum three acres and a cow. No one can ever convince me that the brightest and best and most virtuous and the most progressive of the farmers' sons are to be found in the country. The farmer raises something more than cattle; he has children; and I will venture to say that if a census were taken of the men in my presence now it would be found that more than one-half of them were raised on Ontario farms. The farmer would die without the city. There is not a case in history where the city is not a culmination of national youth. Take, for example, such an almost uncanny illustration as the telescope on Mount Wilson. How could you possibly think of such a marvelous science in a purely rural community? Instead of fewer cities, and smaller cities and towns, we want more of them. I would like to see twenty Torontos scattered throughout this broad land, and I am certain that if we had them the value of farm lands would increase five hundred to a thousand per cent. (Hear, hear)

Now, when it comes to reciprocity--by the way, I think Mr. Fielding has finally got his answer; and it is a very rude answer; but when it comes to reciprocity it always puts me in mind of a story of Pat McGinnis. He left his native village ' to sell some sheep, and as an inevitable result--it was in Ireland--he was somewhat confused at the end of the day as to the nature of the transaction. (Laughter) In driving home he got bogged, and fell asleep, but his horse, which was a somewhat spirited animal, having more sense than Pat, and knowing when it was hungry, tore itself away from the shafts and trotted home. The next morning Pat woke up, still somewhat dazed, saw there was nothing for him but to get between the shafts and trot home. He arrived at his native village, went to the gobeen man and said, "Mike, is my name Pat McGinnis?" "Sure your name is Pat McGinnis; what else would it be, you fool?" "Now, are you sure that my name is Pat McGinnis?" "Troth, I'll take my oath on it." "Well then, all I have got to say is this, that if I'm Pat McGinnis I've lost a mighty fine horse and found a mighty poor cart." (Laughter) If we exchange the protection under which we have thriven, and are stampeded by the rural come-outers into launching into free trade, all I have got to say is that we will lose a mighty fine horse and find a mighty poor cart, and it will take us a long and dreary journey before we get that cart to the city of Prosperity. (Laughter and applause)

Gentlemen, I think we may say that we are in a peculiarly happy position in Canada. As I look abroad over the world I confess to you I think our position is absolutely unique. We are in a hole financially, there is no question about it, and we will not get out of that hole by any miracle, but by the good help of God and our own courage we will fight out in our Canadian way.

A speaker the other day said that Canadianism was dead. Well, I think it is about the liveliest corps that I know anything about. (Applause) I would like him to put it to the touch. I was talking with an old politician today in the Queen's Hotel, an intimate friend of the late Sir John Macdonald, whom many of you know--Mr. White of Pembroke, and he said to me, "Mr. Hodgins, I want to tell you that in any time of real crisis when our fundamental convictions as Britishers are called in question there never is any doubt in this wide world as to where the Canadian people stand." (Applause)

We have difficulties, but we will solve them, because we have the courage, and I am sure we have the brains. Therefore, I would say to you, take counsel of your hope at this time, not of your fear.

What is the greatest single adjustment that can be made as affecting the faith of man on this planet? I would say; in one phrase, it was the discovery of the manufacturing of power. When James Watt looked at that tea-kettle with the lid lifting and falling, and, improving on the Marquis of Worcester's discovery, gave the world the first steam engine, he laid the first stone in the edifice of modern civilization, and every development since has been a development in the direction of elaboration and complexity. When Tyndall discovered that heat is a mode of motion he opened a vast vista of possibilities for the human family. When, for the first time, Thompson and Tesla and Lord Kelvin demonstrated the practical applicability of electricity to the affairs of life, they gave the race another shove forward, and it was of more importance than the discovery of the new continent by Christopher Columbus. When the possibilities of hydroelectric power were demonstrated, largely through the Swiss engineers in Zurich, and it was discovered that water was the most valuable of all assets, then the race again was put on a permanently higher level.

Now I am going to give you a message of hope. If the mountains of this continent ran east and west we would enjoy now, at this moment, tropical conditions everywhere south of Florence in Italy. We would be on the verge of the north tropical zone. But the maintains ran north and south, and the water-shed runs east and west. We have it. (Applause) Every important river on this continent, with the exception of the Missouri and Mississippi and those that flow westward from the Appalachian Range, have their origin in the northern water-shed, and all the important rivers are flowing north. From Labrador to the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains there is a reserve of hydro-electric energy which it is almost impossible to compute. The day will come, it has already arrived, the problem has been demonstrated right here in Ontario, for we have seventy-two percent of the hydro-electric energy of the British Empire), when there will not be a locomotive on the Canadian National Railways that won't be electrically driven. (Applause) And when that day comes our Canadian National Railways will prove to be our most valuable asset, and will cancel our national debt. (Applause)

I know that you busy business men must get away from here around two o'clock, but there are some other things I would like to say to you. (Voices, "Go on.") One is the matter of current criticism. A statement was made by one of the provincial ministers which ought not to have been allowed to pass unchallenged. Addressing a farmers' club up in Western Ontario he had the absolute stupidity to advise them to work only eight hours a day and take Saturday afternoon off. At a time like this when the world is short $300,000,000,000 of commodities; 25,000,000 of the flower of the human race, with its potential manhood; a national debt of $2,500,000,000; the markets of Europe closed to us; the only, possible hope is that we shall work as we never worked before in our lives to pay our honest debts. (Applause) To tell farmers at such a time as this to work only eight hours a day and take Saturday afternoon off j is not only unmitigated foolishness, but almost a crime against the well-being of this country. (Hear, hear) No one will ever convince me, Gentlemen, that the sound axiom that the more you produce the more there will be to divide--is false. It does not matter whether beef is from seven to eight cents a pound on the hoof and wheat $1.50 a bushel; you business men know that it is a sound scientific law that in periods of low cost the thing to do is to increase production so as to increase the net return. If the farmers of this country were to follow such advice as this, within a year the most of them would be in the bankrupt court.

Nor do I agree with the statement which was made by a friend of mine whom I met on most amicable terms, and for whom I have the very highest intellectual respect-a man who has conferred lustre on Canadian letters, but who has most evidently not made a study of economics-which frequently happens even in the case of those who may be eminent in literature. He made the statement that immigration should be limited in this country to 50,000 a year, and the immigrants should be hand-picked. Gentlemen, what we want is immigration, and instead of limiting immigration to this country to 50,000 1 would not limit it to 500,000 a year. I would shut out certain races given to anarchy, fed up with the Soviet, but I would welcome all the Danes, the Hollanders, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the French, the Spanish and the North Italians that I could get, and particularly the noble breed from which I come myself. (Laughter and applause)

I want to say that our Toronto papers--well, some of them which it is not necessary for me to name--seem, almost through sheer malice, to present a picture of Great Britain which is utterly false. No mean thing can happen that is not put into flaring headlines. It is not so much with what is said as the miasma, the exhalation, which arises in those miserable sheets--"willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike." I have walked 2,500 miles through England. I suppose, in respect of men, I am what might be called a "joiner." I have interviewed all classes, and I have met some of the ablest men in Oxford and have become familiar with them, and still correspond with them. Every time there is a strike in England, or a disturbance, it seems to break out in an eruption of print here. Why? There is not a nobler breed of men on the face of God's earth than to contemporary Englishmen. (Applause) They are the veritable masters of fate. The human race depends upon them at this moment. England, alone of all nations, is paying her way, and God knows the cost it bitter. (Hear, hear, and applause) In the past she never has been afraid to face reality or to abide by the everlasting laws of righteousness. We never hear of those splendid ship-owners, the great masters of industry, splendid scientists, novelists, poets, publicists, but we hear of strikes and Bolshevism.

Have we had no strikes? Did anything happen in Winnipeg? Is there a strike in the United States now, which threatens to send tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands to a premature grave? Is there, in the whole industry of corruption, anything that will compare with the ghastly misapplication of public funds that took place in connection with the war, with our neighbours to the south? These things are never preached, but let something happen in England, and one would imagine that England, instead of being beaten, to be sure, with many stripes, and suffering but still purified and noble, still the great another of three parliaments, still the most magnanimous of all powers, never afraid of liberty; scorning the acts of tyranny in every shape and form--one would imagine that instead of that she was in the last stages of senility. It's a lie! (Loud applause, followed by three cheers)

Mat. WILKINSON expressed the thanks of the Club to the speaker for his able and inspiring address.