Canadian-Australian Contrasts

Gentlemen, I speak under two serious disabilities. Firstly, I feel that it will not be safe to talk about Canada and Australia today in view of speeches by some learned, noble and distinguished men at Ottawa; and I find myself wondering whether the country that is being talked about is an ex-enemy country, and whether that queer, cunning, deceitful, crafty land smuggled a trade treaty into your door--a wooden horse full of all sorts of terrible soldiers--and whether somehow the simple, confiding Canadian representatives in that Canadian-Australian Treaty were not, metaphorically, knuckle--dusted. Therefore it might probably be best to keep quiet, and lie low, and allow you to get your impressions of Australia by buying a pound of that Australian butter that is for sale in some parts of Eastern Canada now. Would it not be a horrible thing if, after having lost one part of the Empire over a case of tea, and after nearly losing Australia two years ago over the currants and raisins for the English plumpudding, Australia and Canada came to daggers drawn over a few pounds of butter?

My difficulty in making comparisons between the two countries is that during eleven years of residence I was able to see most of the parts of Australian life and study some of its more outstanding features and problems at first hand, whereas I cannot claim the same concerning Canada where I have been but eight or ten months. However, there is one consolation -after living in one new country it is not difficult to understand another, because new countries, especially inside the British Empire, are so much alike. One has only to learn this simple lesson-that if he finds things different in another country, it does not necessarily follow that they are inferior to his own; they are merely different, that is all. The Englishman who does not learn this lesson will encounter difficulties in the United States as did the Cambridge University gentleman I met recently in the Pennsylvania Hotel, New York, who praised the American conveniences and methods, but could not stomach the porridge. After milking and sugaring it, and putting the first spoonful in his mouth, he spluttered it out with the explanation, " That's not like Cambridge porridge!" I suggest that we will never understand the Empire, or any other part of the world, if we judge it simply by the differences in the taste of porridge.

When one has worked in a new country for a certain time and then goes to another, superficial trivialities are not noticed, because one has become accustomed to the look of galvanized iron, to the roughness of some of the roads, to the presence of tree-stumps in some parts, to waste patches of land covered with rusty iron or empty cans, to the display of real-estate boards, to electric and telegraph poles, not upright, even in the main streets of Montreal.

Let me point out a few things in.which Canada and Australia are alike, and then some things in which one sees marked differences. I propose to omit entirely those things which the world is standardizing. For example, when in Kamloops I saw an announcement of a fine picture-I think it was "Potash and Perlmutter in Hollywood. " I found the very same announcement in New York and in Chesley, England; and away out in a country village in Ceylon the natives were being invited to develop modern civilization in the nature of "Potash and Perlmutter." When I got back to Adelaide, Australia, people there were being invited to the same spectacle. Another case of standardization throughout the world is the flivver, with its flivver story; in the hills of Samoa and Fiji the natives handle their little Fords car as skilfully as it is done in Australia or on English country roads. In every part of the world during the last two years, everybody is being invited to do cross-word puzzles; people are being enticed to cure their ailments by the use of Spearmint, and the women of the world-nay, even the half-caste women of the Pacific Islands- are being shown simple and economical ways of preserving their school-girl complexions. Those are the external standardizations that are making the world really abominably alike.

Apart from those things, in which perhaps Australia is as bad as Canada, there are three or four points in which the two Dominions are very much alike. In both, the chief problem for the past one hundred and fifty years has been the settlement, the opening up, the exploitation of large areas by people of European origin. today, in both cases, the problems have been primarily economic-those of Australia being far more so than in Canada-the working out of the character of the country; the exploitation of its natural resources; the opening up of means of transportation by land and by water; the devising of a system of land tenure; the establishment and development of manufactures, trade and marketing: in short, the building up of all the many-sided machinery of modern economic life.

The two countries are very much alike, also, in trying to make the best of British methods of parliamentary responsible government, neither being willing to try the Eastern European methods of autocracy, assassination and atrocity methods which a friend of mine who is well acquainted with Europe and Russia aptly called the "normal method of argument" in those countries. Both Canada and Australia, largely because of their British connection, adopted, or were given, or were compelled to adopt; the British system of parliamentary government.

There are differences, of course, in point of detail. For instance, most of the Australian Provinces have two-chamber governments, while you have only one, except in Quebec and Nova Scotia. The Australian provinces, or States, as they are called, have governors who, in addition to the Governor General, are " imported" from Great Britain. The federal senate in Australia is an elected, not a nominated, body. The State Governments there have greater powers than were entrusted by the constitution to the Provincial governments in this country. But apart from those differences in point of structure and detail, Canada and Australia are very much alike. In the speeches that are too long, in their love for Royal Commissions, in the printing of voluminous Hansards, and in the delight in long parliamentary sessions, Canadian and Australian politics are as like as two peas in a pod.

The two countries are much alike in the sense of optimism, confidence in the future, that belief that expresses itself in such remarks as, "This is God's own country." If you go to Australia the people will tell you that theirs is the finest climate in the world; so will the people of New Zealand and Florida. I have even heard Englishmen say that theirs is the finest climate in the world. But we make up for our appeals to a traditional past by our belief in a glorious future. We all declare of our countries as Sir Wilfrid Laurier said about yours-that the twentieth century was Canada's. One night I heard a man say, when getting on a train at Montreal Station for New York, "Well, I am off to God's own country." Judging by his accent he certainly was not either a Canadian or an Australian. That sort of thing is very desirable provided it does not tend to make us think too ambitiously, or run to a boom and then to the inevitable bust. When people declare that in a few years, it may be a century or less, Canada or Australia will have 100,000,000 people, it is best to shove into 'our ears the cotton wool of a very healthy skepticism and say, "What does it matter whether Canada has 100,000,000 or only 30,000,000 so long as they are happy and comfortable and have the right spirit, and there is a sense of so much decency and justice amongst them?" We both tend to talking too much about quantity, about shoving in as many noughts as possible; but it is better to have a decimal point somewhere amongst them.

Finally, one finds in both countries a strongly developing desire to build up what we might call, for want of a better term, a characteristic culture. In both Dominions we are feeling that man does not merely live by bread or potatoes or lumber or woodpulp alone; that if Canadians are to be more than hewers of wood and drawers of water and tillers of great acres, we must have our art and letters and drama and poetry and all the rest of the things that make life really worth while.

In most countries--shall I be frank?--one finds earnest, but sometimes a little too self-conscious, and sometimes a little too conceited, efforts in that direction. To compare what has been achieved in Canada and Australia, I should be inclined to say that Canada has gone far beyond Australia in the realm of oil painting, in its work with those brilliant hues and rich colors that come inevitably from the Canadian forests, or the vivid blues and whites of the snow; but that perhaps Australia is ahead of Canada in its black-and-white work, whether it is the cartoons of a Phil May, De Blue, or Norman Lindsay, or whether it is in the realm of poetry. I throw these opinions out very tentatively and hesitatingly, but to me these are the two chief features of an attempt to build up a distinct Canadian culture. The pictures at Wembley may be criticized by Canadians, but they seemed to me to breathe something of the atmosphere and culture of Canada. On the other hand, the Australian pictures were rather puerile mists and fog, rather colorless in most cases; yet the black-and white work in Australia is perhaps better than what is achieved in Canada.

There you have four things in which the two Dominion are very much alike-in their economic problems, their political systems, their confidence in the future, and their desire to build up what you might call culture.

Yet in these things there is a difference that expresses itself in many ways, due to the character of the population, their geographical position, and the facts of history itself. There are differences even in language. What you call a street-car is there called a tram; a sidewalk here is a foot-path there; gas here is petrol there; an elevator is a lift; you talk about an automobile, but the Australian is much more economical and calls it a car; you speak of candies, but an Englishman talks of sweets, and an Australian calls them lollies. You speak of a garbage-pail, while the Australian calls it a rubbish-tin. Some words have very widely different meanings. In Australia if you wish to compliment a man on having carried through a particularly heavy and probably badly paid or unpaid piece of work you say, " My word, you have proved yourself a magnificent grafter; " but if you called a Canadian a magnificent grafter he would not quite appreciate the compliment.

On the other hand, there is a word which in Canada is perfectly harmless, but which has evil meanings and historical associations in the Antipodes. When, for instance, a rather zealous railway agent in Montreal said that he hoped his company would have the honor of arranging for my transportation I was shocked, for that word in Australia means a system of preventing the overcrowding of British jails by sending petty thieves and Scotch radicals and Irish Home-rulers out to the convict settlement of Botany Bay.

Also there are differences in pronunciation, so that you could easily tell a Canadian from an Australian. The latter speaks a twang-shall we call it that?-which is a compromise between Cambridge and Cockney; while the Canadian-doesn't; I leave it at that.

I will now speak of some aspect of Australian life from which you can realize how far different Australian conditions are from those here. Australia is a huge country, though not as big as Canada. It is 3,874,562Y2 square miles-which means that it is a little larger than the United States; about 25 times the size of England and Wales; and about 1,492,361Y2 times the size of Gibraltar. But one has to cross out at least half of the Australian Continent as being probably never of any great use except for a very sparse population keeping sheep or cattle. The real part in which Australians in the future will live is the eastern and southeastern strip of perhaps a million square miles; just as in Canada population will be grouped, probably a century hence, where it is grouped today, on the long 100 or 200-mile strip west of Montreal, and then in that chunk of country out west on the prairies, perhaps 2,000,000 square miles in all. Both Dominions have their large proportion of land which will never be of any real use for close settlement. Both, therefore, have to make the best of the best, and it is the opening up and settlement and close development and intense cultivation of those limited areas.

On those billion square miles Australia has about 6,000,000 people. The increase has been about 2 to 2 1/2 per cent per annum, which represents the doubling of her population every 25 years; and that growth is almost exactly the same as you have had in Canada. That is about the maximum rate at which it is safe for the Dominions to try to absorb further population.

I suppose the first thing that impresses every Canadian going to Australia is that it is an abominably long way off. From Vancouver the quickest boat takes from 20 to 22 days to the nearest Australian point. From London, through Suez, you have a fast journey of 35 to 40 days. If you go round the Cape, it would take you 42 days from Southampton, to Melbourne. Even the most recent improvements in communication have not quite eliminated Australia's isolation. That isolation has been in some ways Australia's bane, and on the other hand one of its great benefits. Of course it meant that that continent was late in being settled, as population was loath to go so far when Canada and the United States were so much nearer. Australia has had to fight against that isolation and long distance, and the long journey hinders Australia in the attempt to capture this, that, and the other market.

Put that alongside the Canadian position. Here, whether you like it or not, you have an insistent, inevitable pull from two near-by neighbours-United States on the south and Europe on the east-and the longer one has lived in Australia the more one realizes how big is that pull from those two sources. One of the greatest shocks I got in Canada was in opening my copy of the London Weekly Times, and discovering that it was only eight or at most ten days old. In other words, it was talking about things which were still of current interest; while in Australia, when I got my copy of the Times, it was thirty-five to forty-five days after its date, and I merely looked at the births, deaths and marriages, and one or two items, for the paper had ceased to be of interest. Here you have the Canadian nation trying to build up its distinct point of view, yet with that pull from south and from east; and I think you would all agree that it is very difficult at times to go as you would like because of the influences from those two directions.

It is easier for the Australian to look at things and develop along his own lines, fairly secure economically, and fairly secure, he hopes, politically and internationally with no great, pull such as you feel in Canada. He is able therefore to build up a type of life, political, social and economical in its outlook, which is perhaps more distinctively Australian than the Canadian outlook is distinctly and peculiarly Canadian; and I think if you went to Australia you would agree that it is perhaps an outstanding contrast between the two countries.

Second to that, I put the contrast in the composition of the population. The Australian population is almost entirely British, the whole tide of emigration having been from British ports. Ninety-eight per cent of the population is of British origin, and I am safe in saying that not a quarter of a million people have gone in the last one hundred and fifty years to Australia from non-British ports. There is a very small sprinkling of Germans, a few Russians, a small number of Italians, and of course on account of the " White Australia" policy the flow from Asia and from across the equator has been virtually nil. Hence in the population there are no big numbers of non-British people, such as Canada has in Winnipeg or in the polyglot areas of the Prairie Provinces From your own experience of Canadian problems-the relation between French and British, the problem of the Canadian European out on the Prairies-you perhaps realize how simplified many Australian issues are in consequence. They have not the problem of teaching English before teaching anything else; the language problem does not exist, and there is a fairly uniform religious outlook.

Perhaps more important still, the entire population has grown up soaked in the British ideas of political life and parliamentary affairs, so that they have no need to teach their people what parliamentary government is. So, in a host of ways, in the whole outlook of the population, you have an essential Britishness which is natural, and which has not to be fostered or cultivated. Finally, it is an easy thing for a Prime Minister to make a speech in Australia; he does not need to know French as well as Canadian. There were times in Australia when one wished there had been more inter-mixture. The Australian was more British than the British, and a good dash of German music and German industry, a bit of Russian pessimism and Russian ability to play the piano, and a few other bits of European contribution would help to make the Australian national character, when it does emerge, a little bit more florid than it is likely to be at present. I suppose the Australian Sunday is almost exactly like the Toronto Sunday; that may be a virtue, or it may be the opposite.

Finally, I think I should contrast the general political and social outlook of Australia, and say that Australian thought was much more contingent on European radicalism than was Canadian thought. Of course that was largely due to the historical fact that Australia happened in her early days to draw people who were of a radical political or economic temperament. Many of those who went there against their will went not because they had pinched somebody's handkerchief or picked a loaf of bread when a grocer was not looking; they went because they were Scotch Radicals in the French Revolutionary period, or Irish Home-rulers of 1901, or because they were people interested in the formation of friendly societies or trade unions; or they were Chartists or something of that sort, or revolutionists of the 1848 period, and many of them went out because they hoped in that far-distant land, away from all the evil anachronisms of Europe, to be able to build an economic world nearer to their heart's desire.

So, long before the rise of the general labor movement this gave the Australian political outlook that extreme radicalism. That outlook was of course strengthened by the rise of the political and economic labor movement; and in the growth of strong labor unions, and then with the turning of those unions to political action instead of ordinary industrial action, you had coming into the Australian political field a large number of proposals which made Australia in some respects a sort of political and economic laboratory. I can merely mention them. One is a big extension of state enterprise. There is no sort of argument in Australia whether state ownership or private ownership is specifically and fundamentally right; the thing is taken for granted. There is no reason why the state should not do this if private enterprise will not do it, or provided the state can do it better. So you have not what you have had in Canada, two private railway systems competing. The whole affair is state owned. In other ways the state has embarked on lines of activity because it was thought that the state could do them as well as or better than private enterprise.

In this field of labor relations I suppose the outstanding cause was an attempt to work out a legally-enforced minimum wage. The doctrine was laid down away back in the nineties of last century that in order to preserve industrial peace and stamp out sweating it was necessary that the state should guarantee to every worker a reasonable wage sufficient to meet the bed-rock minimum requirements of a decent existence; and from the nineties onward Australia has been experimenting in a great variety of ways-sometimes with success, often with

failure-in its desire to guarantee to the wage-earner sufficient to preserve him from the worst effects of poverty. As one goes through Australia's record one finds that at other points Australia has perhaps led in trying out different things which have been subsequently copied-modified, maybe-in other parts of the world.

By the outside world Australia is often regarded as a hot-bed of socialism. The recent federal election was said to be fought between communism and parliamentary government. Personally I do not think Australia is a socialistic country, or a revolutionary one. Too many people own their houses, and too many people have savings accounts which are too large. Further, the very Britishness of Australians prevents the British population from having much patience with abstract ideas. As a Frenchman once described Australia, " It is a land of socialism without doctrines. " Certainly, there were no doctrines, and I very much suspect there was not very much socialism in the continental sense of that term. No; it is merely a general desire to see that the mass of population has a fair deal. It is the desire to prevent the great extreme between wealth and poverty. It is the desire to guarantee that nobody has cake until everybody has got an adequate supply of bread. Under a fairly genial climate, in a land where frost and snow are virtually unknown, life does tend to become fairly comfortable and at times pretty easy for the great mass of the population.

These, then, are the three things in which one can find marked contrasts between Australian and Canadian life. The result of the isolation has been to help to develop a distinct national individuality; the influence of the homogeneity of the population has simplified many political and social problems: while a strong streak of radicalism runs through all political parties, especially the labor party.

In conclusion, a few words on the Imperial outlook. There was a time when the Australian radicals talked about " cutting the painter "-when in Australia, as I have no doubt in Canada, people were keen on developing their own national institutions, on becoming a full-grown country, and not merely a sort of youngster in leading strings of Downing Street. Those days have gone. Strong national sentiment is still there; it is still fostered and carefully cultivated, and in its name industries are encouraged, and what I call culture is fostered and helped at every possible point. But if you get an Australian in a corner and say, "Now, look here, on what, in the last resort, does your comfortable standard of life rest, and your interesting series of state experiments, your White Australia, your very independence and political nationality?" And if he is candid he will be compelled to admit that, in the last resort, it rests on the British Navy. Although his national spirit made him determine at the beginning of the century to build up his own navy; although he has wanted to build up an army as well as a navy, that he himself should control from Melbourne instead of its being controlled from Whitehall, still he would admit, in the last resort, that 6,000,000 people out there would just be a nice morsel for some oriental giant to gobble up if it were not for the existence of British protection.

That, perhaps, makes Australia far more interested in problems of Imperial defence and Imperial relations than Canada. I am on very thin ice, but I feel strongly that Canada can feel fairly safe. I do not know whether you expect any sort of great menace from the Oriental and in Vancouver of course they do-but when one gets beyond the Rockies one does not feel that Oriental peril to be at all keen. In the East I suspect you feel that the only enemy you have would be the United States, and for the time being that can be discounted. Under these circumstances, as far as I can see-and I may be entirely wrong-the defence problem is not what I would call a problem of first-rate importance in Canadian politics. At any rate, it did not appear so in the speeches which were made in the last election. You are fairly secure here, provided the United States won't let anybody else take you; so perhaps there is not any great danger.

But Australia cannot feel that way, with India to the north, with its 400,000,000 people, and China with its 400,000,000, and Japan with nearly 70,000,000 people. Australia feels that perhaps she is sitting on the edge of a volcano; so when you get an Imperial Conference it may often seem that the Australian representative is far more in line with the wishes of Whitehall than the Canadian representatives are. But before you judge and condemn them as being the tools of Downing Street, and all that, remember the fact of the helplessness of 6,000,000 people guarding their territory out there on the edge of the map.

All that talk about cutting the pianter has gone. It was easy to talk of that so long as there was no Japan or Germany looking beyond her own borders; but today Australia has to look to the fact that, in the last resort, in the British Navy lies her last and perhaps her only assured safety.