The case is a standing joke in one province of a man who as an agitator used to rave at “the British flag as a bloody rag.”  The police were never quite sure whether to arrest him for treason or let him blow off steam and exhaust.  They wisely chose the latter course.  Prosperity came to the town.  The man sold his small bit of real estate for something under a hundred thousand.  He didn’t stay to divide his unearned increment among his fellow agitators.  He hied him to retire to the land where “the flag was a bloody rag.”  This, of course, proves nothing for or against Socialism as a system.  There was a Judas among the apostles; but it illustrates the point that Canada is still at the stage where every man may become a capitalist, a vested righter, the owner of his own freehold.  When every man may have a vested property right in a country—­not as a gift but as the reward of his own effort in a fair field with no favors—­it is a fairly safe prophecy that the vested rights earned and held by the fit and the strong will never be handed over as a gift to the unfit and the weak and the don’t-trys.  The savings of the man who has not squandered his earnings on saloons and reckless living will never be taxed to support in idleness—­even an idle old age—­the feckless who have spent on stomach and lust what other men save.  Sounds hard; doesn’t it, in the face of almost universal nostrums for the salvation and propagation of the useless?  But it is like Canada’s climate.  Perhaps the climate has a good deal to do with it.  Hard it may be; but the issue is clean-cut and crystal clear—­work, or starve; be fit, or die; make good, or drop out; here is a fair field and no favors!  Gird yourself as a man to it, and no puling puny whining for pity!

Can Canada keep a fair field and no favors?  Her destiny as a power depends on the answer to that question.  In every city in Canada to-day are growing up crowded foreign quarters peopled by men and women who have never had a fair field—­with class hate in their hearts for inherited social wrongs; derelicts, no-goods, unfits, born unfit through no fault of their own.  Have they no claim?  Can Canada as a foster mother redeem such as these?  Her destiny as a power depends on the answer to this question, too.  These people are coming to her.  In every city are tens of thousands of them.  She needs these people.  They need her.  Will it be a leveling down process for Canada or a leveling up process for them?  Before the nineties the average number of inhabitants per house in urban Canada was three.  By 1901 the average was up to four.  By 1911 it was up to five.  In the crowded centers as many as twenty a room have been found.  If this sort of thing continue and increase, Socialism will become a factor in Canada.  It will become a factor because every man or woman who has not had a fair chance has a right to demand a change to a system that will give a fair chance.  Canada’s economic stability and freedom from social unrest will depend on getting her foreign denizens out to the land.  Unfortunately high tariff fosters factory; and factory fosters cheap foreign labor; and cheap foreign labor as inevitably leads to social ferment as heat sours milk.