The Canadian winter also has to be remembered as a factor driving men to cities like Montreal. Even good men on the land cannot always during the winter obtain work on the farms; or think that the little they can make there is not worth while. So they, too, make { 74} for the cities, not always to their own improving. This problem of the Canadian winter is one that has still to be reckoned with, and no doubt the Canadians will solve it in due course--perhaps by some extension of the Russian methods whereby the peasant of the summer becomes the handicraftsman of the winter. It is not the winter itself that is at fault in Canada, as used to be thought; it is the method of dealing with it. The Canadian may not mind the hard, cold months--may even boast of them, but he cannot ignore them. And the solution of the winter problem seems to be that though Canada is marked out as an agricultural country, it must also equally become a manufacturing one, so that men--who cannot hibernate like dormice--may be able to work the year through. The whitest nation is that nation whose leisure is got by choice not by compulsion.
There must be local reasons, too, for Montreal slums, but these a visitor is not happy in describing. Municipal mismanagement is unfortunately not exclusive to Europe; and my editor gave me examples of it in Montreal which were impressive without being novel.
He also pointed out that there were forty thousand Jews in Montreal, as though that { 75} might have something to do with her slums. Others point out that the Catholic Church, which believes that the poor must be always with us, is supreme in Montreal; poverty and the faith, they say, go always together. I think it is truest to argue that, while all these things are in their degree contributory, it is not fair to fix on any one of them as the chief cause of the ill. One thing is certain. Montreal's slums are not typical of Canada, but of a great city. No great city has as yet found itself completely, and the greater it is, the less soluble are its problems of poverty. It may be that they can be resolved only by the great cities ceasing to exist in the form we know them.
Meanwhile it looks as though the welfare of employees is not being neglected by the leading directors of industry. Take, for example, the Angus Shops, which are larger than any other engineering shops in the world. Here are built these huge houses of cranks and pistons, the railway engines of the Canadian Pacific, that hustle one from end to end of the Dominion; here also are turned out all else that appertains to the biggest railway company in existence. In these shops a system has been introduced which might be called a Bourneville system, only Canadianised. The management { 76} refers to it as Welfare Work, and it consists mainly in certain methods whereby the men can obtain good food--while they are working--at low prices, apprentices are helped to an education, the cost of 'holiday homes' is defrayed, and so on. Very sensibly the management admits the system to be a part of a business plan, which it finds remunerative. The idea that beneficence plays a leading part in it is almost scouted; indeed it would not be easy to persuade Canadian working-men that their bosses were doing things from charity. I went over the shops, and found them built on a vast and airy scale. Not being an engineering sort of person, I usually feel, when I invade a machinery place, like some unfortunate beetle that has strayed into a beehive, and may at any moment be attacked by the busy and alarming creatures that are buzzing about there. As I watched the huge engines, swung like bags of feathers from the roof, some black demon would heave showers of sparks at me, and when I started back, another would come raiding out with red-hot tongs. I admired respectfully. But I am one of those who can enjoy my honey just as much without knowing just how it was made. Still, here was a big bit of Montreal, and what miles of French houses { 77} with green shutters one drove past to get to it!