Perhaps I am alone in viewing, without regret, a turn which was missed in my teens, and which would have taken me to Asia, far indeed from the rigours of Manitoba winters, and from politicians who would assist railway management on lines that have grown hoary with age, and disgraceful in their inefficiency. While working at Stobcross station in Glasgow I answered an advertisement for a clerk on a plantation in Ceylon. No reply to the application reached me, though I anxiously watched for it. Years afterwards, just before coming to Canada, it was told me that an answer to the application did arrive from the Glasgow firm who had the business in hand. The family knew of the matter, and one of them intercepted a letter which was addressed to me, and asked me to come to Glasgow, as it was thought I might be the most suitable applicant for the situation. The letter was concealed, I believe, with the connivance of my excellent mother; otherwise, I might now be curing tea for Sir Thomas Lipton. About that time, by the way, the first of the Lipton shops was opened in Glasgow, and the astounding sight was witnessed of a provision retailer advertising his bacon by weekly cartoons of Irish pigs on the hoardings--for bacon, and not tea, was the early Lipton specialty.
One often envies the Canadian-born--even one’s own children--their fortune in being natives of this land. But occasionally one meets Canadians whose envies are of the reverse order. They say that it must be fine to have spent a youth amidst the historical treasures of the Old Lands; and fine also to have had the experience of finding in Canada an entirely New Land--to have chosen it for oneself, and to have had so much direct control over one’s own destiny; and the destinies of one’s offspring, to remote generations. Immigration is a romance of the commonplace, perhaps; though there isn’t much glamour in the outlook of a poor wight who has left all his kindred, is facing an unknown country, and is finding the ocean a bottomless woe, on which nothing stays where it is put.
“What made you come to Canada?” is a frequent question, to which the answer usually is, “To better my condition.” It is my own story, though oddly enough, I came to Montreal to work for the Grand Trunk at a smaller salary than I was getting in Glasgow as a clerk on the Caledonian. Was that Scottish-like--was it wise or otherwise? If an answer be desired, it can perhaps be found in a sketch of the Scotland I came from--the Scotland of an average industrious family that owed everything to labour and nothing to fortune--the sort of family that has been supplying Canada with people ever since immigration hither ceased to be a purely French process.