Nova Scotia

I suppose Canadians of the First Immigration should be very well pleased to see their farm lands overrun by the mongrel hordes of Europe who, we are told, are presently to assimilate the manners, institutions, and amenities which our British forefathers so slowly and painfully through the centuries established for us.

It is a magnificent spectacle the West is offering to the world—this great trek of a hundred thousand families a year—these cities arising in a single night, this flux and tumult, this noisy abandonment of effete conventions and ideals. Perhaps it is all going to end, as the optimists tell us it will end, to the glory of the race—our race. But some of them do not deny a certain element of risk in the process. It is a big price we may have to pay. It is the price the Egyptians paid to the Semites; the Greeks paid to the Macedonians; the Romans paid to the Goths; the Persians paid to the Saracens; the Gauls paid to the Franks; and the Americans have paid to the Irish, Italians, and Poles. And always the price is—Character.

“When,” once wrote a distinguished American to me, “I think of the early nineteenth-century promise of New England, of its race of scholars and gentlemen, of its thousands of quiet God-fearing homes, and the contented industry of the countryside, I could wish that a great gulf had cut us off on the West and an impassable barrier had arisen on our Eastern seaboard.” But We are going to win through—We are going to assimilate these alien peoples. Our civilisation will suffer as our neighbours have suffered; our serenity will cloud for a time, and when the contents of the melting-pot have cooled the alloy may be a permanent part of our whole national being. But We shall not falter.

Nor will this restless ethnological flux continue. The current and perhaps necessary methods of to-day will—nay, must—yield to other and higher notions of progress. We shall not always be touting for Slav and Hun and Celtic immigrants, and soon, tout as we may, they will not come. Europe will settle herself. Europe, in turn, will have her own “boom.” And, in the meanwhile, all Canada will not suffer alike, and the part which will longest retain its fundamental likeness to Britain, its moral unity with the people of the Mother island, is that province which is the subject of this book.

Nova Scotia has not been exempt from sacrifices. Great as the boon of Confederation doubtless was, and is, to the Provinces of the Dominion, it has been a small boon to Nova Scotia. She has had to play the part of Cinderella while her sisters went to the ball. But her comparative seclusion, added to her intelligence, her frugality, her gentle character, and far greater natural beauty, may commend her to the thousands of English and Scottish men and women who wish to migrate from the British island to the equally British peninsula on the other side of the ocean—the nearest to them of the provinces of Canada.