Odd as this Far East of Canada seems as a habitat for Chinamen, yet there is hardly a town or village where Wun Lung, or Sam Kee, or John Sing has not penetrated, and set up his peculiar and odoriferous little establishment for the destruction of linen. It is one of the curiosities of industry why the Chinese should have taken to this particular occupation. It began in the Far West, when the affluent miner and rancher, discovering the merits of a boiled shirt on Sundays, and that a glazed front and collar is an additional mark of gentility, sent his linen all the way to ‘Frisco. Then up rose the wily heathen to hit upon another use for the rice flour of his native larder, and thereby gratify, at ten cents the garment, the vanity of the early Argonauts. The art he communicated to others of his race, it spread north, south, east, and west, and in the process of time one hundred thousand flat-irons were actuating from Los Angeles to Labrador. Thus was the immediate industrial future of the invading Mongol assured.

The Legislature was not in session at the time of my visit to Halifax. But I met in a friendly way many of the legislators, and I learnt a good deal of the local needs, real or fancied, which agitate this community and all other communities on the face of the earth, but which are of little interest to the outside world. Considering that the population of the Province is only half a million souls, the machinery of government would seem somewhat cumbrous. First of all, Nova Scotia sends 20 members to the Federal House of Commons at Ottawa, and 10 members to the Senate. The Provincial Parliament consists of 38 members: there is a Legislative Council of 21 members and an Executive Council of 10 members. Moreover, there is a system of local government operating in the eighteen counties.

The Federal Parliament alone deals with such important matters as revenue duties, railway grants, the judiciary and the postal system, leaving to the Halifax Legislature the schools, public roads and bridges, local railways, and the royalties on minerals owned by the Province. The County and Township Councils regulate the taxation for roads, schools, and other purposes, every citizen directly voting his own taxation, although such taxes are supplemented by grants from the Provincial Government, which has a unique and perennial source of wealth in the mining royalties.

Although the Legislature and Council is so numerous, the real labour of the Executive really falls upon two or three pairs of shoulders—chiefly those of the Premier and the Attorney-General and the Commissioner of Works and Mines. Although the Hon. George Henry Murray, K.C., is only fifty, he has been the First Minister of the Crown in New Scotland for sixteen years, succeeding Mr. Fielding when the latter joined the Laurier Cabinet in 1896. Mr. Murray is one of those politicians who, like his party chief, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, exhibits prudence and probity in power, and having the honour of his country at heart fully enjoys the confidence of the people.

Under his political leadership, which is not likely to be disturbed, save by considerations of health, now, I was glad to find, no longer imminent, the fortunes of both land and people are certain to advance hopefully into the future.

Considering its unrivalled water-power facilities, New Scotland might easily become a great manufacturing country, as New England has long been. Manufacturing has made considerable progress in recent years; but the Province only occupies the third place in manufactures, Ontario and Quebec far outstripping her. There are now some twelve hundred establishments, with a total capital, including lands, building, machinery and motive power, tools and implements, and working capital, of 34,586,416 dollars, paying out 4,395,618 dollars in wages to 21,010 men, women, and children.[23]

The products of Nova Scotia’s manufactories were 63,700,000 dollars in 1911. These included food products, textiles, iron and steel products, paper and printing, liquors and beverages, chemicals and allied products, clay, glass and stone products, metals and their products, tobacco, vehicles for land, vessels for water, and miscellaneous industries. The value of the manufactured products in Nova Scotia has more than doubled in a single decade, and to this result the increased output in connection with the iron and steel industries has of course greatly contributed.

The province’s position now may well be called, in respect to the establishment of manufacturing industries, truly strategic. Her situation on the ocean highway enables her to assemble all the raw materials cheaply, and to manufacture at lowest cost for the home and foreign market. Here are the only coal-fields in Eastern Canada, those on the seaboard being practically inexhaustible. Pig-iron from the increasing furnaces of the Province has already been exported to markets distributed along the whole seaboard of the United States, to most parts of the world, and to some parts of Germany. Gold, steel, gypsum, pulp for paper manufacturing, grindstones, building stones, timber, fish, fruit, and many manufactured goods are exported abroad. Nova Scotia’s ships for 200 years frequented the ports of the world, and carried on a thriving and ever increasing trade.

All this abundance of coal, and other minerals, combined with her geographical position in relation to Great Britain and Europe, the North Atlantic Coast of America, the West Indies, and South America, leaves no room for doubt that the Province is destined to become one of the great manufacturing centres of the world.

“I don’t know what more you’d ask,” cried Sam Slick; “almost an island, indented everywhere with harbours, surrounded with fisheries. The key of the St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy, and the West Indies; prime land above, one vast mineral bed beneath, and a climate over all temperate, pleasant and healthy. If that ain’t enough for one place, it’s a pity—that’s all.”

And so I part from this little book about New Scotland—an imperfect survey, but not intended to be compendious; only that to the British reader, willing to know something of the people, the land, and the resources of our great Western Dominion, a new Province may, like the film pictures of a cinematograph, “swim into his ken.”

More and more will the Nova Scotians increase in culture as in wealth, more and more will their country become a great Imperial asset. To apply here to New Scotland a famous passage of Froude’s concerning the story of Old Scotland, turn where one may, “weakness is nowhere; power, energy, and will are everywhere. Sterile as the landscape where it will first unfold itself, we shall watch the current winding its way with expanding force and features of enlarging magnificence, till at length the rocks and rapids will have passed—the stream will have glided down into the plain to the meeting of the waters—from which as from a new fountain the united fortunes of the British Empire flow on to their unknown destiny.”