The Canadian Commonwealth | Page 7

Four months
of twenty-hour sunlight produce better growth in some products than
eight months of shorter sunlight.

These two advantages of moisture and sunlight, Canada possesses.[5]
What else has she? It doesn't mean much to say that Canada equals
Europe in area and that you could spread Germany and France and
Austria and Great Britain over the Dominion's map and still have an
area uncovered equal to European Russia. Nor does it mean much more
to say that in Canada you can find the climate of a Switzerland in the
Canadian Rockies, of Italy in British Columbia, of England in the
maritime provinces and of Russia in the Northwest. Areas are so great
and diverse that you have to examine them in groups to realize what
basis of fact Canada builds from.
Girt almost round by the sea are the maritime provinces--Nova Scotia,
Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick--in area within sixty-seven
square miles of the same size as England, and in climate not unlike the
home land.[6] Your impression of their inhabitants is of a quiescent,
romantic, pastoral and sea-faring people--sprung from the same stock
as the liberty-seekers of New England, untouched by the mad unrest of
modern days, conservative as bed-rock, but with an eye to the frugal
main chance and a way of making good quietly. They do not talk about
the simple life in the maritime provinces because they have always
lived it, and the land is famed for its diet of codfish, and its men of
brains. Frugal, simple, reposeful living--the kind of living that takes
time to think--has sent out from the maritime provinces more leaders of
thought than any other area of Canada. It is a land that leaves a dreamy
memory with you of sunset lying gold on the Bras d' Or Lakes, of cattle
belly-deep in pasture, of apple farms where fragrance of fruit and
blossoms seem to scent the very atmosphere, of fishermen rocking in
their smacks, of great ships plowing up and down to sea. You know
there are great coal mines to the east and great timber limits to the north;
you may even smell the imprisoned fragrance of the yellowing lumber
being loaded for export, but it is as the land of winter ports and of
seamen for the navy that you will remember the maritime provinces as
factors in Canada's destiny.
When gold was discovered in the Yukon and a hundred million dollars
in gold came out in ten years, the world went mad. Yet Canada yearly
mines from the silver quarries of the sea a harvest of thirty-four million

dollars, and of that amount, fifteen million dollars comes from the
maritime provinces.[7] Conservationists have sung their song in vain if
the world does not know that the fisheries of the United States have
been ruthlessly depleted, but here is a land the area of England whose
fisheries have increased in value one hundred per cent. in ten years. It is
not, however, as the great resource of fisheries that the maritime
provinces must play their part in Canada's destiny. It is as the nursery
of seamen for a marine power. No southern nation, with the exception
of Carthage, has ever dominated the sea; partly for the simple reason
that the best fisheries are always located in temperate zones, where the
glacial silt of the icebergs feeds the finny hordes with minute infusoria;
and the fisherman's smack--the dory that rocks to the waves like a
cockleshell, with meal of pork and beans cooking above a chip fire on
stones in the bottom of the boat, and rough grimed fellows singing
chanties to the rhythm of the sea--the fisherman's smack is the nursery
of the world's proudest merchant marines and most powerful navies.
Japan knows this, and encourages her fishermen by bounties and
passage money to spread all over the world, and Japanese to-day
operate practically all the fisheries of the Pacific. England knows this
and in the North Sea and off Newfoundland protects her fishermen and
draws from their ranks her seamen.
Japan dominates seventy-two per cent. of the commerce of the Pacific,
not through chance, but through her merchant marine built up from
rough grimed fellows who quarry the silver mines of the sea. England
dominates the Seven Seas of the world, not through her superiority man
to man against other races, but through her merchant marine, carrying
the commerce of the world, built up from simple fisher folk hauling in
the net or paying out the line through icy salty spray above tempestuous
seas. No power yet dominates the seas of the New World. The foreign
commerce of the New World up to the time of the great war was
carried by British, German and Japanese ships. Canada has the steel,
the coal, the timber, the nursery