The strife in Manitoba angered the French element in Canada. They urged anew the rights guaranteed to their language. Without doubt the original constitution of Manitoba, created in 1870, had set up a bi-lingual system, with French and English on an equality. The truth is that, in a majority at first, the French in the province had by 1916 become relatively unimportant. It was undoubtedly a grievance that rights formerly enjoyed by them should be swept away. The strife spread eastward. Under what is known as Regulation 17, the province of Ontario took steps to ensure that, except in a strictly limited number of admit tedly bi-lingual schools (French and English), English alone should be used. In Quebec where the majority is French no one challenged the right of the English element to schools using their own language. Though, in fact, in On tario no constitutional provision supported bi lingualism, the French urged that, on any basis ofjustice, the French minority should have the rights in respect to their language which the English minority enjoyed in Quebec. The Eng lish element in Ontario,. it was declared pas sionately, was persecuting those who used French. Their French press carried on a vio lent agitation, answered in kind by the Orange men of Ontario, who feared that with the French tongue would go the dominance of the French-speaking priest. The claim that consti tutional guarantees protected the right to use French in the Roman Catholic separate schools of Ontario was negatived on appeal to the Im perial Privy Council, the tribunal to determine finally such constitutional disputes.- Trifling as such questions seem, they yet served to make the French, dominant in the province of Que bec, resentful and suspicious, and this no doubt affected their attitude when the European War broke out in 1914.
In 1911 the government of the United States entered into negotiations with the government of Canada for a wide measure of reciprocity in trade. At first the proposal was welcomed by members of both political parties in Canada, but it soon became clear that financial interests in Canada feared the dominance of New York, that Canadian industries were alarmed lest a protective tariff should disappear, and that the Canadian railways, running for thousands of miles east and west, feared a loss through the diverting of the carrying trade southward to the lines of the United States. In the back ground was the fear of those attached to the political tie of Canada with Great Britain that Canadian trade would discriminate against Great Britain in favor of the United States with the result either of bringing Canada into the American Union, or, at any rate, of sever ing the tie with Great Britain and the setting up, of a republic of Canada. The political cam paign revealed the profound of the Canadian people to Great Britain. An election in September 1911 resulted in the defeat of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who had made the re ciprocity pact with Mr. Taft. A Conservative
government under Mr. (now Sir) Robert L Borden came into power and the proposals for reciprocity were dropped.
In 1914 came the Great War and the whole life of Canada was soon to be focussed on this event, discussed elsewhere (see CANADA AND THE WAR). In 1917 Canada celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Federal union created in 1867. It had been a period of varied fortune, of reverses as well as of successes. The popu lation had doubled and the 8,000,000 people of Canada in 1917 represented about the same number that the United States had had a hun dred years earlier. Not until toward the end of the first decade of the 20th century had the development of Canada been very rapid. By 1911 a remarkable immigration movement was at its height. More than half a million settlers from the United States had by that time found new homes in Canada. Settlers from Great Britain and from continental Europe were also flocking in and the prairie country, hitherto almost tenantless, was filling up rapidly with varied types of human beings. Probably, con sidering the small population of Canada, they came too rapidly, for half a million new comers in a single year could not be readily assimilated when the new arrivals represented about 1 in 10 of the existing population. For the transport involved railways were built in the West too to be profitable. Even before 1914, depression in all parts of the Western world had tended to check the tide of immigration, and, for the time, the war, begun in that year, suspended it completely. Prob, on the whole, this suspension was in the best interests of Canada, since it ended a spedulative fever in regard to lands and brought optimists face to face with stern reality. Already there is much talk in Canada of reconstruction after the war. In a world shattered by war's dis asters it will be a problem for the wisest states manship to use the undeveloped resources of Canada to Create homes for the landless and penniless who will turn from devastated Europe to the founding of a new life in the West. (See CANADA — POPULATION, IMMIGRATION AND• DIS TRIBUTION). In Canada, as in every belligerent country, the great war is producing far-reach ing effects. Since the war began one by one the Canadian provinces from the Atlantic to the Pacific have imposed such restrictions and prohibitions on the traffic in intoxicating liquors as practically to annihilate it. At the time of writing, from Ontario westward place is closed. By May 1919 Quebec, including the great city of Montreal, will have done the same thing, and in the Maritime provinces, farther east, by local option, a similar result is nearly achieved. It is likely that by 1920 liquor will not be sold by retail anywhere in Canada except for medical purposes.