Here the gentlemen who propose to be kept by their neighbours are our helpful allies.  They have succeeded in making uneasy the class immediately above them, which is the English working class, as yet undebauched by the temptation of State-aided idleness or State-guaranteed irresponsibility.  England has millions of such silent careful folk accustomed, even yet, to provide for their own offspring, to bring them up in a resolute fear of God, and to desire no more than the reward of their own labours.  A few years ago this class would not have cared to shift; now they feel the general disquiet.  They live close to it.  Tea-and-sugar borrowing friends have told them jocularly, or with threats, of a good time coming when things will go hard with the uncheerful giver.  The prospect appeals neither to their reason nor to their Savings Bank books.  They hear—­they do not need to read—­the speeches delivered in their streets on a Sunday morning.  It is one of their pre-occupations to send their children to Sunday School by roundabout roads, lest they should pick up abominable blasphemies.  When the tills of the little shops are raided, or when the family ne’er-do-well levies on his women with more than usual brutality, they know, because they suffer, what principles are being put into practice.  If these people could quietly be shown a quiet way out of it all, very many of them would call in their savings (they are richer than they look), and slip quietly away.  In the English country, as well as in the towns, there is a feeling—­not yet panic, but the dull edge of it—­that the future will be none too rosy for such as are working, or are in the habit of working.  This is all to our advantage.

Canada can best serve her own interests and those of the Empire by systematically exploiting this new recruiting-ground.  Now that South Africa, with the exception of Rhodesia, has been paralysed, and Australia has not yet learned the things which belong to her peace, Canada has the chance of the century to attract good men and capital into the Dominion.  But the men are much more important than the money.  They may not at first be as clever with the hoe as the Bessarabian or the Bokhariot, or whatever the fashionable breed is, but they have qualities of pluck, good humour, and a certain well-wearing virtue which are not altogether bad.  They will not hold aloof from the life of the land, nor pray in unknown tongues to Byzantine saints; while the very tenacity and caution which made them cleave to England this long, help them to root deeply elsewhere.  They are more likely to bring their women than other classes, and those women will make sacred and individual homes.  A little-regarded Crown Colony has a proverb that no district can be called settled till there are pots of musk in the house-windows—­sure sign that an English family has come to stay.  It is not certain how much of the present steamer-dumped foreign population has any such idea.  We have seen a financial panic in one country send whole army corps of aliens kiting back to the lands whose allegiance they forswore.  What would they or their likes do in time of real stress, since no instinct in their bodies or their souls would call them to stand by till the storm were over?