The farmer in the Old Country can plow every month in the year and his flocks and herds only need supplementary rations to keep them in condition.  How different it is here, where winter locks the soil in iron bonds half the year and animals must be fed from October to May.  What our farmers raise in six months is consumed in the other six, so that their labor half the year is to store up food for the other half.  The result is, that the earnings of our farmers are less than half of what they would be had we England’s climate.  The public man who argues that because the Old Country farmer can pay heavy rent to his landlord, bear the burden of severe taxation, and yet make a living, the Canadian farmer should be able to do likewise, shuts his eyes to the kind of winter he has to fight against.  That winter cuts his earnings more than half, for, during the months the land is frozen he is unable to do any kind of profitable farm work, indeed has spells of enforced idleness.  The Old Country farmer can keep hired help the year round, for he has employment for them; the Canadian farmer needs extra hands only during summer.  The result is that his margin of profits is so narrow that he can never pay such taxes as are collected from the agricultural class in England.  When public burdens draw on his income to the extent that he is not left a living profit, the Anglo-Saxon will leave the land to be occupied by an unenterprising class of people who are content to vegetate, not to live.  The pre-eminent essential in Canada’s policy is to make farming profitable and keep it so.

While the statement, that agriculture is the foundation of Canada’s life, is so often repeated that it has become a commonplace remark, is it not extraordinary that none of its public men since Simcoe’s day have acted upon it?  With the words on their lips, Canada rests upon the farmer, it would be expected the welfare of the farmer would be their solicitous concern.  In the first element of agricultural prosperity, the settlement of the land, they have kept back the progress of the country by bestowing it, not on the men ready and anxious to cultivate it, but upon individuals and companies who expect to make a profit by reselling to the actual settler.  By making the land a commodity to buy political support, the settlement of the country has been kept back.  The rule, that the land be given only to those who will live upon it and crop it, would have saved heartbreak to thousands of willing men who came to our shores asking liberty to till its soil, and would have placed an occupant on every lot fit to yield a living.  The individuals and companies who have been given grants of blocks of land under the pretence that they would settle them, have been blights on the progress of the country.

As to the danger of taxation increasing to a degree that will make the working of the land unattractive to the intelligent and enterprising, that menace comes from two classes—­the projectors of public works who agitate for them from self-interest, and from those who have raised a clamor to encourage manufacturers by giving them bonuses in the form of protective duties.  Should a levy ever be made on the earnings of the farmer to help a favored class, there will be a leaving of the land for other countries and for better-paying occupations.