All this signifies but one thing to Canada—­a swift transition from agricultural status to industrial life; and whether such an artificial transition bodes good or ill for a land whose greatest wealth lies in forest and mine and farm remains to be seen.  For the time it has resulted in a cost of living almost prohibitive to the very poor.  The sweatshop, the tenement, the Ghetto, the cave life hovel of Europe have been reproduced in the crowded foreign quarters of Canadian cities.  It means more than physical deterioration and moral contamination and degeneration of national stamina.  It means if Canada is to become a great manufacturing country, feeding the human into the hopper of the machine that dividends may pour out, then she, the youngest of the nations, must compete against the oldest and the strongest—­Germany, England, France, the United States; but if she is to be a great agricultural country, then she has few peers in the whole world.  Neither need she have any fear.  The nations of the world must come to her, as they went down to Egypt, for bread.  The man on his own land, be his work good or ill owns his own labor and takes profit or loss from it and can blame no one but himself for that profit or loss.  With the renting out of a man’s labor to some other man for that other man’s profit or loss come all the discontent and class strife of industrial warfare.  Of industrial strife, of labor riots, of syndicalism, of social revolution, of the few plundering the many, and the many threatening reprisal in the form of legislation for the many to plunder the few—­of this dog-eat-dog, internecine industrial strife—­Canada has hitherto known next to nothing; but she is at the parting of the ways.  The day that a preponderance of her population becomes urban instead of rural, that day a preponderance of her population must ask leave to live from some other man—­must ask leave to work for some other man, must ask leave to put the collar of the industrial serf on the neck as the sign of labor owned by some other man.  That day the preponderance of Canada’s population will cease owning their own vested rights and will begin attacking the vested rights of other men.  That day plutocracy will begin plundering democracy, and the unfit will begin plundering the fit, and the many will demand the same rewards as the few, not by winning those rewards and rising to the plane of the few, but by expropriating those rewards and pulling the few down to the level of the many.  To me it means the sickling over a robust nationhood with the yellowing hue of a dollar democracy, the yellowing hue of gnashing social jealousy, the yellowing hue of moral putridity and decadence and rot.  Hitherto every man has stood on his own legs in Canada.  There has been no weak-kneed, puling greedy mob bellowing for pap from the breasts of a state treasury—­demanding the rewards of industry and thrift which they have been too weak and shiftless and useless to earn.  But Canada is at the parting of the ways.  The day more men live in the cities demanding food than live on the soil producing it—­which God forfend—­that day Canada goes down in the welter of industrial war and social upheaval.