A CANADIAN DIFFICULTY.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2224, 13 April 1881, Page 3

A CANADIAN DIFFICULTY.

A rather serious difference of opinion has arisen between Canada and the United States with regard to emigration. The latter, not satisfied with taking the lion’s share of newcomers from the Old World, is now anxious to prove that she gets also a large contingent from her nearest neighbor; in other words that emigrants to Canada soon find out their mistake and desert the Dominion for the land of the Stars and Stripes. Canadian officials, however, indignantly traverse this assertion. They admit that a certain number of emigrants do pass the border; but these are they who always intended to make the United States their home, and who only utilised Canadian lines of railway as the most convenient road for travelling to their place of settlement. In the same way they point out that many reach Manitoba and the Far West through the United States, and that the numbers travelling each way pretty well balance each other. To those must, of course, be added a few who do not find the country of their adoption exactly what they expected ; unsettled spirits probably, who would always be on the move, even though they had land allotted to them in some earthly paradise. But to call the emigration wholesale is, to use the words of the Canadian report, 11 A fabrication so gross as to establish an impossibility without even a semblance of probability.” This denial is supported by statistics of various kinds. The numbers moving by rail have been examined, the entries of emigrants’ effects also, and deductions made from the last census. It is, no doubt, a matter of some importance to rebut an allegation of this kind. Emigrants are not unlike sheep, prone to follow where others lead ; and any accredited reports that the Dominion was found unsuitable and unpopular by those who selected it would soon injuriously affect emigration to Canada.