"Wait," says the New Order.  "Give him room!  Give him an opportunity!
Give him a full stomach to pump blood to his muscles and life to his
brain!  Wait and see!  If he fails _then_, let him drop to the bottom
of the social pit without stop of poorhouse or help!"

A penniless immigrant boy arrives in New York.  First he peddles
peanuts, then he trades in a half-huckster way whatever comes to hand
and earns profits.  Presently he becomes a fur trader and invests his
savings in real estate.  Before that man dies, he has a monthly income
equal to the yearly income of European kings.  That man's name was John
Jacob Astor.

Or a young Scotch boy comes out on a sailing vessel to Canada.  For a
score of years he is an obscure clerk at a distant trading post in
Labrador.  He comes out of the wilds to take a higher position as land
commissioner.  Presently he is backing railroad ventures of tremendous
cost and tremendous risk.  Within thirty years from the time he came
out of the wilds penniless, that man possesses a fortune equal to the
national income of European kingdoms.  The man's name is Lord
Strathcona.

Or a hard-working coal miner emigrates to Canada.  The man has brains
as well as hands.  Other coal miners emigrate at the same time, but
this man is as keen as a razor in foresight and care.  From coal miner
he becomes coal manager, from manager {xi} operator, from operator
owner, and dies worth a fortune that the barons of the Middle Ages
would have drenched their countries in blood to win.  The man's name is
James Dunsmuir.

Or it is a boy clerking in a departmental store.  He emigrates.  When
he goes back to England it is to marry a lady in waiting to the Queen.
He is now known as Lord Mount-Stephen.

What was the secret of the success?  Ability in the first place, but in
the second, opportunity; opportunity and room for shoulder swing to
show what a man can do when keen ability and tireless energy have
untrammeled freedom to do their best.

Examples of the _emigres'_ success could be multiplied.  It is more
than a mere material success; it is eternal proof that, given a fair
chance and a square deal and shoulder swing, the boy born penniless can
run the race and outstrip the boy born to power.

"Have you, then, no _menial_ classes in Canada?" asked a member of the
Old Order.

"No, I'm thankful to say," said I.

"Then _who_ does the work?"

"The workers."

"But what's the difference?"

"Just this: your menial of the Old Country is the child of a menial,
whose father before him was a menial, whose ancestors were in servile
positions to other people back as far as you like to go,--to the time
when men were serfs wearing an iron collar with the brand of the lord
who owned them.  With us no stigma is attached to work.  _Your_ menial
expects to be a menial all his life.  With our worker, just as sure as
the sun rises and sets, if he continues to work and is no fool, he will
rise to earn a competency, to improve himself, to own his own labor, to
own his own home, to hire the labor of other men who are beginners as
he once was himself."

"Then you have no social classes?"

"Lots.  The _ups_, who have succeeded; and the _half-way ups_, who are
succeeding; and the _beginners_, who are going to succeed; and the
_downs_, who never try.  And as success doesn't necessarily mean money,
but doing the best at whatever one tries, {xii} you can see that the
_ups_ and the _halfway ups_, and the _beginners_ and the _downs_ have
each their own classes of special workers."

"That," she answered, "is not democracy; it is revolution."  She was
thinking of those Old World hard-and-fast divisions of society into
royalty, aristocracy, commons, peasantry.

"It is not revolution," I explained.  "It is rebirth!  When you send
your _emigre_ out to us, he is a made-over man."

But it is not given to all _emigre's_ to become great capitalists or
great leaders.  Some who have the opportunity have not the ability, and
the majority would not, for all the rewards that greatness offers,
choose careers that entail long years of nerve-wracking, unflagging
labor.  But on a minor scale the same process of making over takes
place.  One case will illustrate.

Some years before immigration to Canada had become general, two or
three hundred Icelanders were landed in Winnipeg destitute.  From some
reason, which I have forgotten,--probably the quarantine of an
immigrant,--the Icelanders could not be housed in the government
immigration hall.  They were absolutely without money, household goods,
property of any sort except clothing, and that was scant, the men
having but one suit of the poorest clothes, the women thin homespun
dresses so worn one could see many of them had no underwear.  The
people represented the very dregs of poverty.  Withdrawing to the
vacant lots in the west end of Winnipeg,--at that time a mere
town,--the newcomers slept for the first nights, herded in the rooms of