[The following speech was delivered to the Canadian Club, in the Russell House, Ottawa, in March 1905, when Sir Rider Haggard (at that time Mr. H. Rider Haggard) was in Canada as Commissioner appointed by the Colonial Office. His instructions were to visit and report on Labour Colonies established in the U.S.A. by the Salvation Army. After inspecting them he was to proceed to Ottawa and discuss the subject with Earl Grey, then Governor–General of Canada.

Sir Rider wished this speech to be inserted as an appendix to “The Days of My Life,” as it gives the essence of his views on the subject of the settlement of the surplus town population of Great Britain on the unoccupied land of the empire, a subject to which he devoted so much time and energy.

Commander Booth Tucker, of the Salvation Army, was with Sir Rider on this occasion, and also spoke. There was a record attendance of members of the Canadian Club, Mr. W. L. Mackenzie King (Prime Minister of the Dominion in June 1926) being in the Chair. — Ed.]

I will begin by making a confession. The other day I had the honour of addressing the branch of your society in Toronto, and there, for one solid half-hour, did I inflict myself upon them. I began to wonder how much they would stand. Well, I sat down and thought they must bless me for doing so. The next day I saw some of the newspapers, including one which stated that your humble servant had made what they were pleased to call a very interesting but exceedingly brief address. I thought to myself: If this is called brief in Toronto, I wonder what is long. I took a few opinions on the point. I asked why they called a speech of that length a brief one. My friend’s answer was that it had to do with your parliamentary institutions. He told me that it was quite common in your House of Commons throughout the country, for speeches to run from two to three hours, and therefore that is the standard and model of time by which addresses are judged.

Now, gentleman, I say to you at once that, high as might be that honour and greatly as I should desire it in any other circumstances, I feel that I should never be competent to be a member of a House of Commons of which this is true. Gentlemen, your president has made some very kind allusions to me and to my rather — what shall I call it? — varied career. He has spoken, for instance, of Africa. Well, gentlemen, it is true I began my life as a public servant in Africa, and many wonderful things I saw there.

I was in at the beginning, so to speak, of all the history we are living through today. I was with Sir Theophilus Shepstone when we annexed the Transvaal; as your president says, I had the honour of hoisting the flag of England over it. Gentlemen, I lived, too, to see the flag pulled down and buried. And I tell you this — and you, as colonists as I was, will sympathise with me — it was the bitterest hour of my life. Never can any of you in this room realise the scene I witnessed upon the market-square of Newcastle when the news of the surrender of Majuba reached us. It was a strange scene, it was an awful scene. There was a mob of about 5,000 men, many of them loyal Boers, many Englishmen, soldiers even, who had broken from the ranks — and they marched up and down raving, yet weeping like children — and swearing that whatever they were they were no longer Englishmen.

That is what I went through in those days; and I only mention it to tell you how I came to leave South Africa. For I agreed that it was no longer a place for an Englishman. Still, time goes on, the wheels swing full circle, things change. I remember that after that I wrote a book. It was a history. And in that book I went so far as to say — I remember it well, and there it stands in black and white to be read — that unless some change occurred, unless more wisdom, more patriotism and a different system altogether prevailed in African affairs, the result would be a war which would tax the entire resources of the British Empire. Gentlemen, have we not had that war? And at that time what did they say? They laughed at me, an unknown young man. And, years later, when the war was on, they dug up the book and printed these paragraphs and said, “Dear me, what a remarkable prophecy!” Three men were right: Sir Bartle Frere was right, and they disgraced him; my old chief, Sir Theophilus Shepstone, was right, and they disgraced him; and even I, humble as I was, was right, and they mocked at me. We know the end.

Thus my residential and official connection with South Africa came to an end — I would not stop there any longer. I came home and went to the bar, where I had fair prospects. And then a sad thing happened to me — I wrote a successful book.

I do not know whether to be sorry or glad that I wrote it. Other things might not have happened; and, after all, as Job the Patriarch says: “Man knoweth not his own way.” You go as destiny drives you. So it was, gentlemen, I took to fiction. Having begun, I had to go on. And, after all, there is something to be said for it. After all, it is not a bad thing to have given pleasure and amusement to many who are weary or sick, and, perhaps, some instruction also. You might do worse than to write a good novel. Not that I for a moment wish to state that all of mine are good.

Of course, the time comes to every writer, I suppose, when he has an inspiration and does something which he knows to be better than he ever did before. Perhaps he sees a little higher up into heaven perhaps he sees a little lower down into — the other depths; and he creates something and knows that that thing which he has created will live, and that it will even go glittering down the generations. He knows, perhaps, that he has cut his name fairly deep upon the iron leaves of the Book of Time, which are so hard to mark. Perhaps he knows that, and for a little while he is content. Not for long — no artist, I think, is ever contented for long with what he has done. But he thinks: “At least, I have done something.”

Then, perhaps, he begins to understand — it comes into his mind — that that was not his real inspiration. Not in these gauds of the imagination, these sparkling things, these plays of fancy or of eloquence or wit, was the real inspiration to be found. He turns and wonders where it is. And he turns, let us say, and looks at the dull masses of misery that pervade the globe, he looks and wonders, and he thinks: Is there nothing that I, humble as I am, can do to help to alleviate that misery, to lift up those who are fallen, to lift them up for their own good and for the good of the world? And then, gentlemen, he knows that that, not the gaudy, exciting work is the real inspiration of his life.

And, perhaps, he turns and tries to match his own single strength against the prejudices of generations, and tries to get men to think as he does, tries to show them where the evil lies and where, too, lies the remedy. Gentlemen, I have spoken, as it were, in allegory. And yet these things have some application, certainly in my humble case they have some application. Years ago, I saw what I described to you; I saw the evils with which, since then, I have attempted to cope. I recognised that it was my duty to cope with them if I could.

It is a hard task, gentlemen. It is a hard thing, in the first place, to live down the reputation of being a writer of fiction — to surmount the enormous barrier of prejudice that lies across one’s path. And it is not for years, perhaps, that people will begin to listen and will begin to understand that to most men’s minds there are two sides. Still, humbly, imperfectly, I did attempt it. I have not done much. Yet I have done something. They listen to me now a bit. If they had not listened to me I should not be here in my present position today as a Commissioner from the Government of Great Britain.

Well, what is it; what is this problem that moved me? I will tell you in a few words. I perceived and realised the enormous change that is coming over the Western world; how those, who for countless generations, dwelt upon the land, are deserting the land and crowding into the cities. I studied the reasons for this. For two years I studied them, going through England, village by village, county by county, town by town. And I found out what they were. In England the chief cause was lack of prospect on the land. We are cramped in England with the remains of a feudal system which works nothing but ill; and under that system it is so that no man on the land seems to have a chance to rise. The labourer on the land, say at two-and-twenty, is earning as high a wage as he can ever hope to earn.

I ask you, gentlemen, how should any of us like to know that at two-and-twenty we were doing the best we could hope to do in life? That is the lot of the labourer on the land. All that he has to look forward to at the end of his long career of forty or fifty years of toil is probably a place in the workhouse. Is that an attractive prospect? Then, no doubt, the spread of education, the facilities of travel, and other things of that kind conduce to the immigration into the cities, and this movement goes on with ever-increasing rapidity.

At the present moment in England, I believe we have but one-seventh of our population living on the land. In the United States, if the figures given me are correct, matters are very little better. And so it is in other countries — everywhere the land dwellers heap themselves into the cities. And what happens to them when they get there? How many succeed? Not one in five, I say. The rest of them, for the most part, get nothing. If sickness strikes a man, when he arises from his bed his place is gone. His children grow ill through crowding together in narrow courts and unsanitary rooms, and become decimated by disease. Bad times come and the workmen are dismissed by the thousand from their employ. Grey hairs, at any rate, come at last, and with grey hairs the notice to quit; and so they go down, and they g............