The presence of camp education facilities often had the effect of stabilizing the work force--preventing the frequent movement of the underpaid, overworked northern labourers from camp to camp. For example, R. Jackson, Superintendent of Woods for the Victoria Harbor Lumber Company wrote to Fitzpatrick that he was "satisfied the reading rooms and night schools very materially checked the 'jumping, of men". i.e. their frequent movement from camp to camp.41

The concerns of employers about their workers largely revolved around the problem of maintaining discipline and productivity during what was a time of rapid economic growth and severe competition in mining, lumbering and railway construction. For this reason, it is unlikely that many employers shared Fitzpatrick's larger, more exalted vision, i.e.:

The association aims to dignify isolated manual labor and to free it from sordid and degrading conditions... labor thus ennobled and made intelligent will become what Carlyle foresaw it would become, "the grand sole miracle of man" and the key to the industrial, educational, social and religious problems of our time.42

However, there was sufficient convergence of interests between small Reading Camp Association and those employers influenced by new corporate-liberal ideology to make some limited cooperation possible.

Diversion from Collective Action

As for the reaction of workers in the isolated frontier camps to visits by representatives of the Reading Camp Association, we have only second-hand accounts of their views as submitted by organizers and instructors of the Association. If these are to be believed, it seems that even if the assumptions of the visitors tended to be middle class and moralistic, and if their rhetoric was frequently patronizing in its tone, many of the lonely and overworked campmen welcomed their presence and appreciated the diversion which the small camp libraries and literacy classes afforded. Sometimes as many as a quarter or more of them took part in some way. 43

For those individuals who suffered most from the mental privations of camp life, literacy instruction and reading materials represented one tangible means of personal development in what was otherwise a barren and stultifying environment. However, the presence of the Reading Camp clearly offered no stimulus for workers to undertake collective action against the exploitation they faced, and in fact the emphasis on individualistic self-improvement and conformity to dominant values probably served to divert them from it.