CANADA is the land of possibilities.

On September 1st, 1900, I landed at Quebec, with introductions from the late Governor-General of Canada (the Earl of Aberdeen), to be warmly welcomed by the great historian of that country, Sir James Le Moine. He had written endless volumes on the Dominion, among the best known being The Legends of the St. Lawrence and Picturesque Quebec.

As to the writings of this Canadian “worthy,” to quote the word fitly describing him, the following extract from an article dealing with them will best explain to some who may not know what a work of filial love was his in chronicling the history of his native province.

“Nearly half a century ago James Macpherson Le Moine, advocate, and inspector of inland revenue for the district of Quebec, published a modest little volume of historical and legendary lore relating to the city and environs of Quebec, under the title of Maple Leaves. Little had been accomplished, prior to that time, in the way of collecting the scattered wealth of Lower Canadian legends and folklore, and English-speaking Canadians knew scarcely anything of the extremely valuable collections of manuscript sources of early Canadian history, scattered through the vaults of various public buildings in Quebec. To Le Moine, whose maternal grandfather was a Macpherson, though on his father’s side the young author was a French-Canadian, belongs much of the credit, through his English books, in interesting English-speaking Canadians in the history, the traditions, and the archæology of French Canada. It was at his initiative and under his presidency that the Quebec Literary and Historical Society, founded by the Earl of Dalhousie in 1824, undertook the publication of some of the most important existing manuscripts concerning the early history of the country.”

The morning after my arrival in Montreal, a week later, various people presented themselves before me—they had seen long notices in the two papers that morning, and came on errands of friendship, or through introductions. One was announced as “Dr. Drummond.”

I looked up; the name conveyed nothing to me; and as I was not ill, I wondered at the visit.

“If I can be of any service to you,” he said, “you have but to command me. I knew your father, his profession is my profession, your profession is mine too.”

“You write? Are you any connection of the Dr. Drummond who wrote the Habitant?” I asked.

“I am he.”

“Oh, then, you can indeed do something for me.”

“And that is?”

“Take me to see the Habitants in their own homes.”

Accordingly I spent several days among the farms and cottages of the old French-Canadians with this large-hearted man. I shall never forget his recitation of his own poems. They brought tears to my eyes and lumps to my throat, they were so simple and so real. And these poor folk loved him. It was a treat to see a man so respected and adored by the people whom he had been at such pains to make understood. Drummond was the Kipling—the Bret Harte of Canada. He was not much of a French scholar. His accent was horrible, but he comprehended. He had that human understanding and perception that count for more than mere words. He would sit and smoke in the corner with an old man, and draw him out to tell me stories while the wife made cakes for our tea.

Complimenting me on my French, he said:

“I can’t speak like you; often I can’t even say or ask what I want.”

“Perhaps if you knew more, you would not be able to make your poems so quaint,” I replied.

“I believe you are right. I jot down the English or French words just as I use them, as the Habitants use them, and perhaps if I knew more I should not do that.”

He was so human, so lovable, and at that time so poor. Half a dozen years afterwards Fortune smiled. His books were selling well; his cobalt mines had begun to pay. Then he heard disease (smallpox I think it was) had broken out at the far-away mines.

“I must go,” he said. “I cannot take the money these men are bringing me, without going to their help.”

He went; but almost before he had had time to make his medical knowledge of value to them, he was himself stricken and died.

Poor Drummond, a lovable character, and a genial comrade. The following verses are a good specimen of his style. They are taken from “The Habitant’s Jubilee Ode,” written at the time of the celebration of the sixtieth year of Queen Victoria’s rule. Why, the Habitant is asking himself, are the “children of Queen Victoriaw comin’ from far away? For tole Madame w’at dey t’ink of her, an’ wishin’ her bonne santé.” The answer is good French-Canadian and good sense:

If de moder come dead w’en you’re small garçon, leavin’ you dere alone,

Wit’ nobody watchin’ for fear you fall, and hurt youse’f on de stone,

An’ ’noder good woman she tak’ your han’ de sam’ your own moder do,

Is it right you don’t call her moder, is it right you don’t love her too?

Bâ non, an’ dat was de way we feel, w’en de old Regime’s no more,

An’ de new wan come, but don’t change moche, w’y it’s jus’ lak’ it be before,

Spikin’ Français lak’ we alway do, an’ de English dey mak’ no fuss,

An’ our law de sam’, wall, I don’t know me, ’twas better mebbe for us.

So de sam’ as two broder we settle down, leevin’ dere han’ in han’,

Knowin’ each oder, we lak’ each oder, de French an’ de Englishman,

For it’s curi’s t’ing on dis worl’, I’m sure you see it agen an’ agen,

Dat offen de mos’ worse ennemi, he’s comin’ de bes’, bes’ frien’.

Drummond spent part of his boyhood among the woods and rivers of Eastern Canada. His own record of these early days was graphic. He said: “I lived in a typical mixed-up village—Bord à Plouffe—composed of French and English-speaking raftsmen, or ‘voyageurs,’ as we call them—the class of men who went with Wolseley to the Red River, and later accompanied the same general up the Nile—men with rings in their ears, dare-devils, Indians, half-breeds, French-Canadians, Scotch and Irish-Canadians—a motley crew, but great ‘river men’ who ran the rapids, sang their quaint old songs—‘En Roulant,’ ‘Par Derrière chez ma Tante,’ and ‘Dans le prison de Nantes,’ songs forgotten in France, but preserved in French Canada. Running the rapids with these men, I learned to love them and their rough ways.”

At the poet’s funeral a poor countrywoman of Drummond—he was an Irishman by birth—was heard to say:

“Shure, he was the doctor that come into yer sickroom like an archangel.”

The amount of French still spoken in Canada is surprising to a stranger. One hardly expects to find French policemen on English soil, or the law courts conducted in the French tongue.

Some of the old French title-deeds in Canada are very amusing. A friend wanted to buy a small piece of property a few years ago, adjoining some he already possessed on the shores of the St. Lawrence. Apart from acquiring the land itself, there were “certain obligations which formed a charge upon the property,” and these were so wonderful they are worth repeating.

“EXTRACT FROM DEED OF CESSION BETWEEN CERTAIN PARTIES.

This extraordinary deed was only drawn in 1866. The old man is now dead, also one of the girls; the other is in a convent out West, and my friend managed to compromise with her for a small sum instead of letting her sit at his table, keep her in clothing, or provide her with potatoes.

In Ottawa I was the guest of the man who was probably doing more than anyone else for the agricultural development of Canada. The great strides with which in this Department she has surprised the world were primarily due to the enterprise of a Scotchman, Professor James Robertson, who held the post of Agricultural Commissioner from 1895 to 1904. He has written volumes on the subject, as well as being successful practically. It will be remembered that this able man had come to speak for me in London at the International Council of Women earlier in the year. After writing London, I ought to have put Eng., as no Canadian thinks of our London unless it has “Eng.” after it.

As a boy he left his father’s farm in the Lowlands of Scotland, where he had been working, and, full of enthusiasm and enterprise, sailed for Canada. He had much practical knowledge at his back, and many theoretical ideas in his mind, that he found difficult to work out in the narrow limits of a Scotch homestead. That lad’s name is probably one of the best known and most respected in Canada to-day, and yet it is not so many years since he landed, for he is still in the prime of life.

Professor James Robertson is a wonderful man; he retains his Scotch accent, has made practical use of his shrewd, hard-headed, far-sighted upbringing, and has about the most extraordinary capacity for work of almost any man I know. His energy is unbounded, and his physical powers of endurance marvellous.

Since I was in Canada in 1900, the increase of population and the output of the land is simply amazing. Roughly speaking, the population was then six millions; to-day it numbers over seven millions.

Growth! Growth! Growth! Wherever one turns there is growth in Canada; her cultured lands; her enormous crops; her untold mineral and forest wealth; her wonderful fisheries and water power; her gigantic railroads; her large cities—one knows not where they end. The Dominion Government with its experimental farms, and agricultural colleges, with its free grants of land which in 1910 equalled half of Scotland in area, affords, to Canadian and immigrant alike, facilities unparalleled in history. With such bountiful natural resources, such able statesmen at the helm, and such advantages from modern discoveries; when the rapidity of locomotion binds the ends of the earth together, and nations from divers continents hold daily converse with each other, rendering the world’s contemporary history an open book, the young country of the twentieth century has advantages never even dreamt of by the pioneers of past ages.

Surely Canada should be the nursery of Empire builders, and her sons the makers of history, and she will continue so, unless too much laudation turns her head, and she ceases to strive.

Professor Robertson took me to see Dr. Parkin, of Upper Canada College, Toronto, another of the best-known writers of the Dominion; his most widely read work being The Life of Edward Thring, the great reformer of boys’ schools, whose devoted admirer the Doctor is. Upper Canada College is like Eton, Harrow, or Charterhouse. It is a magnificent building, and everything seemed charmingly arranged.

Dr. Parkin is a delightful personality, a great scholar, a kindly teacher, and a staunch friend; he now lives in England, having been appointed—about two years after my visit—the organising representative of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust.

At his house I met Colonel George Denison, who had just written Soldiering in Canada, a book as well known on this side of the Atlantic as on the other. It was his grandfather, a Yorkshireman, who went out to Canada and founded “York,” now known as Toronto. The Colonel is an interesting companion and a good raconteur.

Sir William Macdonald may perhaps be said to have been the chief mover of education in Canada for many years. He was justly proud of McGill University in Montreal, and must have been gratified at the success of the manual training schools in different parts of Canada, which owed so much to his generosity. To him also Canada is indebted for the Macdonald Agricultural College at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, which he established and endowed at enormous cost.

No word on Canada, however brief, would be right without reference to Goldwin Smith.

Born in 1823, he died at a ripe age a few weeks after King Edward, to whom he had once been tutor in English history, and of whom the teacher said admiringly:

“He never once let me see he was bored, therefore I gathered he would successfully fulfil the arduous duties of royalty.”

After leaving England for the United States in 1864, Goldwin Smith saw something of the great Civil War. Later he came to Toronto, and there lived out his days in a charming old house called “The Grange.”

He told me emphatically in 1900 that “within ten years Canada would be annexed by the United States.” Goldwin Smith died just a decade later, and Canada seemed then more Imperial, more British, more loyal than ever. But a few months later came this wheat business in Washington, and up sprang the old cry of annexation.

There are a number of interesting writers in Canada. Most of them were born in England, and went there as children; there are others who were born there and have migrated back to England. Of the latter class Dr. Beattie Crozier is, at the present time, most before the public. He describes his early days in Canada vividly in My Inner Life, but Intellectual Development is one of the most readable philosophies ever written. He has a knack of putting the most abstruse subjects in the clearest possible light. Dr. Crozier lives in London, where he practises medicine. A few years ago a terrible affliction threatened to befall him. He went nearly blind. His eyes are now better, but to save them as much as possible, his wife writes everything for him to his dictation, looks up his data, translates French and German philosophies; in fact, is his helpmate in the true sense of the word. They are a devoted couple. One of those pretty ideal homes one loves to see, and which are often found in the busiest lives. The doctor resembles a smart officer in appearance; no one would ever take him for one of the profoundest thinkers of the day.

Sir Gilbert Parker is a Canadian; but he, like Dr. Crozier, now lives in London.

Lord Strathcona is another of the wonderful men of Canada. He is indeed their “Grand Old Man.”

One of the things that most struck Ibsen about the English-speaking race was their capacity for strenuous work at an advanced age. “Britishers often take up important positions in that span of life in which men of other nations are laying down their arms,” he once said to me.

It was at a dinner given to Sir Henniker Heaton, of Post Office fame, on his retirement from Parliament (1910) by the Men of Kent, that I was particularly struck by Lord Strathcona. I was sitting next the old gentleman with Sir George Reid, the High Commissioner for Australia, on my other side. It was really most remarkable to find a man of ninety years of age so clear and concise, and practical and sensible in every way. With the rather weak voice of an old man, he spoke well and to the point, referring to the blessings of penny postage, which Henniker Heaton had made possible to all the English-speaking world, comparing it with the days when he first went to Canada seventy years before, and each letter cost four shillings, and eight shillings for a double page, and no envelopes were used, as they increased the weight.

A fine well-chiselled head, Lord Strathcona has become a greater old man than he was a young man. His life has been remarkable for its steady Scotch perseverance and extraordinary luck, which, through the Hudson Bay Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway, gave him affluence. It was not brilliancy or genius that brought him to the position he attained, but just that hard-headed Scotch capacity for plodding. Luck leads to nothing without pluck.

He talked quite cheerily of his next visit to Canada, the ocean holding no terrors for him, and he explained that his house in Montreal was always kept open and ready to step into. The same with his place at Glencoe, where he had only been able to spend four days in the year, much to his regret.

It was midnight before that old gentleman went home, to begin an early and hard day the next morning, for he is indefatigable at his work for Canada as High Commissioner, and is to be found every day and all day in his office in Victoria Street at the age of ninety-two.

“Yes,” he said, “Canada has a great future, though we must send out the right people. Ne’er-do-weels will do no good anywhere, and hard workers will always get on. Hard workers will get a hundred per cent greater reward in Canada than in Great Britain, while ne’er-do-weels will do worse, as there are no philanthropic institutions to bolster them up, or pamper them, as there are here.”

He is modest—almost shy and retiring. Very courtly in manner, in spite of his humble origin; but, then, he is one of Nature’s gentlemen.

Short in stature—the red hair almost white, but still peeping through the beard—his stoop and tottering, dragging gait denote age—also his slowness of speech; but his mind is all there—alive and active and full of thought and force.

Men may rise to great power in a new country if they only have the grit.

The life of another such in Canada, merely as known to the public by newspaper notices, reads like a romance.

His last night before leaving England in February, 1909, Mr. Fielding wished to see the popular play An Englishman’s Home. There was not a seat in the house; but by a little judicious management, with some difficulty I secured two tickets at the last moment. I dined with him at the “Savoy,” and then we went on to the theatre. Being short-sighted, I was holding up my glasses. The theatre was darkened during the act. Suddenly I found something warm and soft deposited in my lap. Dropping the glasses, I felt, and, lo! to my amazement, it was a head. A human, curly head. Naturally surprised, I wondered where it came from, and whether the man—for man it was—had had a fit, or was dying. I saw Mr. Fielding pushing him up from the other side. Then the head, murmuring apologies sotto voce, rose, but it was too dark, and the house too silent to find out what had really happened.

When the curtain came down and the lights went up, behold the poor owner of the head, who was sitting on the floor, covered with confusion.

“I am very sorry, madam,” he said. “It was most unfortunate, but my seat gave way.” In fact, the stall on which this good gentleman had been sitting had collapsed, sending his head into my lap, and his legs into the lap of the lady on the other side. A pretty predicament.

The rush on the play was so great that extra stalls had been added, until we had barely room for our knees. These had evidently not been properly coupled together: when at some exciting moment in the play, the gentleman had presumably laughed or coughed, and his downfall ensued.

There lay the blue plush seat on the ground, and under it, his top-hat squashed flat.

What a furore that play made, and yet there was little or nothing in it. But success came from the fact that it struck the right note, and struck it at the moment when the nation was ready for the awakening. How it was boomed! Men rushed to join the Territorials, and even I was one of the first women to send in my name for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps. But, as they asked me to go to a riding-school to learn to ride—I, who had ridden all my life—I really could not go further in the matter.

Mr. Fielding is a most interesting personality and character.

“We are so apt to forget the good things of life,” he said that evening. “I wanted a motor-bus just now. There was none at the corner, and I had to walk. I felt annoyed. Then I pulled myself up, and thought—How many dozen times have I caught this bus just at the moment I wanted it! Did I ever feel or express gratitude? Yet when I miss it I growl—now is this fair?—and I shook myself and felt ashamed.”

“Very noble of you,” I said.

“Not at all. But I am always saying to myself I have no right to grumble, no right to be annoyed while I omit to be thankful and grateful for the manifold blessings around me.”

Speaking of nervousness being the cause of my refusal to go to Leeds that week to address five thousand people, Mr. Fielding laughed.

“How I sympathise with you! For twenty years I have been before the public, and yet have never made a speech without a little twinge.”

Of his chief, Laurier, he remarked: “It is an astonishing thing how much more English than French he has become. Forty years of constant communication with, and work amongst, British-speaking people has moulded him along British lines, and although the French manner and charm remain, British determination, doggedness, clear sight, and broad views are dominant. In fact, I far more often find him reading an English book than a French one, when I enter his library.”

Then briefly touching on his own doings:

“I’ve been in England two months, and sail to-morrow morning—came for two things, and accomplished both. First, the trade treaty with France begun eighteen months ago. Secondly, to raise six million sterling in London. I’ve also done that this week; and am now going home with the money, chiefly for our trans-continental railway.

“Treaty? Well, as a rule, only kings can make treaties, but in Canada we are given a good deal of power. This is the second time I have been made a Plenipotentiary in a way—a one-man affair when ready, signed by Sir Francis Bertie.”

“A treaty with France, and you don’t know French.”

“Ah, but I know my subject, Mam. Don’t scorn me for my want of French. In the province where I was born it was not wanted, and when it was needed I was too busy to learn; telephone bells or messengers were going all the time, so I had to give it up, but I’ll learn it yet, I hope.”

“Do you require French in the Canadian House?”

“No, we are mostly English members, and although some of the Frenchmen speak in French, and all things by law are read in both languages, the Frenchmen generally stop the reading and consent to take it as read. Laurier for twenty years has always spoken in English; perfect English. Lemieux speaks in English. In fact, to get the ear of the House one must speak in English.”

“Are the French-Canadians as loyal as the English-Canadians?”

“Yes, but in a different way. We are loyal because it is born in the blood; they are loyal from gratitude, and because they know England gave them freedom. They are more loyal than we should have been to France if that fight on the Plains of Abraham had been won by the French.”

Sir Wilfrid Laurier I do not know as I know Mr. Fielding or Mr. Lemieux, but Sir Wilfrid Laurier is a great personality. He struck me as a wonderful type when I first went up in a lift with him at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, although I did not then know who he was. There is a rugged strength about his face that impresses. He is a scholar and a gentleman, speaks perfect English, and has great charm of manner.

He said in the Dominion House of Commons:

“I would say to Great Britain, ‘If you want us to help you, call us to your councils.’”

Another time, when talking of Lloyd George’s Budget, W. S. Fielding remarked:

“I have made thirteen Budgets, the only man who ever did such a thing, I should imagine; and I know from experience people always grumble. They grumble at everything and anything. To-day at Ascot (1910) a man was abusing Lloyd George’s Budget. ‘There are a few thousand people in the Royal Enclosure,’ I said, ‘and I should think every one of them disapproves. They are rich, and it hits them. There are tens of thousands of people over there on the race-course. They are poor, and they are glad. Was not Lloyd George right, therefore, to consider the millions?’”

Mr. Fielding possesses an enormous power for work. On one occasion, after a tête-à-tête dinner with me, he went home about eleven, and finding letters and documents awaiting him, sat up till five a.m. and finished them, also deciphering long Government telegrams in code. Next morning he began work at ten again.

Quiet, gentle, reserved, Fielding strikes one as a delightful, grey-headed old gentleman of honest, homely kindliness. He never says an unkind thing of anyone. Toleration is his dominant note, and yet with all that calm exterior he has proved himself the greatest treaty-maker of his age, as well as the most successful handler of budgets and manœuvrer of great Government loans; but he failed over Reciprocity.

This chapter would be incomplete without mention of the late Canadian “Ministre des postes,” M. Lemieux, of whom Fielding said: “He is one of the cleverest men in Canada.”

“Your King, my King, our King, is the most perfect gentleman I have ever met. Il est tout à fait gentilhomme,” so remarked the Hon. Rodolphe Lemieux, K.C., when Postmaster-General of Canada, to me in my little library, immediately on his return from Windsor, when King Edward was still our Sovereign.

Then one of the most prominent politicians in Canada, for he was not only P.M.G., but Minister of Labour for the Dominion, M. Lemieux is another man still in his prime. He was born about 1860. A French-Canadian by birth, he speaks English almost faultlessly, an accomplishment learnt by habit and ear during the last few years, and not from a lesson-book.

When I first met M. Lemieux in Canada about 1900, he hardly knew any English. Six or seven years later he could get up and address a large audience in our tongue with ease and fluency. Yet this art has been acquired during the most strenuous years of his life.

“I’m in London,” he replied to a question one day, “to try to settle the All Red Route cable between Britain and her Colony.”

Lemieux is an extraordinarily strong character. Of medium height, inclined to be stout, sallow of skin, clean-shaven, with slightly grey hair, standing up straight like a Frenchman’s; great charm of manner, not fulsome, but gracious, and at times commanding. He gets excited and marches about the room, waving his hands—nice hands, broad, but small for his sex—and pursing his mouth. A man of strength, and a gentle, kindly being. Very ambitious, and yet, as he says truly, “What is success, when once attained?”

One night I was to dine with him. Nothing would do but he must fetch me in a taxi. We went to the “Ritz,” where he had ordered an excellent little dinner, and where a lovely bunch of roses and lilies was beside my plate. When he went at five to order the dinner, he had ordered the flowers and a pin!

The day after his arrival at his London hotel his little jewel-case was stolen. He told me almost in tears. “Recollections, souvenirs, gone, my wife’s first present to me—a scarf-pin. Her great-grandmother’s earring. My ring as Professor of Law, gone. I feel I have lost real friends—friends of years and friends I valued. Their worth was little, their sentiment untold.”

A treaty between Canada and Japan allowed free emigration. At once ten thousand Japanese descended on Canada. Yellow peril was imminent. Lemieux was sent to Japan. After delicate manipulation he got the treaty altered, so that only four hundred Japanese should land in a year, a regulation that brought him much renown.

Then the Lemieux Act, which means amicable discussion between parties before arbitration, was brought in. One representative from each side and one representative of the Minister of Labour meet; everything is sifted to the bottom and published, with the result that few cases ever go to arbitration, but are generally settled by this intermediate body. It works so successfully that Roosevelt sent people from the United States to study its working, and the sooner Great Britain does something to settle her strikes along the same lines the better.

Yes, Canada impressed me, charmed me, and as I am proud to reckon, after ten years, two of the late Cabinet Ministers among my best friends, not forgetting one of the leading spirits in agriculture, I have followed the remarkable development of Canada with interest. She will expand even more in the next ten years. Canada is a land to reckon with. She can produce wealth, and as long as the Socialist does not enter to destroy that wealth, and distribute it, Canada will forge ahead. No one was more surprised than the Liberal Cabinet at their overthrow in 1911; they were more surprised even than Borden at his great victory.