I sat in the tail of the train smoking, while Ontario dropped behind, league after league of thin trees growing out of the rock, of rock growing out of bog or lake, of bog or lake covering all solid things. Sometimes the trees were green and dark; sometimes green and light; sometimes nothing but scorched trunks—black skeletons of trees left by a forest fire which had killed everything within reach like a beast of prey, but consumed only the tender parts.
Somebody, as we swung over a typical piece of muskeg country—black and juicy bogland covered with a foot maybe of clear water—began to tell a story of a train that had run off the rails and plunged head first into just such a place. It had been a long train, he said; a goods train, and it had gone down and down. When he saw it, the last truck only stuck out of the muskeg. We listened respectfully. It was at least a well-found story, illustrating the difficulties the engineers had had in laying the lines across a treacherous ooze that nothing seemed to fill or make firm.
What will become of this one-thousand-mile stretch of swamped rock-land? Nobody knows. There it lies separating East from West, as land impassable, unnavigable as water. Firs and minerals, these are the only things to be expected from it. Firs tend to grow less, but the minerals of course may in the end so count that no one will wish the country other than the rock it is. All along the line the railway authorities have up the names of stations, as though there really were stations there, and, even more, as though there were villages or towns which those stations served. You are carried past a hundred such stations—names on a board and nothing more at all, unless it be a solitary wooden shack in which some railway subordinate passes his life seeing that the line is clear. The gangs of workers, Galicians or Italians, who do repairs along the line, camp out; you see their camps now and then, temporary settlements in this No Man's Land.
'Pays mélancolique et marécageux!' So Pierre Loti named Les Landes, and the description fits this country too, though I doubt if melancholy is a word to be found in a Canadian's vocabulary. 'Pretty poor stuff' a Canadian might allow it to be, but would immediately begin to talk of the fish in its waters, the big game to be got among the woods, and the mining possibilities it would reveal as soon as prospectors and syndicates got together. There never was a people less born to be depressed than the Canadians; nor do I think they will ever produce a Pierre Loti.
For my part, I began to find this country most fascinating when I started to think of its effect upon the history of Canada. It is easy to see that its very impenetrability hindered for a long time the growth of the West. Where there was no road there was no way for progress, and the great wheatlands were shut up beyond it, while Eastern Canada developed. What is less easy to see is the effect such a waste must have when the country on the other side has been populated and fertilised. A little time ago people began to think that East and West would simply reverse their order of importance. They said, 'Quebec and Ontario have depreciated in value. The rich land of Ontario has been ruined, why should any one stay there when in the West there is limitless wheatland to settle on?' But the trackless country still lay between—distance is not annihilated by a single railroad, nor by a dozen railroads. Quebeckers did not move West much. Ontarian farmers began to find that exhausted land could be renovated by scientific methods. If the plains had adjoined their farms, they would not have bothered to try those methods, but the muskeg and rock lay between. Some of them went West, but not all; they did not like it that the West was being settled from the States and Europe. In any case the West would have been an unfamiliar country—the American and English immigrants only made it more so—and the boasts of the West roused Eastern pride. Was the West best? Ontarians looked about them and found that not only could their present farms be improved but that there lay still in their own particular country virgin land that needed only to be cleared and worked. Already there is the new Ontario, north of the old Ontario, offering fresh fields and pastures new for the Canadian born who didn't mind clearing land as well as working it. It is land upon which the average immigrant is lost, upon which the average Ontarian is at home. Thus begins a northern movement which may spread any distance.
I have not said, and would not say, that the rock and water of Ontario account for this northern movement, for the fact that people are beginning to say, 'This East and West business is overdone. Canada is not a thin, straight line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but a country stretching north to Hudson Bay, having the depth of the States almost, if a race spreads hardy enough to inhabit it.' The immediate cause of the northern movement was the discovery that wheat was as hardy as men, if not hardier, and would grow more north than an old-time settler ever dreamed of. The movement began in the North-West. All I would say is that if the waste country had not lain between the Ontarian farmer and the West he would have rushed with the rest, and the balance of importance would have shifted altogether westward. As it is, Ontarian farmers thrive again; new Ontario thrives excellently in a score of ways; the Canadian-born prosper in that part of Canada where they are—and always have been—most massed and most solidly Canadian. The West is a medley of races; and if it had suddenly become dominant by reason of its vastly superior prosperity, a people that could definitely be called Canadian would have been still further to seek than it is. Canada, in effect, would have had to restart becoming a nation.
All that day the rock and bog and timber kept dropping behind the train, and it was sunset before we came to the shore of Lake Superior. A thunderous glow hung over the lake, glimmering on the great granite cliffs. It was dark before we came to Port Arthur—proud possessor of the largest elevator in the world, and fierce rival of Fort William. In the morning we were in Manitoba.
Winnipeg introduces the West. 'If you like Winnipeg,' I had been told before I got there, 'you will like the West.' I had been somewhat disheartened by this information. I had pictured Winnipeg as a smoke-laden city of mean and narrow streets, set off with board walks and wooden shacks of various sizes. I knew that I should not like Winnipeg if it were like that. Well, it is not like that. Main Street, which follows exactly the lines of the old Hudson Bay Company's trail, is a hundred and thirty-two feet wide, and the other streets are in proportion. Above is the immensely clear and lofty Canadian sky. The wooden shacks are not there, and you will have to go far to find the board walks. True, the buildings are, on the whole, less impressive than the streets, but there are some magnificent blocks rising several stories; and if you take an observation-car to go and see the sights of Winnipeg, you will find yourself brought to spots where further fine blocks are rising; and with the eye of the imagination you will behold Winnipeg as splendidly lofty as New York. I am not sure that for a place as warm as Winnipeg in summer and as cold in winter (I have heard the very truest Canadians say that they have been nearly frozen there in winter) the laying out of the town in so spacious a style is ideal. Streets narrower and more easily screened from the sun and wind would have seemed more comfortable to begin with. But then Winnipeg is growing, growing, growing; and it may be that some day even Main Street will seem shut in when it has its skyscrapers.
Certainly it is a mistake to have preconceptions of Canada. I found Winnipeg spacious instead of mean. I next found that instead of consisting of elevators and all the apparatus connected with the storage of wheat, it was all banks and cinematograph parlours. There were, it is true, shops and such things sandwiched in between. I recall a jeweller's shop containing the suitable and attractive placard in its window—'Marriage Licences for Sale Here.' It is true, too, that banks and cinematograph shows are not unconnected with wheat. In the banks you store the dollars you have made out of wheat; at the cinematograph shows you circulate them. But really there was an almost incredible number of these institutions.
Of the two kinds of business I felt that personally I would rather own a moving picture show. Winnipegers are, I feel sure, easy to amuse. And they look exceedingly prosperous. The air of prosperity struck me as more obvious in Winnipeg than in any other part of Canada. This may have been due in part to the ladies' hats. I saw some wonderful hats in Winnipeg. Of course there are some women who seem born to wear wonderful hats. Whatever they put on seems wonderful. But in Winnipeg this art of wearing wonders seemed almost universal. Ladies who might otherwise have passed for school teachers—so serene and even precise was their general bearing—were to be seen in hats that would be astounding either on Hampstead Heath or in Covent Garden opera. I was told the hats come direct either from London or Paris, and form an important part of the Steamship Companies' freights, since they are charged for not by weight but by their superficial area. I thought to myself, after I had seen a few samples of them, what sleepless nights the creators of these marvels must pass in the fear that they can never again rival, much less surpass, the last consignment to the Wheat City.
The men too have a prosperous appearance—always new hats, new coats, new cigars; and I was so much impressed by it that I began to study their faces to see if some new type—with the Croesus gift—had been developed in this western place. If they had all looked alike, or had not all looked prosperous, it would have been simpler. But they all looked different—more different than Londoners—as they would—for here all the nations of the earth are gathered, and over a score of languages are taught in the schools (just think of it!); and among these different faces one saw the old familiar aspects—the shrewd and the foolish, the strong-mouthed and the weak, the bluffer's and that of the man who counts. Clearly, they were not all amazing organisers, or men with the grit and the brains that must take them to the top. Not any more were so, I mean, than you would see in any big place. No, it was the economic conditions, not the men, which were changed.
Yet there is one thing noticeable in most of the faces one sees here. It is a general air of buoyancy—of greater expectation and, therewith, of greater self-satisfaction—in a good sense—than one sees at home. Just as the London clerk's face might be made to read!—'I am merely a city clerk on £50 a year—I shall never rise much higher, and I hope I may keep my place,' so the Winnipeg clerk's face might be taken to announce—'At present I'm helping along the Dominion Elevator Company. Luckily for them they're a go-ahead lot. I guess, though, they'll have to raise my salary soon, pretty good though it is now. If they don't, they'll have to look for another man. There are plenty of jobs waiting for me.'
If it is the truth, what could be better?
That there are more jobs than men in the West seems undeniable, though most of them of course are on the land. I had the pleasure of a talk with Mr. Bruce Walker, through whose hands all the immigrants to the West pass. Mr. Bruce Walker's office is in the station, which is one of the sights of the West, when an immigrant train arrives. For Winnipeg is their distributing centre, and in the station, when the train comes in, you may see more types of men and women than a year's travel in Europe would give you, and you may hear more different languages being spoken than went to the unmaking of the tower of Babel. To place all these people, men, women and children, in positions suited to their capacities, before the small sums of money with which they have arrived in the New World have given out, would seem to be a task which Napoleon might have shrunk from. But Mr. Bruce Walker appeared quite undismayed. Although in the first six months of 1910 the immigration from Great Britain alone had increased 98 per cent. over any other corresponding period, he had found no difficulty in dealing with it. He admitted that it meant increase of work for himself and his staff, but that was nothing, he said, so long as there were more jobs than men. 'And there are more jobs,' he said. 'It's amazing. But the extent to which Canada can absorb men seems endless.' He told me many excellent and amusing stories of the difficulties that arise in connection with the new-comers, but I have no space for them here.
The chief criticism to be directed against the Canadian Government's methods in dealing with immigrants is, I think, that it encourages on to the land men who are in some cases wasted there. It is natural that it should place immigrants on the land as far as possible. The land is there, apparently endlessly absorbent. It offers, superficially, work that any strong and able-bodied man should be capable of doing. Again, that Canadian theory that a man should be ready to turn his hand to anything, encourages the Canadian Government to believe that it is justified in turning the hands of immigrants to the work that most obviously wants doing. On the other side, it has to be remembered that while a man may be capable of turning his hand to anything, he is probably much more capable of turning his hand to the work he has been trained to; and not only that, but he is wasted to a large extent if he is not doing it. I am thinking particularly of the skilled workmen who emigrate to Canada from England. Turn them on to land and they may do fairly well; but turn them on to the work they are used to, and they will do much better. I do not say that the Canadian Government is bound to find for such men the work for which they are fitted; but in so far as they undertake to find work for immigrants, they should as far as possible find the right work. That jealousy which causes the United States to put obstacles in the way of the skilled immigrant who comes into the country, should not be encouraged in Canada. It is absurd to suppose that Canada is already stocked with skilled workmen, and I repeat it is waste to use men, who are skilled, in work to which they are wholly unaccustomed. Moreover, though these skilled artisans may in many cases only spend a certain time on the land (after which they find the job which they want and are accustomed to), yet in many other cases they may be so sickened by their time on the land, doing unaccustomed work badly, that they either become wastrels, or leave Canada altogether, believing it to be no country for workers like themselves, and saying so with all the bitterness of men who were capable of succeeding but did actually fail. Another point to which the immigration department might give all the attention it can spare, is that of making it as simple as possible for decent immigrants to be joined at the earliest opportunity by their wives and families. The lack of women in Canada is a curse which there is no disguising. For one thing, to have a country full only of able-bodied men without wives or families is to give it an air of prosperity which is unreal. For another, it is to leave it without any of the ambitions which cause the majority of men to save the money they make, and lay the foundations of a civilised nation. The other objections are obvious. A wise Government policy might go far towards making the period of separation between an immigrant and his wife shorter.
Later on, to get a contrast with Winnipeg, I went out to see Kildonan with a friend. It is the village where the Old-timers—the crofters from the highlands, whom Lord Selkirk brought out in 1812 to colonise the land—finally settled down. They had hard years enough; trouble with the Indians, great trouble with the rival fur company. The fur-traders could see in the farmers only men who would reduce the wild and spoil their own industry. Only after years were their disputes settled. Kildonan is three miles out from Winnipeg by electric-car—along a dusty road fenced with wire from the fat black land. The crofters must have rejoiced to see that loam. Nowadays it has mostly been turned to market-gardening for the supplying of Winnipeg, and the farmers have shifted further West. We turned down a country lane, shaded with maple woods and golden birches, and came presently to the banks of the Red River. Over on the other side, standing among light trees, stood Kildonan Church, the oldest church in Western Canada. We crossed by the ferry, and walked up into the churchyard. It is not large, but it is full, and everywhere you read the familiar Scottish names—Macleod—Black—Ferguson and the rest. The death among infants in those days seems to have been great—naturally enough—for Kildonan then was far from civilisation and doctor's help; and so, many small, unconscious settlers spent only a few days or weeks in the new land. But there were others that lived long. One of the most interesting gravestones commemorated the death of a settler who had come out from Kildonan, Sutherlandshire, at the age of nine. This in the year 1815—the year of Waterloo. He had lived to be past ninety. For his epitaph some one had chosen those noble words from the Epistle to the Hebrews: 'He looked for a city which hath foundations—whose maker and builder is God.'
I think it cannot matter now that the old man died before the great Canadian boom came, before Winnipeg had become the biggest wheat-centre of the world, before he could realise, who looked for a city which hath foundations, that even in his life he had attained to 'God's own country.'
Any one who knows the plains of Canada is aware that they rise in three tiers, the rise having a westward trend, and that the scenery of them varies as greatly as does the vegetation. Any one who has only been through the Canadian plains in the train is under the impression that, save for a bit of rolling country here and there in the distance, they are as level as a billiard table; and that, except that parts are cultivated and other parts are not, they look the same almost from start to finish.
The moral is obvious. Do not suppose that from the train you can see even the surface of the world.
This seemingly endless flat land, then, holds hills and gullies, rivers and lakes—everything indeed but trees. But what am I saying? There are heaps of trees in reality. Only they have a habit of concealing themselves, and those who want to see them in haste should perhaps take a guide.
There is more monotony in the towns of the plains, I think, than in the plains themselves. Not but what these towns must have differences known to their inhabitants. A man who lived in Moosejaw might conceivably deny that he could feel equally at home in Regina. A citizen of Regina would not dream of admitting that he could find his way blindfold about Moosejaw. Nevertheless all these little towns are singularly alike in construction. It is reasonable that they should be. They are all centres of a country engaged in a single great industry—the raising of wheat. Other things are raised, but in such small quantities, comparatively, that they do not count. And the people engaged in this great industry of wheat-raising are on a particular equality as regards the work they do, the leisure they have, and the tastes that result from the combination of that work and leisure. Some are richer, some poorer, some are wise, some foolish, but mostly they are working together pretty hard. The towns represent the places where they come after their work to bargain and be amused. Moreover, as I suggested in a previous chapter, the model for all other towns of the plains has always been Winnipeg, and Winnipeg is the embodiment of the notion that a city may be a finer city than Chicago if it only tries hard enough.
Architecturally, Winnipeg looks as though it always has allowed, and always will allow, for its own expansion. Other great cities have grown up anyhow, usually on lines that suggest that their greatness was thrust upon them unexpectedly. Winnipeg too has grown big—beyond all expectation one would have thought—yet it suggests in its lines that it never felt, even in those far-off days when Main Street was the Hudson Bay trail, that it would be anything but tremendous. Very likely it is an accident that Winnipeg did possess this power of expanding and Winnipegers did not deliberately foresee and provide for its future vastness. Be this as it may, the towns of the plains are not going to leave anything to chance. They are so planned, that when the time comes they will be ready to outdo Winnipeg. They rather expect to outdo Winnipeg. They even warn you that they will. Here is an example. I got out at some little station on the plains—let us call it Thebes. I don't think there is a Thebes in existence, but if not, it will come along soon, for the classics as well as the Indian languages are being ransacked to provide names for Canada's thousands of new-born towns. I prefer the classical or Indian-named towns to those that bear hybrid titles like Higgsville. I saw at once that Thebes consisted of about twenty shacks and a store. It was all there, just outside the station, and beyond was level prairie again, with one or two farmhouses on the horizon—wooden boxes, like bathing-machines off their wheels to look at.
I should not have been impressed by the greatness of Thebes, present or future, had I not, just by the ticket office, come upon a great placard, calling attention to a plan of the district marked off in square blocks in red and black cross lines. Beneath were two fanciful spheres, side by side, such as statisticians use—a large one marked Winnipeg, a smaller one marked Thebes: also, the following notification:—
'In 1870 Winnipeg had 240 inhabitants.
In 1910 Winnipeg has 180,000 inhabitants.
In 1910 Thebes has 74 inhabitants.
How many will Thebes have in 1925?
Buy a Thebes town lot.'
It may be that the method is an American one, recalling that by which Martin Chuzzlewit was persuaded to buy a lot in Eden city. An old-fashioned Englishman, straight from the old country, might even now be scared by it, and decide on the strength of it not to become a citizen of Thebes. He need not be scared. He can dislike the advertisement if he chooses, but he should bear in mind that by just such advertisements men were attracted to prosperity in the States as much as to adversity—even in the Dickens period—that real cities as well as sham ones were built up by them, and that anyway most of the Canadian land thus advertised is of an easily ascertainable value. He should remember, too, that a man nowadays, certainly in the new world, is not presumed to take every advertisement he sees as Bible truth. A smart advertisement, such as the Thebes one, is to a Canadian or American simply a proof that whoever it is wishes to sell Thebes town lots is a go-ahead person who clearly wants to do business, who probably knows how business ought to be done, who is likely to come to the point of doing it more quickly and ably than a man who won't even take the trouble to attract attention. No doubt the purchase of town lots is bound to be a speculative business. These little prairie villages may or may not become Winnipegs. Of the particular chances a man must satisfy himself. That there are chances is a certainty; and the advertiser is only clothing that certainty in what he considers an attractive garb.
I am very far from delighting in the 'plush of speech,' as Meredith called the language of the advertisers. Apart altogether from the fact that Canadians have not as yet learnt the art of understatement, the plush of speech is far too common in Canada. I suppose it was to be expected. Hard by lie the United States whose advertisers have, in a very few years, done more to blazon all the horrors of which the English tongue is capable than their great writers have done to point out its beauties. Their example has spread. So that in Canada, too, a barber's is announced as 'A Tonsorial Saloon'; a hat shop is 'A Bon Ton Millinery Parlour.' There may be some magic attraction in the words. The desire for a hat in the heart of a woman is not a definitely economic want; perhaps to be able to get a hat from a millinery parlour may strengthen that want. Only I know that speaking for myself, I would not willingly have my hair shortened oftener than was necessary, even if a tonsorial palace should be open to me for the process.
To go back to the prairie towns, their future is ever before them, and their citizens talk of them in the same proud, fond spirit as that in which a mother will discuss the career of the creature-in-the-perambulator, which for the ordinary person is too embryo to be distinguished as either a boy or a girl. Already, of course, the prairie towns are of all sizes, though you must never judge them by the size they are. Take Regina. It is a capital city, but the usual definition of a line—only reversed—best describes it. It has breadth without length. Its streets, which are called avenues, are astonishingly wide, the more astonishingly, because as soon as you start to walk along them they come to an end in prairie. I thought a notice which caught my eye as I wandered through the town rather characteristic. The notice was pasted outside a half-built block. It ran:—
'These premises will be open by September 5.'
It was long past 5th September, and those premises were not going to be open for some weeks to come. The roof was not on yet, and in fact I think the fourth wall had to go up. Still, when they were opened, they would be fine and solid. You could see that. It is the same with many of these western towns themselves. Some day they, too, are going to be fine and solid, but they are not really open yet, though a good deal of business is being done, with the roof still, so to speak, off, and the fourth wall still to go up. On the outskirts of Regina, for example, there are some 1911 Exhibition buildings which look rather larger than Regina itself. That is enterprise.
I stayed a whole day in Regina because I wanted to see the barracks of the famous North-West Mounted Police. It was a very hot day, and I was not sure where the barracks were, so I went into a hotel, partly to find out, partly to have a drink. The hotel was cool and pleasant, and after a little while a well-dressed gentleman came over and began chatting. We talked of various things, and then he asked me if I would not like to have my suit pressed for Sunday, as he would do it for a dollar. I said I should like it very well, but I had not time for it as I had to go out to the police barracks.
'You don't think of joining them, do you?' he inquired with much disdain.
'Why?' I asked.
'You're a fool if you do,' he said; 'there's too much discipline about them. You spend your whole time saluting every one you see if you're in the police. I know what it is. I was two years in the American Navy.'
I did not inform the ex-naval clothes-presser that I'd rather belong to the police than press clothes, nor, indeed, did I waste any further time upon him, and I only mention him because he is one of the less valuable American types that find their way into Canada, and also because he was the only man I met who had a word to say against the mounted police.
The sun can be very hot on the prairie, and it was very hot that afternoon when I did at last set out for a two-miles' tramp to the barracks. Nobody was walking that way except myself, and nobody was even riding. There was a fine dust about, and I needed brushing as well as pressing before I reached my destination. When I did get there, the courteous welcome of the second-in-command caused me to forget that the way had been long, or that anything greatly mattered except to hear about the North-West Mounted Police from the officer who was good enough to show me all round, from the horse-hospital to the prison cells. The latter were the least inviting part of the barracks, and I decided on the spot that if I committed a crime I would not select the North-West of Canada for the scene of it.
I doubt if Canada, or England, has anything to be prouder of than the North-West Mounted Police. Some of their deeds have been told from time to time—that of the mounted policeman, for example, who brought a homicidally-disposed maniac down hundreds of miles from the frozen country, saved his charge from frost-bite, and lost his own reason in the process; that of the corporal who went into the camp where Sitting Bull sat armed with all his braves about him, and gave him a quarter of an hour to clear over the border. But under a hundred less-known acts the same spirit has run—the spirit of the one representative of justice triumphant over incredible odds.
'It's made possible,' said my guide, 'partly because we have men who regard every capture they're told off to make as a matter of personal honour, partly because people know that if a man commits a crime, we get him in the end. We go on till we do. Sitting Bull knew that if he killed our corporal we'd hang him and every man with him. So he went.'
All kinds of men are represented in the mounted police, but this officer told me that the recruit they liked best to get was 'the young man with blood in him,' from an English public school or university, as much as from anywhere; fond of riding and shooting, and not lost when he is acting alone hundreds of miles from headquarters. The district patrolled, remember, by five hundred men is not much smaller than Europe minus Russia. Wanting that kind of man, the authorities see to it that, in barracks at all events, he is comfortable, and very little in the way of the accommodation for these police could be improved upon.
The most historic part of the barracks is that window through which Louis Riel stepped out—to drop with the rope round his neck. I was shown it hurriedly. It is the capture of their man, not his execution, that is these policemen's pride. Their record shows that almost always they take him alive, with no struggle—a strange thing, and one more proof of the reputation the police have built up for themselves. 'What is the use of struggling with these men?' seems to be the natural thought in the mind of the pursued; and no doubt much bloodshed is saved as a result of it. I learnt a lot of stray Canadian facts that afternoon. I learnt that the immigrants known under the somewhat vague heading of 'Galicians' are at present considered the leading toughs, owing to their habit of using their knives at random. Galicians mean roughly all those who come from central Europe, and would, of course, include Letts. So that it is not, apparently, merely the climate of England that induces in these particular aliens a homicidal mania. It would be interesting to know the opinion of a North-West Mounted Policeman on 'the Battle of London.' Another thing I learnt was that a hundred miles a day is no unusual distance for one of these policemen to cover on horseback, and that of all the districts patrolled by them that in the neighbourhood of the North Pole is most sought after. They do not believe in English stirrups and girths any more than they believe in the British truncheon. They do believe in sobriety. The man with the drinking habit cannot continue, so I was told, a mounted policeman.
As I walked back into Regina, I remember seeing in one of the principal streets a second notice which struck me as quaint. The notice was:—
'Please do not spit on the side-walks.'
The quaintness of it consisted in the last three words. 'Please do not spit' one could understand. I should like to see that notice up almost anywhere in Canada, since the habit it deprecates is almost universal. It is worst, perhaps, in a smoking compartment, where it is difficult to get one's legs away from the neighbourhood of spittoons. I have sat for hours feeling all the emotions of the son of William Tell while the apple was still balanced on his head, and his father was in the act to shoot. But it is an uncivilised, unhealthy, absolutely unnecessary habit anywhere. That is why, for a public authority to suggest that it may be done, provided it is not done on the side-walks, is quaint. It should either be ignored or penalised. When one reads, as one does so often in the papers, of the ravages made by tuberculosis in Canada, it almost looks as if offenders should be penalised. Certainly they should not be politely requested to spit a few inches more to the left or the right. And why provide them with spittoons?
Alberta is at present the débutante of the Dominion.
Countries, like cities, used to grow up and, if we stick to our metaphor, 'come out' anyhow. It is true there were people called statesmen who had at times bright ideas concerning the commonweal which they tried to put into practice, and sometimes succeeded in putting into practice, with not unsatisfactory results. But the commonweal they had in mind was a limited one. It was not truly 'common,' either in respect of the people whose weal was considered, or in respect of the weal it was desired to affect. Statesmen, in fact, thought usually only of a particular section or part of the population of their country and also thought only of a particular aspect of that section's welfare—usually either its soul or its prestige; very rarely its material prosperity.
Things have not altogether changed. Things don't. Statesmen still consider particular classes rather than the nation as a whole, and their notions of what weal means are still limited notions. But there is this difference. That aspect of the commonweal which can be referred to somewhat vaguely as material prosperity now bulks very large in their minds, and, as a result of it, the idea is beginning to prevail that not only can cities be planned before they are built, but that whole provinces can and should be encouraged to grow in certain thought-out directions.
In the old world the new idea is likely to work slowly and somewhat obscurely. Cities and countries have already grown up there in the old-and-anyhow style; and grown-up things, like grown-up people, are not easily changed. In England, for example, we may think that large properties are a mistake; but they will not, with anything that can be called celerity, be turned into small holdings. So with our cities. There they are—fully grown and fully stocked with vested interests. The possessors of those interests cannot see in any proposed change the vast improvement that the non-possessors see in it. The most that can be expected in England in the immediate future is that, slowly and imperceptibly, certain outrageous mistakes of the past will be remedied, and that where new developments are essential, they shall be the result of ideas, rather than of confusions. The Town-Planning Bill is, I imagine, a case in point. The most conservative people are beginning to see that in itself an idea is not a vicious thing and may even produce a good result.
In the new world (and perhaps in the German Empire too) the notion of planning the future of town or country instead of leaving it to luck is having much swifter and more demonstrable effects. On the Canadian plains, as I have pointed out, towns are being laid out largely with an eye to their future. The same thing is being done for the countryside. It, too, is being planned with an eye to its future. It is not growing up just anyhow; it is being made to grow in particular directions.
How much this is the idea of statesmen, of the public officials, that is to say, of the Dominion; and how much it is due to the managers of private companies and enterprises, historians will some day be able to decide. I incline to the view that at present the big railway companies represent far the most influential force in Canada, and that they, without any of the outward paraphernalia of office, are deciding what Canada is to be for a good many years to come.
Naturally they work from what may be called the railway point of view. Their notion of a Canadian commonweal takes the form, therefore, of a country in which a settled and prosperous population lives along the lines of the railroads, and is so distributed that there shall be no uninhabited spaces through which the running of trains will cease to be a paying proposition. There are bound, of course, to be some intervals of the kind. The highlands of Ontario form such a gap in the system of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That gap is not easy to fill: Alberta is.
A few years ago Alberta was far from being a profitable country through which to run trains. Cattle-ranching maintained the thinnest of populations, and the leagues of sunburnt plains east of Calgary seemed to offer few chances to a more numerous class of settler. Any one who had prophesied then that they would shortly be crowded with wheat-farmers would have been laughed at. But they are being crowded, comparatively crowded, now. And the credit for this must be given those who started the Bow River irrigation works. No doubt there are other reasons for the rise of Alberta. The discoverers of new wheats have helped it; so have the American farmers who, by spoiling the land across the line, created a demand for new land. But the irrigation works are the main factor, and when the Octopus, as the Canadian Pacific Railway is not uncommonly called, is had up for judgment, these and many other of their achievements will help them to make a stout defence. True, it is their own land they are irrigating; it is passengers and freight for themselves that they want to secure; but, whatever the motive, they are advertising and causing to be populated and cultivated hundreds of square miles on either side of their own particular land which might otherwise have lain waste for many years.
It may be said—Where is the plan in this? Where is it any different from the schemes of any railway country in the old world. The difference is that in the old world as a rule the railway company follows trade, and runs only through populous parts where that trade is to be got; whereas in Canada, railway companies lay their lines through the desert, so to speak, and then start to fill it in an orderly and profitable manner. Alberta at present is being planned into existence. It is not booming simply on its own merits, great though these may be. It lay fallow for many years. For all one knows, other parts of Canada may have more of a future. But they are not being boomed as Alberta is, because the time has not yet come when they must, in the opinion of the railway companies, be filled in.
The need for the filling in of Alberta is one of the reasons why Calgary has sprung up so quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-aged, can remember camping in Calgary in tents. There was only one place to dance in, and ranchers used to take turns at entering it. Now Calgary is a stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important. There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not succeed. I suppose that prosperity has overtaken it at such a pace that it has not had time as yet to consider its responsibilities. A town which permits one of its best hotels to place three double beds in one bedroom—and perhaps as many as nine guests in the three double beds—may already be great, but it has not realised its greatness.
Calgary differs from the prairie towns which lie between it and Winnipeg, in that it is not really a prairie town, but a town on the edge of the prairie. It looks at the mountains; and it is built of the grey stone that is found near by; the Chinook winds that sweep it and make its climate comparatively mild, are mountain winds; and it stands on the Bow River, which is a mountain river, swift and clear, and blue with the blue that is melted from snowfields. This is none of your turbid streams like the Assiniboine or the Red River. All rivers must run to the plains at last, but the Bow River does not seem to belong to them, though it feeds them more than most. In the old days Calgary, such as it was, owed everything to the hills. The cattle-ranchers settled round there because the Chinook winds, scatterers of the snow, made outdoor grazing possible for their cattle during months when Manitoba and Saskatchewan were deep in frozen drifts. And since it was just at the foot of the mountains, the miners in the mountains used it as a supply centre. It is still a centre for ranchers and miners; but its real importance is that it has become the headquarters of that prairie which produced once, perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now yields the finest wheat in the world. If any statues are to be put up in the town—and it would be as well to wait for a native sculptor of talent—they should be the statues of the men who constructed the irrigation works.
Later on, but this is a smaller matter perhaps, I should like to see a statue put up to the man who will make it possible for the bars of Calgary to be allowed to remain open between the hours of 7 P.M. on Saturday, and 7 A.M. on Monday. At present they are shut during those hours, which means, I take it, that Calgarians, if admitted, would drink more than was good for them. The person therefore, to whom the suggested statue should be raised, would be the man who made the Calgarian attitude towards the drink question more civilised. I know that the problem is not peculiar to Calgary or to Canada. It may even be that Canada for a new country does more to solve it than most. I recollect than when I got back to England, one of the first things that caught my eye was an interview given to a local paper by a leading Hertfordshire man, who had also just returned from travelling through Canada. He assured the interviewer that, having been from end to end of Canada, he had never once seen a man the worse for liquor. It must have been a delightful, but perhaps unique experience. I had not his good fortune, and having talked with many decent Canadians, seldom fanatics, and rarely indeed total abstainers, who nevertheless deplored the prevalence of the drink evil in the West, I cannot think that that Hertfordshire traveller's happy blindness is a thing to be imitated. Drink takes another form—perhaps a less vicious one—in a new country; but it ruins more good men than it does in an old one.
There is vague talk at times about the Americanisation of Canada. Very dismal people talk about its Americanisation by force of arms. Minor pessimists think the change will come about peaceably. How can the Canadians—they ask—continue to assert themselves for ever against the constant influx from the other side?
Monsieur André Siegfried, in that most lucid and excellent book, Les Deux Races en Canada, considers this question a little, but the very fact that he has called the book Les Deux Races en Canada, shows that he considers the question premature. The two races he treats of are not the Canadians and the Americans, but the French Canadians and the Canadians who are not French. Certainly these two peoples are at present, and must for a considerable time to come, be considered the two main races of the Dominion. They are still for all practical purposes separate without being hostile; and it is quite possible that one of these may Canadianise the other before any real Americanisation makes itself felt. Should the French Canadians get the upper hand, it is pretty certain that American influence would get a set-back of perhaps centuries. Yet English writers as a rule never seem to consider this contingency. Perhaps if they did, they would begin to think that they would rather see Canada Americanised than Gallicised.
Still the Americanisation may happen, and it is at least an interesting possibility. Let us consider the task that lies before the Americans. They will have to absorb—
(1) The French Canadians.
(2) The Canadian born, who are not French.
(3) The English who have immigrated.
(4) Foreign immigrants; e.g. Scandinavians, Galicians, Italians, Doukhobors—all that strange assortment of people who have flowed in from the poorer countries of Europe.
The Americans themselves represent at present only a small fifth in this conglomeration of nations. Still, they have this in their favour, that they start in while Canada is still an unfixed nation. French Canadians—a small third—only number about three millions. Non-French Canadians about the same. The whole population is under ten millions. It may in fifty years be ten times that number. So that anything may happen.
Meanwhile, many effective American influences are at work. Their order of effectiveness is not easy to define, but when one considers their representatives of business enterprise, capital, journalism and farming at work in the country, one can see that the Americans are likely to go far.
What is their present value to the Dominion? Take American farmers. They are an undoubted gain to Canada in so far as they possess energy, capital, a knowledge of the local conditions, versatility and adaptability. I hardly know if it is an example of their versatility or their adaptability, but as soon as they cross over the line, American farmers who were Tariff Reformers instantly become Free Traders. It is not, of course, that they have adopted nobler principles in their new country. It is merely that, having become Canadians, they have now to support Canadian manufactures, and pay more for their farming machines and shoddy clothes. Naturally they think tariffs a mistake.
Setting aside for a moment this political elasticity as of doubtful value, Canadians may still wonder if the American farmer is all gain to them. Is it an objection, for example, that the American introduces the purely commercial spirit into farming? Not entirely. Not certainly so far as love of gain induces promptness and enterprise. It is, however, an objection if it destroys that love of the land which causes the English farmer to stick by his farm, generation after generation. Perhaps American farmers have not that land love in any case. If they had, they would not have crossed the line. In most cases, they have crossed it to make money—more money. It may be argued that the English farmers come further for the same purpose, but that is not really the case. English farmers who come are mostly men who were tenants, and find themselves either not making money or expecting to have their rents raised if they do. Or they are the sons of farmers who have not the capital to start farming in the old country, or cannot get the land. The American farmer is usually quite ready to admit that he is in Canada to make money, and his enemies will admit for him that though this ideal may lead him to adopt new methods of farming which are good, it also induces him to adopt that very old method of farming which consists of getting all you can out of the land, putting nothing into it, selling it to a fool and moving on to fresh land—which is a bad method. Any one who is acquainted with the States at all, knows how at present people there are awakening to the viciousness of this practice. All their papers and speakers are full of the wastefulness which Americans practised in the last century thinking it to be smartness. Fine land, they say, was spoilt by it; forests were annihilated; water supplies were overdrawn; people were made restless. It was getting rich quick at the expense of posterity, and it bred in Americans a nomadic spirit, and an imprudence in considering the future, which has become a menace.
Canadians cannot altogether condemn the American farmer, for just these methods spoilt so much of the land in Ontario; and only now are their farmers beginning to improve on them. Still, they would do well to indicate to American farmers that they are welcome only as improvers and not as wasters of the new country. The trouble is to give an effective indication of that kind. Settlement of the land is still reckoned, especially by the railway companies, as the first of virtues, covering a multitude of sins; though even they, I think, are recognising a little that the English farmer, whose aim is not an immediate fortune, but a home which he can retain for his life and hand over to his children after him, is not to be scorned as he was a few years ago. The ready-made farms, made possible by the irrigation work of the Canadian Pacific Railway, are the chief example of the attempts made to draw the Englishman. 'We hope,' said one of the Canadian Pacific Railway officials, speaking a few months ago before the London Chamber of Commerce, 'that the Englishmen on these farms will leaven the lot.' A few years ago, compliments of that sort were not being offered to the English farmer in Canada. Probably he was not so good a type as comes in now. But it is to be remembered that the English immigrant has always had more adaptations to make than the American. To the American from the northern States, Canada is the country he is used to—only a little more north. The Englishman finds a new soil, new climate, new manners, and new methods. I should say that man for man, the English farmer knows at least as much as the American about farming, and a great deal more than the average Canadian. But when he goes out to Canada he has to put this knowledge behind him and learn afresh—a difficult thing for a conservative race. The American can hold on to what he knows and simply go ahead. The accident of birth has given him a fine start over the Englishman.
The same advantage belongs to other Americans in Canada. Business men, capitalists, journalists have only had to cross a non-existent line, instead of an undeniable ocean. When Canadians complain that Englishmen take no interest even in those Canadian schemes for which they have found the money, they forget that capitalists cannot always be close to their investments. I repeat, the Atlantic is not a thing to be denied, nor is it fair to call the English mere moneylenders because they have not always personally accompanied their loans. At least they have shown themselves trustful of the men on the spot.
Nevertheless, I think that Canada has every reason to be grateful for the able business men whom the States have sent her. That negro porter at the Niagara Hotel who said that Canadians were a stupid people, and would have done nothing without the Americans, was taking rather a spread-eagle view of the facts. Still there is no doubt that American brains have been—and still are—of great service to Canada; nor can I see that they can be charged with Americanising tendencies. Business men are nearly always cosmopolitan in their achievements, whatever their motives may be.
It is rather different with American journalists. They can hardly as yet be charged with being citizens of the world, and where their influence penetrates, an American trend is noticeable. They are beginning to leave their mark in Canada. Canadian papers are numerous and creditable, but an American atmosphere broods over them. The most trivial incident is magnified by headlines, which repeat three times over in large type and increasingly pompous language all and more than all that follows in the news space. I am not talking of the best Canadian newspapers but of the average ones. If their methods are American, so very largely are the matters they deal with. In some small up-country Canadian journal one will find the leading columns occupied with the account of some dinner given, say, by Mrs. Van So-and-So of New York, wife of the Coffin King, with full accounts of the costumes, menu, etc.,—wearisome and vulgar matter, staringly of no interest whatever to the bucolic readers of the journal in question. But it was all very cheaply wired from the States: whereas news from England would be costly in the extreme. The result is that Canadians—in spite of their local sagacity—are at least as ignorant of the things that happen in Great Britain and Europe as we are of what is happening in Canada. Often I have felt while the Canadian-born were talking to me of the 'Old Country,' talking of it too, not only in a loyal, but a fond and even wistful manner—that they had in their minds a picture of it that would probably have fitted England better in the fourteenth century than it does now. A poor, worn-out, tottering old country is what they are thinking of; and nothing would amaze some of them more than to see modern England as it is.
Why should they have got this idea into their heads? Largely, I suppose, because the new with them is necessarily best. The old things were put up anyhow by men in a hurry and they are always superseded by better things. The very epithet 'old' connotes badness to a Canadian. Then, again, it is a country of young men, and young men are apt to favour youth, which they hardly associate with England. No country—not even Spain—can be as antique and ramshackle as many of them undoubtedly believe England to be. Birmingham and Manchester are on paper such very ancient cities compared with Regina and Moosejaw that the untravelled Canadian thinks pityingly of the former; whereas he considers the latter infinitely up-to-date and important, and would be hurt to know that we have in England hundreds of little prosperous country towns very like them, of which the ordinary Englishman hardly knows the names and, if he did, would think no more of than he would think of Regina and Moosejaw.
I would not seek to minimise that Canadian pride and optimism which finds such satisfaction in everything that they build. Pride and optimism are valuable assets to any country. All I would suggest is that they should realise that the English habit of grumbling and self-depreciation does not indicate that all Englishmen live in a tottering old realm, doing nothing but decay and grumble.
Here we come back to newspapers. Most people derive their facts from newspapers nowadays, and if Canadians find that everything of importance happens in the new world, whereas in the old world nothing happens except an occasional sensational murder or the deposition of a third-class king, they cannot infer that Europe is still an important continent, and that perhaps the most important country in it is England. What is to enlighten them? I suppose the receipt of more news from Europe.
Probably the All Red Cable would do much in this direction. News has to be cheap or it is not news (the converse proposition that news if it is cheap must be news, is not true). Much also might be done by private enterprise. English publishers could do more to push their wares. So could English magazine proprietors. Most of the books and magazines one can get in a hurry in Canada are American. English Cabinet Ministers might now and again make a tour in the Dominion and explain to Canadians some of those political principles in which at home they have such fervid belief. It may be that the Americanising tendency is too strong for any of these suggestions to be of much avail in combating it. Reciprocity treaties between the States and Canada may inevitably result in closer union, though I never could feel that it was a marked human characteristic to pine for fellow-citizenship with the man whom one supplies with bread in return for a reaping-machine. Trade relations may result in that mystic fraternal sentiment by which nations come together, though hitherto in the world's history men have never shown any very frantic desire for a heart-to-heart intimacy with their tradespeople. 'Utility, Reciprocity, Fraternity' sounds rather a cold cry by which to rally two great people together.[1]
[1] This chapter was written before the Reciprocity business flamed forth. I return to the subject later.
When all is said and done, and there are a hundred other pros and cons which might be considered, the chief obstacle to the Americanisation of Canada is climate. Canada is north and America is south; and those two show less inclination to rush together than even east and west. Of course it is not extremes of north and south that are represented in the two countries;—along the boundary the climates are not dissimilar. Yet it seems to me that while Canada is bound to be mainly a country of northern peoples, Americans are fast becoming more and more southernised, I do not mean in the old sense of becoming languid and effeminate and semi-tropical, but southernised in just the same way as the French from being Norsemen have become southernised. Have you seen prints of old Paris when it was a Gothic city? If you have, you will realise the completeness of the change that has come over it. It spreads itself to the sun now, faces to the Midi, and some such change might easily come over New York, Chicago, and the rest of those at present northern cities. Already the typical American is far from being the son of a grim and dour Pilgrim Father. Rather he is lively and energetic—with a temperament always on tiptoe—logical and apt to be materialistic, yet sentimental and passionate too. You find such a temperament among the French and Italians of northern Italy. It is the sun working on them. Even the stolid German and the moody Scandinavian feels it when he gets to the States, and thaws—into an American.
It is not so in Canada. The northern immigrants there remain silent and frosty, though the touch of fortune makes them perhaps more genial. Canada will never become a southern country, even though its northern parts are rendered temperate by the cutting down of timber and constant ploughing. No, I think Canadians will remain a hardy and somewhat dour race, slow-moving on the whole, but industrious and virtuous, suspicious of talkers and hustlers; so suspicious, too, of free thought and new morals as to lay themselves open maybe to the charge of hypocrisy; given at times to self-distrust and self-depreciation, but for the most part steadfast, and holding in their hearts the belief that there is no place like Canada and no men like the inhabitants thereof.
In short, they are as likely as not to end by becoming Anglicised.
There was a time when Englishmen got a very bad name in Canada. It was not to be wondered at. For a long time English youths, who came to be known as Remittance Men, used to be shipped out by relations anxious only to get rid of them. These helped to create an opinion that Englishmen were more remarkable for their drinking than their working powers; and when to them was added shipload after shipload of unemployables from yet lower classes, Canadians began to get impatient of English immigrants. It was not logical of them to suppose that these were favourable specimens of our working-classes; it is never logical to suppose that the best men of a country are ready to leave it. Logic, however, is difficult to insist on under these circumstances, and though there were plenty of Englishmen even then, and even more Scots perhaps, who were obviously as good as any farmers on the prairie, the bad name of the English clung to them. That is all, or nearly all, changed now; and the project connected with those farms, which came to be known in the English papers as the Ready-made farms, proved that the Canadian Pacific Railway Company at any rate, which is the biggest landowner in Canada, was ready to welcome English farmers to the land, if they could get the right sort. Readers will perhaps remember that the idea of the company was to provide farms ploughed, irrigated, sowed, and furnished with house and out-buildings, into which English colonists, having been handed the front-door key, could enter—straight from England—as well equipped almost as settlers who had lived there for years. The purchase money was to be spread over a certain term, after which the land would become the property of the farmers.
The plan saves all that intermediate period during which the ordinary homesteader has to set up his shack, sink his well, and generally unsettle himself over the tedious work of settling in. Good farmers are not necessarily born pioneers; and since the prairie in winter, when work is slack, does not show a very hospitable climate to new-comers and those unaccustomed to it, it generally happens that the English immigrant has to waste the spring and perhaps the whole working season in the unremunerative business of settling in. The Ready-made farms were intended to save all this time and trouble, and they were at once filled—in the spring of 1910—by specially picked men from the old country. The men were not all necessarily farmers, but they were, hypothetically, at any rate, men of intelligence and grit.
I wanted to see how they were getting on after six months of this new life on the prairie. For that purpose I took train from Calgary with a friend, back along the line to Strathmore, which is forty miles east, and is the station for Nightingale, as this first colony of ready-made farmers has been named. Strathmore itself is not peculiarly beautiful or peculiarly interesting, though it has a demonstration farm which is. We went over the demonstration farm with Professor Eliott, its manager, who struck me as one of the keenest and most interesting men of the West. What he does not know of the productivity of the prairie is probably not worth knowing; and his experience seems to be at the service of any farmer who has the intelligence to apply for it. He showed us his barns and splendid teams of horses and leviathan oats, and the little trees which he has planted in this country where it was thought no trees would grow, and which he believes will change the face of it in a few years. We were full of the future of the prairie when we got back to Strathmore, and put up for the night in the last bedroom of the one and only hotel. The two of us were lucky to get that last bedroom containing a double bed to ourselves, for more often even than in Calgary six people sleep in such a room and are very glad of the accommodation. So I was told. It shows how things move in Alberta; what a hustle there is upon the country.
We tossed for the bed, and I got it, and the other man took two blankets and the floor. I slept very well, especially after a mounted policeman came in and threw out two gentlemen next door who were, as the hotel boy tersely put it, 'seeing snakes together.' My friend slept less well. The room was small, not much bigger than the bed, and we could not get the window to stay open. It had not been constructed with a view to admitting fresh air. Still, after breakfast in a dark chamber, where about thirty guests of every profession and clothing (but all land-seekers) ate in silence, we started pretty fit for Nightingale in a two-horse rig.
I wish I could describe the prairie. Harvesting was over, so that in any case the leagues of golden wheat which you read about in advertisements were not visible. It was another kind of monotony altogether that we drove through—a kind I cannot begin to suggest the charm of. It was a kind of bare, rolling, sunburnt country, with a high sea-wind blowing through it, and waves of dust and an endless sky. Intensely wearisome or intensely refreshing it must be, according to a man's temperament; and going there from trees and hills must be like changing from a room with patterned paper to one with whitewashed walls. And then the soil, light and fertile, stoneless, ready for the plough—the farmer wants no variety of that.
We drove fourteen miles, as far as I can remember, to get to Nightingale, and it was all bad driving. Alberta seems to want roads badly. In the old ranching days roads mattered less. The prairie was a ready-made riding country, and nothing was produced or needed that could not, so to speak, go of itself across country. 'I never owned a plough the seventeen years I was there,' a retired rancher told me proudly. 'It was a fine country then.' But it is a fine country now, too, and going to be finer still when it has roads. At present even the roadways are changing. Once you could go everywhere. Now from day to day a new farmer takes up a new piece of land, and what was the road is enclosed by a wire fence.
One of the most inspiriting farms we passed was that of a man who had been out from Cheshire only three months. He was now a chicken rancher—kept fowls, as we say; and in his brief occupation had got up—off a quarter block—eighty tons of hay, besides winning thirty-eight prizes at Albertan poultry shows. This would seem to show that Alberta is not yet rich in pure bred fowls. The Cheshire chicken rancher said he hoped to show the people round what a good table bird ought to look like. He was already a Canadian in all but accent. May he prosper!
After talking with him we drove on again towards Nightingale in the same sea-wind along the same bad roads. The sameness of the country was amazing; nor should I have known in the end that we had come to Nightingale but for the man driving us. 'See that avenue?' he said. 'The shacks standing along that are the farms. It seems more sociable being along a road.' 'Certainly,' I said. So it is more sociable to live along a road, provided you know it is a road. I didn't, but the colonists did, and that was the main thing. We found those we visited apparently contented and undoubtedly hopeful. Canada has the gift of making men hopeful. Though it had been in this part a very poor year, owing to drought, and though the irrigation had not been properly ready (but accidents will happen, and the company was charging only a nominal rent as a result of this) the farmers seemed as cheery as they would have been dismal in England. The crops had been poor, but they would do for chicken-feed. A bumper year was a sure thing some time or other. The future held no clouds. They were going to study Canadian methods suited to the country. I rubbed my eyes. These sentiments were being enunciated by an English farmer, who was meanwhile giving us a most hospitable English lunch. He was going to tell more people to come out. It was the finest farming land possible, once you get the water on it. Only one must take local advice how to run things. It was no good standing out, and knowing better than people on the spot, as one of the colonists was doing. He, I gathered, was the only man regarded as likely to do badly, being determined to stick to the methods of his English forebears. His leading wrongheadedness was in declining to believe that the winter was going to be or could be as long and as hard as people said, and he had not got in half the food needful for his cattle.
I suppose, but for that winter, the prairie would be the most sought-after country in the world. But for that winter, however, it would not possess the amazing friable soil it does. As has been remarked, one cannot have everything all the time. The winter is very severe, and there should be no disguising of the fact, nor indeed any exaggerating of it. Formerly its hardships were no doubt exaggerated. People had no use for a hard winter. Nowadays leisured people go in search of it—on the understanding, however, that it shall be made easy for them. They would like it less if they had to work in it in a below zero temperature, twenty or thirty miles from anywhere. I do not say that work under such conditions should or would disgust healthy and energetic men, provided they were prepared for it. It might even delight them. But it should be prepared for. English farmers in particular should be made to understand the drawbacks as well as the advantages of the new land they are going to. Honesty is in fact the best emigration policy. Given that, it is tolerably certain that these transplanted English farmers are going to find it more than worth while to have settled in Nightingale or any of the newer prairie colonies, and what is more—Canada is going to find it more than worth while to have them settled there.