For the first time I got a view of the Rockies. We looked down a long, narrow, purple valley that ran at right angles to the Columbia River, over the first hills beyond Wilmer, into a sea of mountains. I had heard that phrase—a sea of mountains—applied to the Rockies before, but I had not realised its fitness before.
A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES.
A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES.
There it was, a sea of white caps frozen eternally in the very moment when they had stormed the sky.
For just five minutes we gazed, and then a mist settled down on them, and, where we were, immediately a bitter wind began to blow and caused us to make for the ponies hurriedly. As we rode down the frozen trail we startled some ptarmigan, which rose and fluttered above the snow like big white butterflies.
We got back to Wilmer the following morning, and the problem then was—how to reach Golden again. The boat was due up the river some time in the day, but sandbanks do not encourage punctuality. I had my suspicions of that boat, and in any case, even if it arrived that day, it would certainly not start back again till the morning following. I did not want to wait for it at Wilmer, and decided instead that I would start walking down the valley at once and pick the boat up at Spellamacheen, forty miles downstream, some time next day. My friend was as suspicious of the walk as I was of the boat; and since he had heard that some men were likely to turn up that day in a motor from Golden who might give him a lift back in case the boat failed, he decided to wait for them.
So we parted, and rather late in the day—at noon, to be exact—I set out on my walk. Forty miles is not much of a walk. It can be done in ten hours very easily—in eight if you make up your mind to it. I decided I would take nine hours over it and waste no time. I did not stop for lunch in Athelmer—where one crosses the Columbia—but merely bought some chocolate and a pound of apples, and hurried on.
About a mile out of Athelmer I ate the apples, because they were a nuisance to carry, and wished I could as easily get rid of my heavy overcoat, which had its pockets stuffed with toilet and sleeping accessories just like a suit-case. I also wished that I had on boots that I had ever tried walking in. Still I did six or seven miles in the first hour and a half, and then I realised that two things destructive to fast walking were about to happen. One was footsoreness and the other was rain. Both came upon me a few minutes later, and both increased steadily hour after hour. The valley which had looked so beautiful in all the reds of autumn, as we drove through it in the sunlight, was now filled with a clammy mist; and the road which had seemed a fine road for the horses in fine weather now struck me as offensively sticky, and my pace declined to something under three miles an hour. I consoled myself for a little with the thought that I was getting an experience of autumn in the Columbia Valley. Afterwards I decided that I would gladly do without it. I could have imagined it just as well. The road was like glue and my coat had increased in weight several pounds. To balance this as far as possible, I sat on a wet spruce tree that had fallen by the side of the road and ate my packet of chocolate; after which I moved on at a very sober pace. I began to doubt if I should get to Spellamacheen that night; and the doubt soon increased to a certainty that I should not. Then I remembered that on the drive out we had passed a place called Dolans, only twenty-eight miles from Wilmer. I did some mental arithmetic which seemed to prove that even Dolans was a terrible distance off, and I tried a little running, but it was not of a kind to win a Marathon race. Running through glue when you are footsore is trying work. Nevertheless by six o'clock I calculated I was only about three miles from Dolans, which rejoiced me, until the horrid thought cropped up—if I got in after the supper hour, should I get any supper?
It was by no means certain in that valley.
Providence a few minutes later sent a buggy, driven by a small, glum-looking man up behind me, and the glum-looking man said 'Care to drive?' I said 'Yes,' and found he was bound for Dolans like myself. We got there about seven o'clock. The rancher and his wife were in; also another wayfarer like ourselves, who had arrived a few minutes before us. He was an elderly man, with a great shock of iron-grey hair, who was driving into Golden in a farm-cart from some place several days distant. He had the strangest pair in his cart—a little brown mare of about fourteen hands, and a great lanky horse the height of a giraffe.
We were all given a good meal, and ate it in silence, and sat in silence to digest it. Canadians in these valleys are often that way; it is due not to unsociability but to disuse of their tongues. Possibly to ruminate is the better way, but silence can be oppressive, and if you start a conversation and the other people only reflect upon your words, they may be weighing them as if they were gold, but you are not sure enough of this to be elated. I was rather glad to be shown to my bed, which was in a barn (but the blankets were clean, Mr. Dolans said), pretty early. Mr. Dolans sat on the bed for a bit, and advised me to buy the ranch. I promised to think the matter over, and went to sleep instead in a nice atmosphere of hay, and got up for six o'clock breakfast. The other two had already driven off; but the rain had ceased, and though the road was a mud slide, I started for Spellamacheen in high hopes of catching the boat in spite of being footsore.
I need not have worried myself, for when I got there at 12.30, I learnt that the boat had just passed on its way up to Wilmer, and was not likely to be down again for two or three days.
Spellamacheen consists of a rest-house ranch in full view of a semicircle of snowclad mountains, but I was a little disheartened in spite of the view. I particularly wanted to catch the midnight train from Golden to Vancouver, and now I realised that to do this I should have to walk the rest of the way—another forty miles. From two o'clock to twelve is ten hours. If I did four miles an hour, I should catch the train to a nicety.
When I am resting on a walk I am always singularly optimistic. I was stiff after lunch—partly from the unusual exercise, partly from sleeping in wet clothes, and my feet were sorer than ever, but I set out for Golden, confident that I should catch that train. A young man with a bundle on his back, who had got into Spellamacheen just ahead of me, offered to hike with me. He also was for Golden, but thought twenty miles more that day would satisfy him.
He was a pleasant and conversational young man, and told me that he was from New Brunswick, but had for the last eight months been at work digging the ditches for the Columbia Valley Irrigation Company. He had had enough of it, he said; in fact too much. Compared with New Brunswick, British Columbia was no catch at all, and he meant to go back home. Frenchmen are not fonder of their 'patrie' than are the Canadian-born. He brimmed over, did that young man, with praises of New Brunswick—brimmed over very intelligently, telling me about the Reversible Falls of St. John and the conditions of farming in the province with a clearness which few Englishmen of his class could emulate. He said that he would only get one and a half dollars a day instead of two and a half, but then one and a half would go much further there than two and a half in British Columbia. You could live better on it, and life was easier there. British Columbia was too rough: he allowed there was no pioneer about him. He had got tired of the Columbia Valley months before, and had started to come out of it in July, but had only got as far as Athelmer. There he had gone to a hotel for the night, and had got drinking, and somehow before he knew it all the money he had saved during his months of digging had been drunk. So he had gone back to the ditches. But he meant to get out of the valley this time. I gathered that even this time it had been a near shave, for having again got as far as the hotel, he had found a lot of fellows drinking what he called 'Schlampagne.' He supposed there must have been a hundred bottles of schlampagne drunk last night, and whisky afterwards, but he himself had been very careful and had taken gin instead. You never knew, he said, what the whisky would be made of, but if you drank from a bottle of gin marked English, it was all right. He felt a bit funny inside to-day, but seemed quite cheerful about it because he had won away from the hotel, and was pretty sure now to get back to New Brunswick, after which he would not go pioneering again. He doubted, however, if we were likely to get to Golden that day. There was a place called M'Kie's we could put up at eighteen miles on, or if we felt like it, another called Petersen's—eight miles further. I said I wanted to catch the midnight train from Golden, and was going to walk on by night: at which he said he would do the same. He repeated that he was funny inside and footsore, but he thought he could do it. We would get to M'Kie's for supper, or rather get M'Kie to make us up a supper, which we would eat upon the road, and we should thus get into Golden in good time. He was sure we were going at least four miles an hour.
I was sure we were scarcely doing three, and by the time we did get to M'Kie's, just before dark, we were both so sure that a rest would do us good that we thought we would eat our supper there after all.
M'Kie's was a shack just off the road, with a huge puma-skin nailed to the verandah. Inside was a very old woman, who said that we could get our tea all right, but M'Kie wasn't in yet, and we'd better wait for him. So we sat down in the road, and I paddled in an icy creek that went foaming by the house door. Then the old woman asked us in and chatted to us while she cooked the meal. M'Kie turning up, we fell to, and M'Kie entertained us with trapping stories. It seemed he was half-trapper, half-rancher, and the big skin we had seen outside he had got only a few days before. The mountain lion had come down right into the sheepfold, and his two dogs had treed it, and a single bullet had brought it down. It was the biggest skin that he had ever seen, and measured ten feet six from tip to tail. It certainly was a large skin, but a puma's tail counts for a good deal. M'Kie had also shot a bear in the sheepfold the week before, and he talked so much about cinnamons and grizzlies, which seemed very plentiful round there, that the New Brunswicker insisted on our having his opinion as to whether they ever attacked unarmed men walking by night. M'Kie thought not. So we started on again, somewhat reassured, along what promised to be an uncommonly dark road.
The sky was all clouded over, and it was now 8.30, and there was no chance whatever of my catching the midnight train, since twenty miles still remained to be accomplished, and our limp condition made even three miles an hour hard. But we walked on, mostly because I now wanted to get the morning train at eleven o'clock, and I felt that if we went back to M'Kie's and stopped the night, I should be so stiff that I could not walk at all next day. The New Brunswicker sportingly said that he would go on for as long as he could anyhow, though he wasn't bent on any particular train; and for some four mortal hours we splashed along through mud and water in what was the next thing to pitch darkness. To add to the discomfort, a high, cold, and very wet wind began to blow, and there was every prospect of rain soon descending in torrents. It was at this point, I think, that our thoughts began to turn to Petersen's. The New Brunswicker remarked that if we had passed Petersen's there was nowhere to stop at between where we were and Golden; but if we had not passed Petersen's, we might rest there a few minutes and perhaps get some milk to drink. Soon after this we felt sure that we had passed Petersen's in the dark; and though neither of us admitted it, I think our respective hearts sank. We decided to rest a little, which we did, and we rested again a few minutes later without deciding to do it. As we got up from a brief smoke on a fallen log the rain began to pelt down, and we saw a light just off the road.
I own I should have wanted to stop at Petersen's anyhow, even if the New Brunswicker had not confessed that he could not go any further: but I don't know that I should have had his perseverance in knocking Petersen's up. There certainly was a light there. But I was convinced that everybody inside was deep in sleep. The New Brunswicker thought somebody might be up, and after knocking vainly for ten minutes at the front door of the house he went round to the back, while I sat on the doorstep, wondering what fifteen miles in that black rain would be like.
A couple of minutes later, the New Brunswicker appeared triumphant. The Petersens, he said, were up—in their kitchen—and thither we limped, much relieved. They were the kindest people—Swedes, both of them, and kept a milk cow, and gave us milk and buttermilk. They said they were sorry they hadn't a bed to offer us, but we could have the kitchen. Fastidious travellers might have thought the kitchen untidy and stuffy, and even the New Brunswicker before he went to sleep on the floor on his blankets, with some old clothes that we found hanging on the walls over our legs—even he got a broom (after the Petersens had gone to bed) and swept a clean space for us to lie on. But at least it was warm, and a haven of luxury compared with the road.
Personally, I know that I was very sorry to have to get up off that floor at 4 A.M., when that industrious old lady, Mrs. Petersen, came in again to relight the stove and to prepare breakfast. She was followed presently by her husband and son and a hired man, while from the barn there issued forth not only that shock-headed old man with the queer rig whom I had seen at Dolans, but no less than five other men who had been working in different parts of the valley, and were hiking out before the winter should come. These had all spent their night in the barn, which seems to be a privileged resting-place for travellers in this part of the country.
Mrs. Petersen had to get breakfast for some dozen people, and an odd company we were, all unkempt and unshaven, and most of us looking, truthfully enough, as if we had slept for some months in our clothes. We all did a wash before breakfast, however. Two of the men at table were socialists, and we had a desultory conversation on that subject while we were not occupied in eating Mrs. Petersen's bacon and eggs. Nobody seemed much to dispute the socialist position, but this might have been because nobody was greatly interested in it. I remember that the socialists thought that capital ought to be done away with, but Mr. Petersen, who no doubt had a small amount himself and kept a hired man, thought it was a useful thing, and should be retained. Everybody went off directly the meal was finished, except ourselves, who lingered because the New Brunswicker had boldly requested the shock-headed old man to drive us in to Golden in his farm-cart, and we went to help harness the little mare and the big giraffe.
It was still raining heavily when we started, and it rained just as heavily all the way into Golden. I never was so damped in my life, and this was due not merely to the rain, but because the farm-cart was so full of the old man's things (he seemed to be moving his house in it) that the only place available in it for me was a sack of hay. The cart had stood out all night in the rain, and the sack of hay was wet through, which made it like a sponge, so that the more I dried off the top of it the more moisture I seemed to absorb from the under part. The little mare and the big horse made about two and a half miles an hour, and if I could have walked, I should have done so, for now again the eleven o'clock train seemed in danger of getting off from Golden without me. Indeed it was half-past eleven before we got to Golden, and, resigned to despair, I accompanied the New Brunswicker into an inn, where I thought I should have to wait again for the midnight train. We ordered beer in the bar, and as I was explaining to the proprietor what a nuisance it was to have missed the train, he put down his glass and said, 'Wait a minute,' and went to the telephone. He came back to inform me that the train had just been signalled, being very late. He thought I should just have time to catch it if I rushed.
I managed to get that train, and also a half bottle of rye whisky on the way to it, and sank into a seat in the smoking compartment, where I sat all soaked and miserable, supping my rye whisky at intervals and half dozing until two grizzly-bear hunters got in a few stations down the line. They were very wonderfully arrayed in moccasins and Arctic socks and turned-up overalls and sweaters and cartridge belts; and though they were modest enough in their bearing, and did not talk about their exploits until they were asked questions, the whole compartment was soon eagerly chatting of nothing but grizzly bears. The two hunters, who were amateurs of the sport, had been up in the mountains alone, a three days' portage from the railroad, and had got three grizzlies, and would have got more, they said, but that heavy falls of snow had forced them to decamp. They spoke like good shots—which does not mean that they said they were good shots—and they seemed very keen on their sport, which they claimed to be the most dangerous and exacting in the world; nor would they listen to my meek suggestion that the Bengal tiger would compare favourably with the grizzly.
'It's a cat,' one of them said sniffily; 'you shoot it off elephants.'
I said that I knew Anglo-Indians who went after tigers on foot, and I also argued that even in the case of shooting from elephants the combination of a charging tiger and a restive elephant offered opportunity of showing one's nerve to be in order such as is not to be despised, especially if the howdah happens to have been inexpertly fixed and slides at the critical moment. They allowed that there might be something in this, but persisted that in any case tiger-hunting was done at ease, with natives to do all the portering, whereas grizzly-bear hunters like themselves had to carry everything with them, and camp in the snow, and shoot on mountain-sides, down which a grizzly bear would charge at a man quicker than a racehorse. They gave graphic descriptions of charges of grizzly bears, with their back legs flying ahead of their front ones. The last bear they had bagged had dropped, they said, within twenty paces of them, after being rolled over three times.
I fancy they spoke reasonably enough, and that the pursuit of the grizzly—certainly if done without a guide—is as good a test of a man's nerve as any other. As to the merits of the grizzly considered as a brute likely to do for you if you do not previously do for it, and compared with such others as the tiger, the buffalo, the rhinoceros, the elephant, or the lion, there is no arriving at any final conclusion. African hunters never seem agreed about the comparative merits of the last three; while one Indian sportsman supports the buffalo, another will support the tiger. Not having any experience of the grizzly bear myself, I can only say that, judging from what I have heard, he must be accounted big enough game for anybody. There is no doubt that most of the old trappers have a wholesome respect for him, and the longer they are after him, the greater, as a rule, their respect grows. His pace, when charging, is said to be something terrific, and, downhill, it always charges as soon as hit, its back legs flying out before it at a nightmare speed. Add that it seems less easy to drop finally than any other animal, that your fingers may be frozen to the trigger in the intervals of shooting, and that a single blow from one of its front paws is strong enough to claw the face out of an ox, and it will be seen that it is no contemptible foe. On the other hand, experts seem agreed that it rarely if ever charges uphill, and if shot from above is therefore comparatively harmless. If a man could always pick his position for shooting, this would reduce the value of the grizzly bear as a sporting animal; but obviously the hunter cannot always choose. Any one who has been on a snowslide will realise that. From the point of view of an unarmed person, the grizzly bear would seem to be rather less dangerous than he is sometimes made out to be. You will often hear that grizzly bears will attack a man at sight. The truth seems to be that—as is the case with any other bears—attacks are only to be feared either from female grizzlies with cubs, or from a grizzly of either sex, if the intruder is so placed as to appear to the grizzly's eyes to be cutting off its retreat to its lair. Of course no unarmed man would elect to put himself in either of these positions, and equally naturally he might unwittingly do so—in which case it would be better not to be that man, though I believe there is an authentic story of a lumberman who, returning alone from his work, was suddenly attacked by two grizzlies, and managed to kill both of them with his axe, though the second mauled him badly. Authentic or not, and one grizzly or two, it is pretty certain that few people would care to try a similar encounter.
Afterwards the conversation shifted to timber-wolves and the Yukon. One of the passengers scoffed at the notion of a dog being able to kill a timber-wolf, as happens in one of Mr. Jack London's novels. A northern timber-wolf, according to this critic, is at least twice the size of the European wolf, with a disproportionately large and powerful jaw—a single snap from which would polish off any dog. Two or three of the biggest dogs known could hardly even hold a timber-wolf much less kill it. I dare say there was more in this criticism than in one I heard later, anent Mr. Maurice Hewlett. A very solemn fruit-rancher was ploughing wearily through one of Mr. Hewlett's earlier romances, and he looked up presently to say it was funny the sort of yarns these writing chaps seemed to believe in. There was a girl in the book who milked a wild deer. He had seen plenty of deer in his time, but none of them had seemed to fancy coming close enough to be milked. If a chap wanted to write about the country he ought to know it right through like Mr. Service. Had we read Service's poems? Several of the men in the compartment evidently had read them; and, indeed, Mr. Service's poems concerning the Yukon seemed to have reached the heights of popularity. I think it is due in part to the fascination which the north exercises on all sorts and conditions of Canadians, not only because it stands for romance and mystery, but because a sort of idea is gaining ground that these inhospitable and well-nigh polar regions only await a sufficiently hardy type of colonist to have as great a boom almost as some of the more southern districts. The idea exists not only among business-like estate-agents, who see themselves in fancy selling Arctic blocks to this expected race, but among quite disinterested and patriotic people, who talk of it, as Mr. Service himself does, as a strong man's land. A few peculiarly strong men may survive there; and it is excusable for a poet to regard them as super-men—Canada's noblest type. As a matter of fact it is at least as romantic to weave halos about the heads of the crowd that seeks the Yukon country as it is to make one's heroine milk a wild deer. A certain praise is always due to pioneers, and the struggle with nature at its cruellest and most wild is not a bad test of an individual's character; but for respectable ranchers and fruit-growers (who have never been to the Yukon themselves, but have struggled with nature quite as valiantly elsewhere) to talk enthusiastically about the great lone land as the country for breeding men is absurd. Canadians may be able to colonise further north than they have done at present, and their descendants will, no doubt, be a fine and hardy race. But there is a point in the north just as there is a point in the south beyond which no white man's country lies. If any strong men are going to perpetuate their families beyond that northern point, they are going to be strong Esquimaux—not strong Canadians. Esquimaux already do quite a lot of grappling with nature in lone lands, but they are not the heroes of Mr. Service's poems. I don't wish to labour the point, but this northern strong man business seems to me entirely overdone. There is always going to be romance attached to the uninhabitable country, and adventurous young men will get there; but the theory that these are the people of whom Canada has peculiarly to be proud will not do. Adam Gordon's bush-riders had a certain merit; so had Mr. Kipling's gentlemen-rankers; so have Mr. Service's prospectors; but none of them ever forwarded civilisation very greatly. The fact is, there are true and admirable pioneers, men like Hudson and Thompson, of whom Canada has had plenty; and there are pioneers of doubtful value like those in Mr. Service's poems. These latter are picturesque enough in verse, especially in Mr. Service's verse, which catches the fascination of the north at times admirably, but the others are the men worth boasting about.
The rain persisted while we sat talking of all these matters, and the mountains were hung about with a clammy vapour which spoilt the view from the train. I should like to have stopped at Glacier, which is the usual centre for the better-known Selkirks, of which many of the giants have been climbed only within the last six or seven years, but I had not time, and they all swam by in the mist, which changed into dusk as we reached Revelstoke. There a number of lumberjacks filled up the carriage, and were very cheery and conversational all night. Having slept only two hours the night before, I should not have minded being able to get a sleeper, but they were all taken; and indeed there were not even seats enough to go all round, though it was a first-class carriage. In any case the lumberjacks in my part of the carriage would have prevented sleep. Sometimes they would sit down for a few minutes and tell stories, then they would dart off to have a look at a carriage-load of Doukhobors who were on in front and seemed rather better than a show to judge by the lumbermen's guffaws when they came back from these trips. Canadian trains may not always be restful, but they are generally entertaining. The distances traversed are so great that people cannot afford to sit in them in hunched silence. They have to unbend, and some of them unbend thoroughly. That is why, though the ordinary traveller has to pass through great tracts of land in the train, he is not losing local colour to quite the extent one loses it in an European train. Some one in the carriage is sure to know something about the district one is passing through and to be ready to talk about it. The smoking compartment becomes an animated club-room in which conversation becomes general on any subject. There is no better place for a discussion of political problems, and I fancy a great many Canadians reserve their consideration of these for the time they have to spend in the train. Certainly they grow very keen in the train, and I have heard the warmest arguments and the most libellous denunciations of leading Canadian statesmen hurled freely about among men who had never set eyes on one another before. And there are plenty of other arguments with which to pass the time. As we got to Sicamous Junction, for example, we took on board two fruit-growers, one of whom was a 'wet' grower and the other a 'dry.' A wet fruit-grower is a man who does not irrigate his fruit-land, and a dry fruit-grower is one who, having settled in the dry belt, has to irrigate. As fierce a debate was started between these two as ever you heard between exponents of wet and dry fly-fishing.
IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT.
IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT.
As far as fruit-raising is concerned, the 'dry' men appear to have the advantage. Their contention is that they can turn off the water so as to leave their trees dry for the winter when frost at wet roots is so fatal; while they can turn the water on whenever it is wanted for swelling the fruit. In addition, the dry belt country gets a longer season of sunshine, which is more favourable for the growth of the earlier and finer dessert apples. It seems curious that none of our finest-flavoured apples, such as Cox's Orange Pippin or Ribston Pippin, seem to come to perfection in Canada; and I found British Columbian fruit-growers very anxious that English people should appreciate this fact, and also get to know which are the British Columbian apples most worth asking for in England, as though some of the older orchards are still growing comparatively worthless apples, the new ones are being planted only with a few best kinds, which are as wine to water. One of these best kinds, by the way, is called Wine-sap; two of the other selectest varieties being Jonathan and Winter Banana. The latter is said to have a strong banana flavour. It is worth the English public's while, if it is going in largely for British Columbian apples, to encourage only the growing of the best, and that is to be done by demanding only the best from our own greengrocers by name. It is just as simple to plant a good apple tree as it is to plant a bad one, and there is no reason why the world in general should not eat only the best apples. So long as people are contented to look only at the colour of the fruit, which is no criterion whatever, and to pay their greengrocers' price for an unnamed sort, the best apples will not be for sale, and one will go on being provided with highly-coloured samples that taste like inferior turnips.
The weather picked up in the morning, and I was able to see some of the beauties of the great Fraser River, though I somehow missed the Chinamen washing for gold, Indians spearing salmon, bright red, split salmon drying on frames, Chinese cabins and Indian villages with their beflagged graveyards, which are said to be visible from the car windows. Perhaps I was talking too much.
A diminutive Japanese who picked up my fairly heavy trunk, slung it over his shoulder and walked down the platform with it as though it were nothing but a shawl, was the first person I met in Vancouver, reminding me that that land-locked sea below was the Pacific, which white men do not own but only share with the brown and yellow Orientals. I wonder—will the day come when the latter want an ocean all to themselves? And are there, in view of this contingency, plans of this intricate coast among the Japanese naval archives? They knew the other side pretty well before the war began with Russia, and they are not a people to leave things to chance. The yellow men have known the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver as long as the white men, and put in a great deal of work there and eaten much humble pie, and also realised by the constant rise in their wages—ten times anything their own country offers—that the white man is strangely lost without them. They had no flair for colonising half a century ago, when the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but they have it now.
Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The ground sloping to the shut sea, girt with those huge, straight trees that give a sense of luxuriance to this northern Pacific coast which no tropic country can excel, is a perfect situation for a big city. Vancouver is a big city. It is so big that many people are afraid for its immediate future. They say that it is already far bigger than it has any right to be, and that by the dubiously beneficent aid of innumerable real estate men, it is increasing at a pace that is bound to end in disaster. The slump had been expected in 1909, it was expected last year, it is expected this year. Some year it will come; and if I were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant of Vancouver, I should then head a deputation which had for its purpose the dumping in the sea of a large number of the real estate agents who swarm hungrily in the place. There is a big street entirely filled with their offices, and the mark of them is everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that encyclopædic work Canada in the Twentieth Century, jeers at the English for their distrust of the real estate man, who, he thinks, serves a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to the real estate man, says Mr. Bradley, if you want to buy land, than to the bar loafer. There is a great deal in that. In individual cases they are excellent men. But, collected together in vast numbers, as in Vancouver, they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer never can, and that is by so magnifying the importance of the buying and selling of land, that people take to it in exchange for work, and falsely imagine that enormous prosperity is coming to a place which is in reality doing nothing but changing its land at fancy and speculative prices, expecting the prosperity somehow and some day to follow of itself.
I suppose Seattle, with less justification, is in very much the same case. Both, besides being ports with great expectations, happen to be the last place, so to speak, in their respective countries; and there is something magnetic in the attraction of a last place. Thither drifts that very considerable population which, by getting on geographically, almost persuades itself that it is getting on materially. Having attained the limit, it stays there and does as little as it can. Such people give a city a false air of greatness, and are, in fact, a surplus population with nothing to do but bid up land against one another.
Of course there are plenty of genuine citizens in Vancouver, with all the enterprise and intelligence that help to make cities great. Practically, too, the greatness of Vancouver is in the end assured. It is already a magnificent port, having a big trade with the East, but nothing to what it will have. The Panama Canal will make it the centre, by sea, of the world. Again, it is the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and is destined, every one says, to become the terminus of the Grand Trunk, and any other railroad that wants to outlet on the Pacific. Wheat has begun to come through it from the prairie that used to go west to Montreal. The new reciprocity treaty will divert some of this freight to the south, no doubt, but that remains to be seen. In any case, besides being a port, Vancouver will remain the business capital of a province endlessly rich in minerals and timber, and increasingly rich in fruit- and farm-land. Some day, therefore, Vancouver will extend to those remote spots where already town lots are being disposed of. Some day. Only, a big city should not live upon its future; and the sale of such lots miles off in the backwoods to people who, having bought them, cannot pay for them or cannot put up houses on them, or cannot afford to live in those houses even if they put them up, because there is nothing for them to do there and their money has run out—this sort of sale, while it enriches the real estate man, does not enrich anybody else. Moreover, it creates a restless spirit among those genuine farmers out in the country who would honestly be farming their land, if real estate agents would leave them alone, and not persuade them that it is just as profitable a game to hang about waiting for opportunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course they, like most other people who get as far as Vancouver, are not mere innocents. Sellers and buyers are probably equally aware of the risks they run; but where a tide of speculation sets in, the shrewdest people seem ready to take the most absurd risks. And the slump has taken so long in coming, and the possibilities of Vancouver seem so immense, that speculation in land has become a perfect fascination.
'What will it be worth next year?'
That is the formula you constantly see at the end of an advertisement of some town lot—five miles, perhaps, from anywhere. The correct answer varies. If the slump does not come off next year, the lot may be worth double what is being asked for it now. If the slump does come off it will be worth a twentieth, perhaps, of what was given for it. Slump or no slump, this method of building up a city is unsatisfactory. Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg—these have become great as the centres of comparatively populous provinces, in which wealth has been gradually and carefully created by agricultural and industrial enterprises established on a firm basis. The jobs have been waiting for the men. In Vancouver alone, of all big Canadian cities, the men are waiting for the jobs, or, what is worse, waiting in the belief that money comes anyhow, and that jobs are not the prerequisite of money-making. I do not wish to give the impression that Vancouver is full of unemployed people, still less of unemployable ones; merely that many of the people there employed are not engaged in the undertakings that ensure the continuity of a city's prosperity.
Certainly any picture of Vancouver that made it out gloomy would be a mistake. Nothing could be livelier than its streets and its people; and if the slump does not come, and the Jeremiahs are wrong, Vancouver citizens will be justified of any amount of exultation. Already they have most of the things that make citizens pleased and proud—a beautiful site, fine streets, the most splendid of public parks, water-ways innumerable in front, and, behind, a country good to look at and rich in potentialities. Vancouver's industries, even if they do not justify the size of the place, are important and prosperous; and its propinquity to the salmon fisheries and vast timber tracts of British Columbia is something which alone would make a great town. In tone it is new world compared with Victoria, but old world compared with Seattle. There are many English people there. Living is high. No coin under five cents is, of course, in use, and when you start the day by paying that sum for a newspaper marked one cent, you find it difficult to beat down prices during the rest of the day. Apropos of newspapers, I was told of a very successful strike among the paper-boys of Vancouver some little time ago. Many people must have heard of it, but it is worth retelling. The strike was headed by a youthful organiser, popularly known as Reddy, from the colour of his hair. Reddy was alleged to be thirteen years of age at the time, but Pitt was not so much older when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Holding the firm conviction that he and his fellow-workers were entitled to at least two cents out of the five for every paper sold (I am not sure of my figures), Reddy proclaimed a strike, and conducted it so successfully that the newspaper proprietors of Vancouver were compelled to wait upon him humbly, and yield in every particular to his demands. Among historic strikes this seems worthy of a place.
There are no lotus-lands attached to the Dominion, and will not be, unless we make over to it at some date the West Indies. But because Vancouver Island has a climate excelling that of any other part of Canada, and a beauty of scenery not surpassed anywhere; because also the men who have settled there have reckoned these possessions dearer than other things, such as the fat soil of the prairie and the chance of growing quickly rich, Canadians of the mainland are given at times to lay a charge of lotus-eating against them. I think the charge is an unfair one. Life may be less strenuous on the island, and there are men there, no doubt, who take their work there over easily. Against this has to be set the fact that the work that does go on in Vancouver Island goes on all the year round, that the colonists are men with an eye to the far future as well as to the immediate one (they have, that is to say, an English ideal of permanent residence instead of the notion of getting what they can from the place and decamping), and that in their hands, if the island is not being developed as fast as it might be, it is at least safe from spoliation and waste. Some day, when the mainland Canadians have time to consider the amenities of a country life as well as the necessities, they will find themselves going to the island for hints.
As one crosses from Vancouver, the beauty of the straits prepares one a little for the beauty of the island which, so far as I saw it, has no bare or ugly places. Its coast-line has the contour of the Scandinavian fiords, but its charm is greater, owing to the luxuriant growth of the tall and splendid trees. Right to the edge of these rock-bound sea-water lakes the forest grows—Douglas firs, surely the finest of all straight-growing trees, cedar and maple, jack-pine and arbutus, and at their feet, flowers and mosses and saxifrages. Arriving at Victoria, I went straight through to Duncans, and, looking from the train, was reminded by the greenness of the land, freshened by the delicate rain that was falling, of the mountainous parts of Ceylon—which impression was strengthened by the fact of the smoking-compartment being crowded with Orientals of all sorts, mostly Chinese, but Japanese too and some Indians, all seeming very much at their ease among the white men. It was a harmonious sight; but what, I wondered, would an Anglo-Indian say if he found himself condemned to sit with his cheroot among this riff-raff of natives? and what chance of any agreement on questions affecting our Indian Empire between the officials of India and these Westerners who admit the Oriental to an equality with themselves?
I was bound on a visit to friends who had a farm on Quamichan Lake, and found a buggy waiting for me at Duncans station, driven by an elderly man who had all the Canadian optimism, in spite of the fact that he had, in 1882, sold for a song the whole of Edmonton, then in his possession. Another of the missed millionaires of Canada. He brought me in the dark to my friends' farm, and when I looked out of my window next morning, I almost believed myself to be back in England. A little lake lay two fields below—a fresh-water lake still and reedy, with woods or orchards sloping to its edge, and in the distance a ring of hills. It might be Grasmere transported to some warmer county such as Devonshire; but Devonshire never grew such stately trees, nor has England anywhere mountains wooded like these to their peaks. A heat-mist lay on the water, and the apples in the orchard seemed the reddest I had ever seen. Only the grass was not English grass, though it was greener than most of the grass of the new world. All round the lake were farms, belonging largely to Englishmen, dairy-farming or fruit-farming, making use of science and co-operation, but not sacrificing beauty to utility. Perhaps they could not spoil the island if they tried. The trees are so dominant and stately that every piece of cleared land seems to look at once like a part of an old English park.
It should have been called New England, this beautiful country which has so many English people in it, which carries on so much of the English tradition and sentiment, and which has even the English pheasant. I saw thousands of pheasants during the days I spent there. They were put down on the island not so very many years ago, and they have increased enormously. The deer were already there, and you may see them in the orchards, unless they are very high-fenced, at almost any time in the early morning. And there are grouse and partridges in plenty too, and beasts that England no longer possesses—the coon and the puma, and the bear and the wolverine. To see the salmon leaping all across Cowichan Bay, on a bright October morning, is a sight for sore eyes, if they happen to be an angler's. To drive along the roads is to realise instantly that they are the best roads in the Dominion. Duncans is particularly English, even for Vancouver Island. I think it is vanity and a certain cause of vexation to expect in the new world a conformity to the ways of the old, which necessary differences of living—the indispensable growth of new habits, some of them better than the old—render in time impossible. Those who expect such a conformity are usually the first to forget that the old country changes too, and that it is we, as often as those across the sea, who have forgotten the ancient order and taken on the new, generally without thought, and often without reason. Though it is absurd to expect to find Canada a replica in ideas and habits of the old world, it is nevertheless pleasant to come upon a community there which, without holding itself too much apart from its neighbours or standing out against what is progressive, does represent some peculiarly English qualities at their best. That is, perhaps, why the island makes a particular appeal to the man newly out from home. I certainly do not think its inhabitants are to be charged with stiffness and unadaptability. Men who have taken on the new life, and work in a spirit of optimism not less than that shown elsewhere, are rather to be admired than otherwise if they have retained, and even insist on, what is good in the old. And a love of sport and beauty and sociability, and even of leisure, is a good thing, especially when it is found among men who do their own work as these men do, and more especially when found among women who work as the women of the island do. The work is the best of all, but all work and no play turns many people—and not a few Canadians—not merely into dull folk, but into narrow-minded and backward ones, who will some day have all the unpleasantness of being rudely awakened to the fact.
No doubt there are some ne'er-do-weels on the island, but the great majority of those I met seemed to me to be capable men, likely to do well by what is the most beautiful, and will some day be, perhaps, the most valuable part of the Empire.
As everybody knows who has been in Canada, there are two hotel systems in vogue there. By the one system you pay for your room and board separately, and this is called the European plan. By the other you take your meals and lodging at a fixed price, and that is called the American plan.
In much the same way one might say there are two systems of life in Canada, and indeed elsewhere. By the one you distinguish between your work and your play, and treat each as a separate item. By the other you mix the two up, and are apt to consider yourself a strenuous person. I don't know that it is fair to describe these respectively as the American and the European system of life; but I am pretty certain that whether you apply the systems to life or to a hotel, the results produced by them are not on the whole very different. Applying them to life, the main distinction seems to be that the exponents of the strenuous or American method—those who get their fun out of their work and their holidays out of their forced travel, or their compulsory rest by doctor's orders—are frequently led to confuse the appearance of work with the reality, and to be disentitled to wear that air of superiority which, in the presence of confessed believers of leisure, they too frequently assume. For, when all is said and done, leisure is as necessary to man as work, and everybody takes it, whatever he may think.
Vancouver laughs at Victoria for its dead-aliveness and want of hustle. Victoria smiles at Vancouver for its restlessness and superfluity of energy.
Now you see the point of my aphorism. I do not propose to hold the balance between these distinguished cities. Both have their peculiar merits; and if Vancouver is likely in years to come to leave Victoria far behind in the race for industrial supremacy, Victoria is none the less likely to remain ahead of Vancouver in culture and the arts. At present I should judge that Victoria is distinctly the steadier city of the two. Speculation in land is the exception rather than the rule; prices go up steadily, and the land is bought by intending residents. At which point I will abandon comparisons, which are the more absurd because the destinies of the two towns are so widely different. Vancouver is a great port on the mainland of Canada, connecting it with Asia, the western States, South America, and whatever countries will henceforth export merchandise via the Panama Canal. Victoria is the political capital of British Columbia, with all the prestige that attaches to such a position and the finest climate in the Dominion. Not that it is only that. Some of its inhabitants consider that its prospects are immeasurably superior to those of Seattle, 'since the riches of Vancouver Island' (I quote from a local pamphlet), 'in their entirety incomparably more valuable than the gold-mines of Alaska, are directly tributary to the British Columbia capital.'
There is a great deal in this, though one has to remember that those riches will take many years to develop. The drawback to the immediate development of Vancouver Island is that it is covered with enormous timber. Reciprocity with the States is likely to give a fillip to the lumber industry, and the clearing of the land will then go on far quicker than hitherto. True, lumbermen do not actually clear the land; they leave the stumps behind them, and all the poorer trees. But they undoubtedly open the land up. Moreover, the revival of Esquimalt as a naval base will revive the prestige of Victoria, and create more work, besides inducing railwaymen to press on into the island.
I stopped there on my way back, partly to see the town itself, partly because I wished to see Mr. Richard M'Bride. The town disappointed me just a little. It commands a magnificent view of the mountains on the mainland, and the country all round is beautiful. But the villas and gardens, which one hears so much praised, struck me as a little commonplace. Perhaps it is that I like a town to be a town and a garden to be a garden; whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city, grateful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed to the utilitarian towns of the West, but altogether lacking in architectural fineness. The Parliament Buildings are good, and would be very good if those responsible for their maintenance would remove the inscription 'Canada' from across the front of them. In its coloured lettering it looks like the icing-sugar mottoes you see inscribed on birthday cakes.
But let a more enthusiastic pen than mine (again I fall back on that local pamphlet) describe Victoria as it appears to Victorians.
'If there are sights more beautiful than the Olympian Mountains from Beacon Hill, or the windings of the Gorge as the waters come in from the sea between waving battlements of plumy firs, then eyes have not seen them. If there is a sweeter song than the skylark's matin melodies high up from Cadboro Bay, then ears have not heard it. If there be more bewildering loveliness than clusters about the shaded and flower-gemmed gardens of Victorian homes looking seaward, then poets have not written it in imperishable numbers, nor minstrels celebrated it in well-remembered song. If there be a city of dreams, even the fabled Atlantis of antiquity, or vision of Babylonian towers set in hanging gardens, and redolent of strange odours of musk and myrrh, or fairy casements opening out to perilous seas forlorn, then never one approached in splendour this jewel of all time, ringed by the azure seas and sentinelled by everlasting hills.... A bird's song drops like the sudden peal of a bell. Outside are broad boulevards, grey with powdery macadam, stretching towards the bustling city; highways of progress and modernity, now scrolled by the flight of a whizzing automobile, now echoing with the staccato sound of hurrying hoof-beats. Inside are flowers and brooding hedges, the sheen of close-cropped grasses and sun-lacquered tree-trunks—rest, peace, and sweet seclusion.'
After this it comes almost as a relief to know from the same pamphlet that 'the climate of Victoria is best expressed in figures.' There is a great deal to be said for figures.
There is a very good, small, natural-history museum in a wing attached to the Parliament Buildings, but it is absurdly small. The collection of Indian curios is remarkably inadequate, and merely tempts the visitor to ask when Canadians are going to devote some of the money they are undoubtedly making to a genuine study and collection of the remains of their predecessors in the land. Indians are not dying out as fast as some people suppose; but their crafts are, and so are their creeds and all that appertains to them. It would be easy even now to create a magnificent Indian museum, but it will become less and less easy as the years go by. Relics of Indian times are constantly being picked up by men travelling in out-of-the-way parts, or unearthed during railroad and other excavations, and if it were known that the authorities would be glad to receive them and would perhaps pay the cost of their carriage to some centre, there is no doubt that many valuable finds would be forwarded to them. The making of museums, just like the building of ships, is a branch of empire work which should not be neglected; and Victorians are eminently the people to recognise this.
It was in his rooms in Parliament Buildings that Mr. M'Bride conversed with me on the subject of British Columbia. You hear people say in Canada, that if ever that astutest of party leaders, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, goes out of office with his Liberals, Mr. M'Bride will shortly after become Prime Minister of the Dominion—as Conservative leader, be it understood. He is not a great orator, and he has no scheme even for a party millennium. That, however, in Canada is a strength rather than a weakness. Politicians are not expected in Canada to bring about the millennium: indeed, so far as I could make out, the average Canadian is of opinion that when the millennium comes, it will be noticeable for an absence of politicians. They have not our reverence for these great men. But on the other hand, they require from them evidence of qualities which may or may not be present in our ministers. One is a readiness to seize opportunity as it comes. Another is, to have a practical understanding of the ways of finance. Yet a third is, to be in touch with men and things—the sort of quality we mean, however vaguely, when we raise the cry of a Cabinet of Business Men. All these qualities Mr. M'Bride possesses, together with that readiness to seem agreeable which is almost a necessity to a public man.
Mr. M'Bride confined his conversation with me to British Columbia—a big enough subject for a short interview. I wished to know if the survey of the province was being carried out as quickly as possible. In a vast country like British Columbia, it seems one of the most important things. The right to acquire land must be made simple and certain. Mr. M'Bride declared that surveying was going on as fast as men and money could do it, and referred me to the surveyor-general for details. I wish I could go further into the subject, but there is no space for it here. Then we got on to education, and Mr. M'Bride asked me to assure the working men of England that the education facilities of British Columbia were as fine as any to be got anywhere. Perhaps this is so, though I heard some criticism of the public schools from another eminent Victorian. It is easier, perhaps, to be enthusiastic than to be unanimous about any given system of education. To take but one small point, the co-education of boys and girls is a thing upon which people are not agreed even in British Columbia.
I was on the steamboat, ready to start for Vancouver, when the great fire of 1910 broke out in the town. With a considerable wind blowing it seemed to me not improbable that the whole of Victoria would be burnt down that night, and I had sufficient of the journalistic instinct to leave my things to go on by the boat and to go back myself to watch the blaze. Luckily the wind dropped and the fire was kept to one quarter, and I rather regretted my haste when I found myself stranded in Victoria at three o'clock in the morning. Still, it was worth while to have been there, if only to observe the working of the Canadian mind in a crisis of this sort. In England you would have heard ejaculations of horror and much sympathy expressed with those who were bound to suffer by the fire. The Victorian crowd took it quite differently. 'This'll create more work,' said one man fervidly. 'Just what the town needed,' said another enthusiast. 'We'll be able to have a better-looking street there after this. Those shops weren't good enough.' I even heard some of the men who had rushed out of their burning offices talking keenly and proudly of the sort of buildings they'd have to start putting up next day—much better buildings. Presumably they were insured, but even so men in the old country would have been a little shocked and perturbed, and regretful of the old rooms they were accustomed to. I fell asleep, when I had found a hotel, almost oppressed by the optimism of Canada.
It was just before sunrise that I first saw Ottawa. I was on my way back from Vancouver, and had spent four successive days in the train, getting out only for minutes at a time to stamp about platforms where the train waited long enough to permit of such exercise.
Such days, varied only by meals for which one is always looking, but never hungry, tend to become monotonous, even though one spends them mostly in the observation car. The fact is, observation pure and simple is one of the most difficult things possible to a member of the human tribe—as hard as doing compulsory jig-saws; and reading humorous American magazines, one after the other, is an alternative that also requires the strong mind. If I must travel long distances by train, I want to be the engine-driver.
The country, I thought, looked less attractive as I repassed it now than it looked before, and I put this down to the freeze-up, which had come unusually early, people kept saying, and gave to the land a black and ruffled look, like a sick bird's. Later it would be beautiful again in snow, and the life and work of the season of snow would begin. Meanwhile, people in the little northerly stations we passed had the appearance of having stopped work. You saw them standing about—always with their backs to buildings to get out of the shrivelling wind. I suppose in most of these places there is a between-time in which nobody can work.
Nothing much was doing in Ottawa when I got out there, but that of course was due to the earliness of the hour. It was so early that when I reached a hotel they told me breakfast was not to be had for some time yet, and so, since I was too wide-awake to go to sleep again, I thought I would spend the hour looking at the Dominion Parliament Buildings. Perhaps it was the too early hour, perhaps it was the coldness of the wind blowing round that bluff above the river on which the famous buildings stand—but I could feel none of that satisfaction, when I looked at them, which great architecture gives. The situation is fine, but not the buildings. Anthony Trollope has written of them:—'As regards purity of art and manliness of conception, the work is entitled to the very highest praise.... I know no modern Gothic purer of its kind or less sullied with fictitious ornamentation'—but I think he must have breakfasted handsomely first. Some one else, but I forget who, and it does not matter, has described the buildings as 'a noble pile,' which seems to hit the mark, if, as I fancy, that mid-Victorian expression suggests something on so large a scale, which has obviously cost such a lot of money, that vague admiration is the least of the emotions which should be produced by a sight of it. 'A noble pile,' then, let them remain, especially since, seen from some distance, with the beautiful river below and a spacious country stretched before them, they possess a certain imposing appearance. Closer up, one is less impressed. There is a long-backed unmeaning set to the buildings, as though the architects had found concentration a vexation, and had decided to extend instead. Still, they might have elaborated painfully, and they did not—except for those little turrets on the side-buildings, surmounted by railings which one associates chiefly with the London area. Area railings are meant, I suppose, to prevent errand-boys from falling into the areas, but there can be few errands to the roof of the Parliament Buildings. In passing, I did not like those hundreds of silly little windows that peep all round: one, as it were, for every official to peep from.
Reflection should serve to temper criticism, however. The year 1867, in which the Dominion Parliament required its Houses, was not one of brilliant achievement in the architectural world; and when it is remembered that Canada itself was also a new country, the wonder is that nothing worse was built. Only a few years before, we in England had been transfixed with admiration of the Crystal Palace; Royal Academicians were above criticism, and 'almost too great to live'; bright in the sun gleamed the Albert Memorial. We ruled the waves, but not the arts; and 'our daughter of the snows' took over our large ideas and our little taste in building.
Whether she took over our political ideas is another matter, upon which I pondered as I contemplated those Parliament Buildings. There stood the House in which Sir John Macdonald evolved that east-and-west policy which seemed such an empire-cementing thing; where Sir Wilfrid Laurier teaches the world how to lead a party; where not as yet had been ratified that Reciprocity Agreement with America which has been agitating our statesmen so much this year, though, even as I gazed, it must have been in course of construction. Would an Imperial Parliament sit there some day, I wondered, and direct the affairs of the British Empire from what would be, not so long hence, a far more central and important spot than Westminster? I could not quite imagine it. I could not even like the idea, as some Imperialists at any price can. Home Rule for England is one of the policies I shall always stand for, I believe; even when Canadians have that grasp of Imperial affairs which we in England impute to them—by comparison, we generally mean, with our own English political opponents—that grasp which, as a matter of fact, is much less common among them at present than it is among us, whether we be Liberals or Conservatives.
I wish our party political system allowed of our minimising the zeal and intelligence of the side opposed to us without magnifying those qualities in a third party which, in strict reality, it scarcely possesses. I wish, for example, that Tariff Reformers could deride the Imperialistic attitude of Free Traders (and vice versa) without declaring that Canadians could in this matter teach us all lessons. For the truth is that Canadians could not give lessons to either in this matter. They have an Imperial sentiment all right, but they do not worry over it as we do. Take that question of Preference which has been making us all so hot for several years now. It never troubled Canadians at all. They thought that there was a good deal in it from a business point of view, and they were prepared to try it—and did so. But they never for a moment fancied or perturbed themselves with thinking that, either with or without it, the Empire would totter to its fall. Our fervours left them entirely cool; and in that business-like state of coolness, after duly granting us Preference, they have, equally duly in their opinion, set out to establish reciprocity with the States. The only thing likely to make them hot in this matter is the suggestion that they have been lacking in Imperial spirit. Of course they had been lacking in that early, romantic, self-immolating and fantastically quaint, Imperial spirit which we attributed to them—just to make our own Little Englanders try and feel ashamed; but, equally again, they never had it, and would not dream of claiming it even if they could be made to understand what our devotees meant by it. To forgo trade in order to uphold the flag would not appeal to a Canadian—mainly for the reason that the idea would strike him as grotesque.
In the matter of this Reciprocity Agreement, then, I think it is we who are wrong if we make it a reproach to the Canadians. It may or may not be a sound economic proceeding, but it is entered upon without prejudice to Imperial sentiment. Only if we first assume that all Canadians have been burning for years past with the same zeal for an Imperial Zollverein that has animated our own Tariff Reformers, can we now credit them with cooling off and backsliding. But such an assumption would be a very great mistake. All assumptions that Canadians view our political problems from our point of view are great mistakes. They no more do so than we view theirs from their point of view. We do not. Nothing struck me more forcibly than the fact that what causes us political turmoil in Great Britain is viewed with complete coolness in Canada, and that what Canadians are keen after remains unknown to us. While I was there, I kept seeing letters in English papers (reproduced sometimes—but very briefly—in Canadian papers) saying that Canada was whole-hearted for Tariff Reform, or that Canadian Free Traders were sweeping the country; whereas the fact was and is, that these two terms (whatever might in reality be the state of Canadian parties) never conveyed in the least in Canada what we mean by them, and therefore conveyed no truth that could be understood of both peoples equally.
Does this inter-Imperial lack of comprehension threaten the future of the Empire? It might seem so at first. Lack of understanding between fellow-citizens cannot be a good thing in itself. But it has this merit, that it makes real interference on either side a rare thing. If we understood—or believed we understood—what was for the future welfare of Canada, it is doubtful if we could refrain from pointing it out, even if we could refrain from insisting upon it. If the Canadians thought themselves capable of directing us in the right way—say in the management of India—they would feel urged to give their opinion, and Anglo-Indian officials, having this last straw added to their backs, would strike en masse. As it is, we let each other's real problems alone, and are satisfied with our own solutions of them. Imperial Conferences are necessary because in some matters the Empire must work together, having the same interests. Cables and Dreadnoughts are cases in point. That Great Britain still bears the main expenditure in all such matters is proof, if proof be needed, that what American papers somewhat unkindly call 'British Island Politics' are, still, more Imperial than the politics of any other part of the Empire. We pay and we ask for little in return, and the Empire will go on, even now that Canada has become a nation. Only some mistake could, I think, part us—a mistake as big as that which parted us from the United States—and we are not likely to make it; nor is Canada likely to wish for it, however great she may picture and make her own destiny. But that she will want to rule entirely in her own house is certain. Canadians themselves—the voters I mean—are not likely for a long time to wish for much more than they have in the way of national liberty. I do not think they would much worry as to whether their ambassador at Washington, for example, was appointed from Ottawa or from London. The results in either case would be likely to be very similar, and in any case, as I have said, Canadians are not obsessed at present with politics. But it has to be remembered that besides Canadian voters, there are Canadian politicians, and since it is in the nature of politicians to be at least as ambitious as other people, it is natural that Canadian politicians should want in their own hands all the important posts that are to be had. Just at present Canadians take such a disrespectful view of politicians in general—which is unfair no doubt to their own political representatives, but natural perhaps in a new country which has not too much time to reflect upon the real benefactions politicians may confer, and rather fancies, from isolated examples, that 'graft' is what they are usually after—that they are not likely to demand of their own accord more power to the hand of their own statesmen. But the accord of voters depends in due course upon the persuasive powers of candidates, and I foresee the candidates persuading pretty hard in the near future: all of which will make work for Imperial Conferences of the near future, but not, it is to be hoped, impossible work.
I find that having represented myself as reflecting upon Canadian politics outside the Dominion Parliament Buildings, I have altogether omitted Canadian politics in favour of Imperial considerations. Beyond showing, or rather trying to show, that Canadian politics—the things that really interest Canadians—are not in the least what we are accustomed to think them, I have got no further at all. Still, that—if I have shown it—is something, for it may suggest to some gentle reader that an Empire is not a simple, extended Great Britain, in which every one thinks precisely the same things to be of the same immediate importance; of which all the emotions and reflections may be realised in full by a perusal, let us say, of the Standard of Empire.
And so I remove myself from that bluff above the river at Ottawa to my hotel, and thence to divers parts of that charming town, which looked then—for Parliament was not sitting—something like Oxford out of term; and thence to the train carrying me back to Montreal and Quebec.
Afterwards came the return across the Atlantic to a country smaller than Canada—(less than a week of steaming, my friends), in company with Canadians who were returning to see what the old place was like after many years. I think they would not be ill-pleased with it, small as it is by comparison. I hope they found behind it some of the qualities which, as it seems to me, are to be found also in THE FAIR DOMINION, making it to my eyes yet more fair.