There’s a man driving a dozen cows out to pasture. He has evidently learnt the livestock lesson. Let us pay him a visit. “Yes,” he says, “I learned that much years ago, and it was all right as far as it went. I didn’t keep all my eggs in one basket, and if wheat was poor Mrs. Cow would always keep our heads above water. But that was nothing to what she could do, as I soon found out when I studied the matter, and learned to select and test the cows, and weed out those that didn’t pay for their board. Breeding up, and feeding right, I call this herd my little gold mine.”

Quality, again! Quality all the time.

“And I don’t spend the gold on gas,” he adds, as an automobile speeds by. “Think of it! Over 63,000 passenger autos in this Province alone—one to every three or four grown-up people—40,000 in Alberta, nearly as many in Manitoba, and 32,000 in British Columbia. Every man must judge for himself, but living as I do, only three miles from town, I couldn’t give ‘business’ as an excuse for keeping a car. What with the cost in money, and the time a man is tempted to spend running around when he’s wanted at home, some of us have been kept pretty tight pinched by our cars.”

“You wouldn’t call the West extravagant, on the whole, would you?”

He laughs. “No and Yes. You know as well as I do, we farmers didn’t spend over much on ourselves at the best of times. You wouldn’t call a telephone an extravagance, would you, or a gramophone?” Ten Million Wagon Loads

“Not for the world! I should be sorry to see the poorest farmer give them up. It’s things like that, and now the radio, with good roads, and the auto when you live a long way out, that have ended the ‘isolation’ we used to complain of. They bring us the advantages of city life without its disadvantages.”

“That’s right. And so far as we farmers have spent too much, it has generally not been for pleasure, but for business. We have taken too much land, and bitten off more than we can chew—that was the way of the country, and we had to learn better. We’ve often bought more and bigger machinery than we could profitably use—that was partly because everyone was begging us to raise more grain during the war, partly because we were too easily persuaded by professional salesmen. We haven’t had a business training, worse luck.”

“No; we’ve been too busy with the producing end of our business to study the commercial end of it. Think of the work we put in to raise the crops we do! Of the 1,956,000 people in the Prairie Provinces, 1,652,000 are classed as ‘rural,’ but they include all the old folk and women and children on the farms, and even villagers. Yet our handful of country folk managed to raise in one year a good 10,000,000 wagon loads of grain, not to speak of hay and potatoes, and the rest. If you put those wagons in procession, so close together you couldn’t cross the street between them, that string would be so long that Mother Earth could tie a girdle around her waist with it and have spare ends left long enough to trip over.

“It’s a big manufacturing business, this agriculture of ours, making food out of earth and air and water and The Business End of Farming a little seed. In any other big manufacturing business, do you think the men who make the goods in the factory have to sell them over the counter—or buy the machinery, for that matter? The concern must have its buying experts, and its selling organization as a matter of course.

“We have made some progress on the selling side, with grain and cattle and wool and fruit and butter and eggs; but it is only a beginning. It is too much to hope that every experiment will succeed at once. An infant can’t run till it has got some practice in walking, and it can never learn even to walk if it stops trying after a fall or two.

“We need co-operation—not between food-raisers at the food-eaters’ expense, but co-operation in each class, leading to complete co-operation between both classes. If that is a dream, it is one that must come true when we all awake to the need of working together for the good of the whole community.”

Off again. Do you see what that boy is digging, down there? Sweet potatoes. They are called “semi-tropical.” As a fact, we have a semi-tropical climate; not for long at a time, but long enough for corn and tomatoes and tobacco, through a big stretch of the prairie—to say nothing of the coast. We have discovered that sunflower makes about as good fodder as corn, and grows a tremendous weight of crop. But the corn line, like the wheat line, is pushing farther and farther north. For this, and for a hundred other most practical benefits, we have to thank the quiet, ceaseless work of the experimental farms, started long ago by the Dominion Government—work now carried on by The Inspiration of Bigness the Provincial Governments too, at their universities. We don’t all make the use of these that we might, we are so busy. Fortunately they come to us, if we don’t go to them, sending out “extension lectures,” and manning the “Better Farming Trains” which the railways lend.

Every Western Province has its own full-fledged university, a centre of light and leading, besides its normal schools for training teachers. Just over yonder, at Saskatoon, is the University of Saskatchewan.

Eastward again we fly, and look down on Manitoba—no longer a “postage stamp province,” for it has been growing in size, as well as in every other way. One extension followed another till in 1912 Manitoba pushed up to Hudson Bay, and the Province covers 232,000 square miles. Saskatchewan has 243,000 square miles, Alberta 253,000, and British Columbia 353,000.

Big figures these. The West is a big place, as I have observed. That is nothing to brag about. Its bigness should inspire us with a humble determination to do big things with it, and for it, each in our own little corner of it, looking beyond our own little corner, too; for if we have a broad country we are bound to take broad views.

A big country indeed, endowed with land and railways and roads and schools and all the machinery of Government for countless millions of citizens. We hold the West in trust, a sacred trust, not for ourselves and our children alone, but for the millions who might be here to use it with us. We shall gain, as well as they, by their coming; though even if we had nothing to gain, we cannot escape the responsibility of holding a realm so much vaster than we can use.

Our most urgent need is to unearth our hidden wealth, Small Farming for Big Population to develop our enormous undeveloped resources, of which our uncultivated or half-cultivated land is the greatest part. Our first business, then, is plainly to get population, people able and willing to work. We have to devise new plans of settlement, of land-holding or land arrangement, of agricultural production and agricultural commerce—yes, and agricultural manufacture, so that we shall no longer depend almost wholly on the sale of raw material. Every possible avenue must be explored, every resource of human ingenuity taxed to the utmost, brushing aside all obstructive traditions and conventions, and thoroughly testing every plan with one glimmer of hope in it, to get and keep a large and permanent, because successful and contented, body of people doing this vital work.

It is not the big wheat farm or cattle ranch that means big population, but just the opposite.

Most of the new settlers we can hope to get will be poor. Small farming, and often very small farming, is the only kind possible to them. What of that?

It was the small man, the poor man, with little or no capital beyond his own body and brains, who built up this country from the beginning. It is the small man, reinforcing us in his hundreds of thousands from the mother country and from many other lands, that we must get to build it up with fresh vigor from now on. Yes, and we must give him a better chance than he ever had under the broadcasting, go-as-you-like, sink-or-swim homestead system, which so often allowed him to sink, with grievous loss both to him and to the country.

There is no fear for the wheat supply. Any cutting down of the present wheat acreage, beyond what may A Self-Supporter be required from time to time to prevent over-production, will be made up for by the multitude of small wheat fields on the multitude of small farms that will now come into existence.

The small farmer, if he thinks and plans his way carefully, is not only self-supporting—able to feed his family even if the rest of the world should sink under the sea, and independent of labor costs, which are the last straw on many a big farmer’s back; he is also independent, to a degree which few yet realize, of the foreign market, and of unfortunate conditions abroad that keep that market down.

Such men are to be found in every Province already. Here is one. He has cut his coat strictly according to his cloth. He does not try to farm one acre more than he can handle with his own small capital, supplemented by very little credit. He works no more land and carries no more stock than he can thoroughly cultivate and care for in normal times by himself, or with such help as his family can give—and occasionally the neighbors, to whom he lends his help in turn. He spares neither brain work nor hand work to produce—not simply the largest quantity, but the most that can be got of the highest quality, so as to secure the highest net cash yield per acre and per hour.

I know his family are well dressed and well fed, for I have more than once dropped in unexpectedly, about meal times. There is always plenty of variety on the table, but you notice, even in winter, that almost everything on the bill of fare was raised right there. A little tea and sugar are their only imports; British Columbian apples are the only food from outside the farm.

This man has been improving his land steadily from Our Friend the Cow the start, till almost the last inch of his quarter is under cultivation. He is a hard worker, of course; “but I don’t kill myself,” he says; “what’s the use? I don’t want the moon.” Yet he is by no means lacking in ambition. He had a very high ambition from the beginning—to be independent—and he has got more than he aimed at; while thousands who aimed at something much bigger have overshot the mark, through over-ambition, and are not even independent, but struggling in the chains of heavy debt.

Small men, or rather men with small means, can do big things by working together, as the Danes have shown us by the wonderful results of their combination of scientific dairying and hog-raising with nation-wide co-operation in marketing.

This Province of Manitoba has been learning fast in the last few years. She still grows over two million acres of wheat—Saskatchewan has twelve million and Alberta nearly six—but no longer stakes her whole existence on that crop. In 1920 butter and cheese factories received from Manitoban farmers the milk or cream of 24,600 cows. By 1923 that number had risen to 107,200, yielding 10,730,000 pounds of butter and 231,000 of cheese. In the same year Alberta sold 17,870,000 pounds of butter and 1,865,000 of cheese, from 158,000 cows, while Saskatchewan’s output, from 95,400 cows, was 10,870,000 pounds of butter and 119,000 of cheese. A few years ago we were importing butter to the prairie; now we are exporting butter from this same prairie to England, and the people there are delighted with its quality.

The prairie farmers’ takings for the year, from these factories, came to nearly $13,000,000. British Columbia’s Winnipeg factory output of 2,960,000 pounds of butter and 290,000 pounds of cheese, from 39,000 cows, gave the farmers over $2,000,000. These figures take no account of the enormous quantity of milk sold in its natural state, or used on the farms.

Winnipeg alone must need a big supply. The little settlement which had such a stormy and romantic infancy has grown into the largest city of the West, with nearly 200,000 inhabitants, including 30,000 Slavs, 14,500 Hebrews, 6,700 Scandinavians and 6,200 Germans and Dutch. It is noticeable, by the way, that seventy per cent of the people in the five biggest prairie cities—Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton—are of “British” stock, including “Americans” of British descent; though they are only fifty-six per cent of the whole population of the three Provinces. That is, the English-speaking folk tend to gather in cities much more than the Slavs, and very much more than the Scandinavians and Germans.

Winnipeg holds all the railways bunched together in her hand, before they spread out east and west. The largest railway “yard” in America is here—the Canadian Pacific’s, with 258 miles of track in it; and the Canadian National has 200 miles of yard track too. In twelve months 225,000,000 bushels of western wheat have passed out through this eastern gateway.

Here is a Parliament Building, stately and fine enough for a Dominion, not to speak of a Province. “When Canada has a bigger population than the little mother-land, as one day she certainly will have, and the Empire wants a more central capital than London, Winnipeg will be all ready with the equipment,” a hopeful Westerner remarks. Boys and Girls

She is certainly ready with the golf links, where eminent statesmen are said to find their chief recreation. There must be a dozen such courses around this city, and some of them are owned not by clubs but by the community, so that here, at any rate, golf is not only the rich man’s game; any one may play who can.

We have little leisure out on the Western country-side, and get all the healthy exercise we need on the farm; but hundreds of country villages have their baseball and tennis clubs for summer, and hockey for winter. The cities and towns, of course, have their organized sports and healthy athletic clubs of all kinds, with enthusiastic musical and literary associations too. The churches and schoolhouses, in town and country alike, are centres of social activity.

If there is one country school in the West where the children are not any day to be found playing and shouting as children should, I have yet to find it, and hope I never shall. Many school gardens are cultivated by the pupils; and large numbers of farm boys and girls are now active members of juvenile societies which give prizes for the best-bred and best-fed steers, heifers and hogs, or the best samples of grain. That youngster of eleven, captain of the soccer team, “pitched on” the hay of an eight-acre field the other day, by himself, when a sudden emergency called his father away and it “looked like rain.”

Corps of Cadets and Boy Scouts flourish in scores of country centres, as well as in the larger towns. There are over 18,000 Boy Scouts in these four Provinces (that is more than the number in the East), besides 7,500 “Wolf Cubs,” or Junior Scouts. There are nearly 21,000 Cadets, in 340 companies, besides other National Defence organizations which likewise aim at helping each new generation to develop the health of mind and body Acquired for good citizenship. The Cadets are connected with our Department of National Defence; but they include in their programme lectures on citizenship, and organized games, as well as physical training, “first-aid” work, scouting and signalling.

“We love peace as much as any Quaker,” says a Western war veteran who is now an enthusiastic officer in the Canadian Militia, “and warmly sympathize with every movement, international conference, or anything else, towards the abolition of war. Peace is the chief interest and foundation principle of our Empire—pax Britannica. If we train ourselves to be ready for emergencies, in the present state of a world we can’t help belonging to, we look forward persistently to the growth of commonsense and good feeling which will make emergencies few and far between.”

As a matter of fact, we have no “standing army,” except a little force of 4,000 or so, for the whole of this vast Dominion. In the Western battalions of the ordinary “Non-permanent Militia” about 13,000 men are enrolled.

THE MUSIC of a foaming torrent mingles with the softened hum of mowers and roar of heavy trains rushing wheat to the steamers at Fort William, as we plane up—not down—to the south-east corner of the Province. The crisp music is the voice of Winnipeg River, busy making electric light and power for the city and the towns beyond.

Right about turn. There is the very same water, spread out and sleeping in the shallow expanse of Lake Winnipeg. The shimmer of the surface breaks into flashing points of light as hundreds of Icelandic settlers pull out the fish.

Now for a long swift spin to the farthest North. Leaving Manitoba behind, we soon leave the woods behind too. Beneath us lies a treeless rolling plain.

Astonishing! We were brought up to believe Northern Canada a “frozen wilderness.” We find it contains great stretches of green pasture, gay with innumerable flowers, alive with birds and beasts and butterflies. Even the Arctic islands, which most people imagine covered with perpetual snow and ice, we find carrying much vegetation and fattening herds of musk ox and caribou. A large part of Alaska, and nearly all Greenland, are mountainous. These keep their mantle of ice the year round because of their height and snowfall; but they are not in Canada. For periods varying Sunshine and Reindeer from two to four or five months, as the explorer Stefansson tells us, most of our northern land is a picture of green prairie and flowering meadows; the flowering plants are much more conspicuous than the mosses and lichens which many people imagine are the only specimens of vegetable life to be seen.

The summer is short up here, if reckoned by months, but not if reckoned in hours of sunshine. Where the sun never sets, for weeks or months at a time, the summer warmth is continuous, unbroken by the cooling of night. In polar regions you may experience a temperature of 95 to 100 in the shade.

One day, as Stefansson predicts, this continent will draw a large part of its meat supply from vast herds of reindeer grazing on these northern prairies of Canada. The caribou is simply a variety of reindeer, and as easily tamed.

The 1,280 reindeer brought over from Siberia to Alaska, between 1892 and 1902, have increased beyond all expectations, and now number more than 200,000, after 100,000 have been killed for their meat and hides. And Alaska possesses only one-tenth of the area available for this purpose on our vast northern plains.

Our children will smile at our notion that this north land is “useless.” We have not learnt to use it; that is all.

Rising again, and skimming over Hudson Bay, we overtake a ship of the Company making her yearly voyage to England with a cargo of furs. Yes, it is the same old Corporation of Adventurers, carrying on its ancient trade. Times have changed even up in the North, but the change has been very slight compared to the transformation of the South under the magical touch of steel rails. Steam has long taken the place of Our Farthest North sails, at sea; stern-wheelers ply at intervals on the Peace, Mackenzie and Stikeen Rivers; but everywhere the stout rowboat and fragile canoe in summer, the dog cariole in winter, are still the express trains of a country thousands of miles wide, from British Columbia to Labrador. On the shores of all three oceans, and at scores of posts between, the Company goes on bartering goods for the furs brought in by Indians and Eskimo.

On and on we glide, over the land of the midnight sun, with its Eskimo encampments. We leave the continent behind, but the land is still almost continuous: we are crossing the Arctic Archipelago, and some of its islands are huge. Threading its way among them goes a little steamer, apparently on its way to the North Pole. No, but it goes within seven degrees of the Pole, on its yearly voyage with supplies for the Canadian Mounted Police stations and post-offices on the east and north shores of Baffin Island, on North Devon, and on Ellesmere, the most northerly island of all.

It is only when we reach the top of this island that we look down on the northern boundary of Canada, and realize that our Dominion has enormous breadth as well as length. From this point to the southern boundary of Manitoba is about 2,450 miles in a straight line; to the south extremity of Ontario, 2,650 miles.

We are scarcely tempted to spend the winter up here, though the Police would be very good company. Turning back towards the mainland, we fly in silence to the west, a vast expanse of sea on one hand, a barren shore line on the other. The whole world may be dead, for all we see of life, except the life of the birds.

Hark! In the midst of this utter solitude, the virgin Wireless in the Arctic air gives birth to a still, small human voice. Incredible, yet true. It is a wireless message giving us news from home, two thousand miles away, and telling also of events that happened a few hours ago in Europe, in India, in Australasia. Speeding on, we see at last the explanation. There on Herschel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, is a wireless station, the end of a chain of aerial communication stretching south to the prairies of Alberta, west to Dawson City, Prince Rupert and Vancouver, east to Norway House, Winnipeg and Ottawa, and keeping this outermost sentinel of Canada in touch with the whole civilized world. The Mounted Police wave a greeting to us as we pass.^[1]

We have reached the north-west corner of the Dominion. The yearly steamer bringing supplies from British Columbia, round through Behring Sea, has just arrived. Inland, we catch a flying glimpse of Yukon Territory, which blazed into fame as the gold-seekers’ Mecca in 1898. Now, striking up the valley of the Mackenzie, we pass a string of outposts where the fur traders, the Mounted Police and the missionaries live and watch and trade and teach among the Indians. The braves no longer fight, but they live as they did by hunting and trapping the beaver and the rest of the fur bearing folk.

A noble valley this, now spreading wide, now narrowing to a canyon where the Ramparts rise hundreds of feet sheer up from the river’s edge, now opening again to show green meadows and woodland. Here, a mountainous Mackenzie and Peace Rivers region is densely clad with spruce; there, light birch and poplar restore life to a stretch of brulé; jack-pine and tamarack vary the scene; and yonder a gaunt escarpment of bare rock climbs to a height of 3,000 feet.

If we followed the Mackenzie through all its windings, we should find it the longest river in Canada, 2,500 miles to the head of the Finlay. Let us be content to strike a bee-line of 1,000 miles from the Arctic Sea to the Peace River.

Another noble valley this, and, where we strike it at the “head of steel,” dotted not with fur traders’ forts but with farmhouses, schools, and villages. Here is a Canadian farmer whom I saw a dozen years ago setting out from Edson, on a 300-mile drive through the backwoods to reach this “land of promise.” He has a great farm now, with 300 acres of fine wheat and oats, and the railway is almost at his door; when it pushes through to the coast he will be satisfied, he says. “But we’ve got a creamery at the Crossing, now, and that’s been a godsend. They reckoned on making 40,000 pounds of butter in a year, and they got up to that in three months. In the first two months they had paid the farmers $6,600 for cream, which brightened things up considerably—that year was dry as we had never known it up here before.” Another Peace River farmer is filling a silo with sunflower for his aristocratic herd of pure Jerseys.

Southward again we fly, but swerve a little to the east. Those little log shacks in the brush remind us that the pioneering spirit is not by any means extinct. As a matter of fact, as many as 2,576 homesteads were taken up in this Province in 1923 and 1924, besides 3,507 in Saskatchewan and 1,121 in Manitoba. The Buffalo Comes Back

“If you are a great people,” as Joshua told an Israelite tribe when it wanted more land, “then get up to the wood country and cut for yourselves there in the land of the giants.” Only there are no giants, either men or trees, to be encountered in the prairie backwoods.

Still keeping a south-easterly course, we come out of the woods again and rub our eyes. Are we back in the middle of last century? Buffalo in thousands roam the plain beneath. Newcomers? Yes, but the oldest of old-timers, too. Not one was to be seen when we passed here twenty years ago. But the Dominion Government bought up a few hundred surviving in the United States and fenced in a prairie “park” at Wainwright as a sanctuary for these original inhabitants of the West. They have thriven and multiplied fast. A wonderful sight, that shaggy monarch of the ancient plains and all his wild barbaric following. . . . And over there, a few miles away, a fair-haired girl is milking a sleek imported Shorthorn, a cow with a pedigree of thirty proud generations. . . . The old and the new, the native and the immigrant; and what a contrast! They are not so different as their skins appear. Some interesting alliances have been made between the wild buffalo and tame cattle. But more success is hoped from a union arranged between buffalo and yak, the long-haired cattle of the cold Himalayas.

The good old buffalo “robe” is again on the market, for hundreds of the band have now to be killed every year. The park is becoming a fur farm as well as sanctuary.

Scores of private fur farms, nearly all devoted to fox raising, have been established in the West, though the East has still ten times as many. This will become one Fur Farming and Trapping of our leading industries. Trapping, in comparison, is a wastefully laborious and crude as well as cruel method, though still by far the chief source of the Dominion’s fur supply—and Canada is “the last great fur preserve of the world.”

In 1924 Saskatchewan sent out 1,161,805 pelts, Manitoba 711,778, Alberta 503,070, British Columbia 180,844, the North West Territories 164,903, and Yukon 50,070, or 2,772,470 in all.

Of the 70,029 beaver, British Columbia contributed 21,509, Alberta coming second with 20,057, and Manitoba third with 14,806. Of the 233,037 ermine or weasel, Saskatchewan sent 82,437, Manitoba 63,054, Alberta 57,962, and British Columbia 25,128. The muskrat numbered 2,121,929, of which 1,006,863 came from Saskatchewan, 554,716 from Manitoba, 331,144 from Alberta, 108,632 from the North West Territories, and 85,670 from British Columbia. The beaver catch showed a great increase over the previous year’s figure, 51,737; but the muskrat total fell heavily, as the number taken in 1923 had been 3,100,074.

The total value of the western fur catch in 1924 was $8,798,773, of which $1,970,013 is credited to Alberta, $1,927,914 to Saskatchewan, $1,908,354 to Manitoba, $1,529,376 to the North West Territories, $1,116,037 to British Columbia, and $347,079 to the Yukon. The whole Dominion’s total was $15,643,817, for 4,207,593 pelts, and included $2,542,992 for 169,172 beaver and $3,440,363 for 2,985,395 muskrat.

Sometimes a fur farm does not need to be “established”; it establishes itself. On the banks of the Red Deer, away there in the south, you can see—if the telescope is strong enough—a beaver gnawing at a tree. Transforming the Brush Country Now he has finished, and skips to one side. Down falls the tree with a crash. The enterprising farmer who owns that land, when he found the beavers coolly colonizing his water-front, adopted them under special licence, and supplements their diet of bark with a dessert of carrots, for which they will presently pay him with their skins.

Turning back from these oldest Canadians to the newest, we plunge into the thick of the “Galicians” whom we watched coming in. Twenty years have made a great change here too. Many of the thatched cottages have been abandoned for modern houses, which, however, are scarcely so picturesque. The little plots dug up with a spade and reaped with a scythe have expanded into broad farms worked with the most modern machinery.

In agriculture, these “New Canadians” have been more than willing, and many of them keen and quick, to learn the ways of our country. Their natural thriftiness, ingrained by the poverty of bygone days, has largely saved them from branching out in the fatal course of over-ambition. Then the kind of land they have generally settled on, the brush land, has helped to keep them in the safe path of mixed farming.

There is something in the woodland that seems to fix a family to the soil with peculiar tenacity—partly, no doubt, because we value most what we have taken most trouble to secure. Then the Slavs have come to us with no idea except to make a permanent home. “In the brush country they can’t be beaten,” says an observer of experience. “It is wonderful,” says another who knows them well, “what a transformation they have made; how they have developed the country as well as their own homes.” The Teacher and New Canadians

Those who live near the unifying railway and the town easily pick up our language, and also have a chance of visiting a “better farming train” and hearing an agricultural lecturer. But the folk away out in the back country, who need most help, get least of it.

Look at this little schoolhouse, where a young teacher is playing with the boys and girls. It is in their free hours out of school, quite as much as in their “lessons,” that they learn our spirit and our ways as well as our speech. This young woman has such tact and sympathy and sense that the parents love her, as the children do, and come to her for information and advice on all sorts of subjects quite apart from school work. But she is absolutely alone; to every one else in this district English is a foreign tongue; our Canadian spirit and ideals are unfamiliar.

Lectures are valuable, when they are listened to and understood; books and papers, if they are read, and read with ease. But living interest, personal friendship and sympathetic insight, have ten times the attracting and stimulating force of all other influences put together. Without the power of winning affection by giving it, the strongest intellect is feeble at a task like this—to make the “New Canadian” not only at home in our country but at home with ourselves; to make him one of us. It is not paternalism that will do this, but fraternalism.

We must back up those solitary teachers, and, doing that, we shall back up those New Canadians themselves who are already keen to see their whole people on the highest level the best of us have reached. We cannot wish them to adopt our faults when they adopt our language. We have something to learn from them, as well as they from us. Unity, not Uniformity

It is not unnatural uniformity we want. If we got it we should not like it; and we are better without it. The highest music is not unison, but harmony, in which our varied voices play their natural parts. Unity is our aim, not monotony.

We must penetrate the remotest settlement, the densest mass, with the national spirit of Canada—the spirit and sentiment that knit us together, the ideals that shame us instinctively when we are unworthy of them. But only when inspired ourselves by such ideals can we inspire others with them.

Whether by casual neighborly intercourse, by travelling among them as an unassuming friend, by large and carefully thought-out systems of intensive education, or by establishing among them little community settlement houses in which the teachers of several districts and others who see the need and the opportunity would live together—or by all these means and any others which good-will and good sense united can devise—this aim can and must be achieved.

Achieving this, we shall have laid the sure foundation of a splendid future for our country, every diverse element joining, in mutual appreciation and respect, to form one great harmonious community.

Once more we find ourselves approaching Edmonton. When we rode up to it in 1905 we were just in time to see it raised to the rank of a capital city. Since then it has adorned itself with a lordly Parliament House, which crowns the northern bank of the deep wooded valley, and a fine range of university buildings on the opposite heights.

We slow down over a garden, charmed by its harmonious Wild Flowers, and Music blend of colors. There is something uncommon about it too. Half the flowers are natives; half are immigrants. “Like me and father,” says mother, with a rake in her hand. “He came from England; I was born here in the West; so I put in the nasturtium and mignonette and sweet peas and morning-glories that he loved over there, and he begged me to bring in the goldenrod and wild aster and Indian paint-brush and wild sunflower, the prairie rose and wild violets and Canada lily that I grew up with. There never was such a country as this for wild flowers, he says, and he has been all round the world. The finest of all are the little ones, like the ‘shooting star’; dainty and delicate as a piece of embroidery worked by the fairies.”

Perfect in harmony, rich in variety.

Listen again. The city is holding a musical festival. The grandeur of “O Canada” follows the glorious simplicity of “God Save the King.” Perfect harmony again; and many of those blending voices had never sung or spoken a word of English, a few years back. These folk who come to us with other languages are said to be more musical than the rest of us. They have practised singing more in their daily lives, perhaps; but nearly all of us have musical capacity, if we will only train and use it as we might. Music will be one of the great forces to weld us together.

As if to echo our thoughts, that lad on the gang plow below breaks out in song—a song of Robert Burns, the plowman poet. I know teams that would jump at such an outburst, but these beasts are used to it.

Let us go down. We have time for one more visit. The city is far behind, the journey almost ended, and the sun still high. A Blend of Races

A very modest farmhouse is this we have come to: not much of it, but spick and span, what there is. Barn and sheds all painted; beasts, not many of them, but all good. The house-wife is singing as she comes to the door, and only stops when she catches sight of her unexpected visitors. No need to ask why the boy sings at his work.

She is “sorry to have nothing better” than deliciously cool butter-milk to quench our thirst—as if there could be anything better, on a hot afternoon like this! Will we let her make us a cup of tea? Not on any account.

Happily, this seems the only thing she has to be sorry for. She and her husband have had difficulties, she admits when asked, but she brushes them lightly aside for cheerful topics. “Everyone has difficulties, of course,” says she, “but they were made to be got over.” And we can imagine how that spirit of hers smoothed the way over them. “Anyway,” she adds, “why worry about difficulties when there’s so much to be thankful for?”

Her husband is one of her chief “things to be thankful for,” we discover at once. And where did he come from? Oh, his parents came out here from some corner of the old Austrian Empire, and settled next door to an Ontarian farmer with a Nova Scotian wife. These must have been the best kind of neighbors, for they treated the newcomers like brother and sister. Well, that Canadian couple, having a wealth of natural affection and no children to spend it on, had adopted three orphans, who were part English and part Scotch, with a dash of Irish; and our hostess was one of them. Her elder brother also had married into the Slavonic “Pure Canadian” family. “And a good family they are,” she exclaims; “there’s none better; right-down good Canadians”—thanks largely to the “neighboring” they got when they first came in.

We look at each other. One of our party smiles. “I’m what they call a pure Scot,” he says, “and never heard of a single ancestor who wasn’t. But if I could see a little farther back I know I should find Norsemen among my forbears, besides Celts, and the folk who held Scotland before the Celts came in, and fought them like Indians. To tell the truth, there’s no such thing as a ‘pure’ race in the world—or, if there is, it’s a poor one, too. I hadn’t thought of it before, but with such a threefold inheritance I’m thrice as rich as if I had only one.”

“Then my children are richer still,” says the mother, laughing.

“To be sure they are—a dozen times as rich; for every one of the races they inherit from is a blend in itself.”

“And when neighbors ask what ‘race’ my children belong to,” the mother goes on, “I say I can’t guess a riddle—they belong to so many, and all good. But this I know, the children are what their father and mother are, just pure Canadian.”

The mother is right. We need not and should not forget the roots from which we spring; we cannot pull up and burn those roots, if we wanted, and we should not want. Every cause for love and pride that we have in the lands of our past, we ought to cherish. Those who best remember the past and rightly value it are the least likely to forget their duty to the present and the future. Valuing our distant roots, we shall value more highly A Picture of Home and love with more devotion the tree which has sprung from them, this many-rooted, many-gifted tree, the united brotherhood of the Canadian people.

A last flight through the air, and we glide to rest on a gently sloping hillside. At our feet is a lovely picture, reminding me of a famous view in the garden of England, in spite of differences in detail. A picture of softly undulating green and gold; wide fields of yellow grain, with many a copse of poplar and willow, and here and there a darker grove of stately spruce; herds of fine cattle, teams of big horses—and yonder a big school, chief glory of a little town. We have done with adventures of travel; we must plunge once more into all the adventures of Home.

See the children playing under the maples, beside that gabled farmhouse on the knoll. That is Home. The biggest boy, a son of the Stars and Stripes, runs a sister flag up to the mast-head. Wherever we were born, we are all true Canadians now. True Westerners too. The better Westerners we are, the better we can serve Canada; and the better Canadians we are, the better we can serve the West.

That is the flag of our own world-wide brotherhood, our royal commonwealth,—his flag, and yours, and mine—the Union Jack. It is a signal. The children are running to meet me at the gate. As soon as I have landed you other Westerners at your own doors, I must get into my overalls—only first we must see our visitors off by train.

“No,” they protest, “we had rather stay and get into overalls ourselves.”

There is only one answer to that—“Brothers, Welcome!”