One regrettable fact has to be noted in connection with the creation of the Province of Manitoba. The anxious and bewildered Half-Breeds, fearing their interests were in peril, rose in rebellion under Louis Riel, the trouble not being repressed until Colonel (afterwards Viscount) Wolseley crossed the continent with an armed force. The growth of Manitoba under representative government has been one of the most inspiring achievements of modern times; but the history of that province merges at this point into the history of Western Canada, to which it had become the open door.

Western Canada provided the Federal Government with several problems, of which the most pressing concerned the status of the roving bands of Indians. In the States, civilisation was driving back the natives with fire and sword. In Canada, recourse was had to milder and more effective methods. But in one respect the Yankees and the Canadians acted in concert. They joined in a war of extermination against the buffalo. Of the number of those animals roaming the prairie, it is difficult for anybody nowadays to form a conception. One traveller recorded that he rode for twenty-five miles through an unbroken herd, which he estimated to include one million animals. In the States, “Buffalo Bill” (Colonel Cody) took an active part in the work of extermination. He is credited with shooting forty-eight of the poor creatures in fifty minutes. In a period of some eighteen months—when he was under contract to supply all the meat needed by the huge army of men engaged in constructing the Kansas Pacific Railway—he accounted for 4,280 buffaloes. On both sides of the international boundary line, the country was swept clean of these fine beasts. I have seen places on the prairie white with an accumulation of their bones, whereof the weathered relics may still be found.

When the Indians saw what was being done, they were filled with apprehension. The buffalo was their means of subsistence. Its flesh supplied them with meat, both fresh and, when pounded down and mixed with fat, as pemmican; its skin provided them with clothing, tents, canoes, bridle and reins; its sinews made strings for their bows; and its horns served them as powder flasks. But the Federal Government had no intention of permitting the Indians to starve. Their helplessness without the buffalo was the means of bringing them, willy-nilly, within the pale of civilisation. I have mentioned the pioneer compact with the red man achieved by the Selkirk settlers. That had been followed by similar understandings in Eastern Canada. And now the Federal Government effected a series of treaties with the North-West Indians, who surrendered any general claim they may have had to the country at large, and accepted a specific title to ample lands, or reserves, set apart for their exclusive use. Moreover, the Government agreed to make them annual money payments, and to grant them free rations until such time as they should be self-supporting—an end Canada is striving (and not without a very encouraging measure of success) to further by providing the tribes with schools, both general and agricultural, and with cattle, seed, and farming implements.

The interests of the natives were served in another way. American traders, in defiance of the law, were supplying them with intoxicants; and the fascinating, maddening “fire water” was a temptation wellnigh irresistible to the red man. To sweep that traffic from the prairie, the Government enrolled the North-West Mounted Police—a force that has won for itself a splendid reputation for tact, pluck and all-round efficiency. The suppression of the illicit liquor trade was one of the earliest and best of its achievements. The Riders of the Plains won the respect and confidence of the Indians, and carried through a treaty with the warlike Blackfeet—the last tribes to be won from a footing of irresponsible independence. When the Half-Breeds, again under Louis Riel, once more raised the flag of revolt, the mounted police rendered effective assistance in repressing the trouble; and this time it was repressed permanently.

The year of that rebellion witnessed the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the creation of modern Western Canada.

One of the most interesting facts concerning Canada is that very little is known about it. Its eight million people are scattered along the southern strip—a mere fraction of the country. The great bulk of Canada is neither settled nor surveyed. Nay, it has not been explored, save in the sense that a person proceeding along the road from London to Scotland may be said to have explored England.

Settlement in Western Canada is necessarily of recent date. But in Eastern Canada civilisation has already had a good innings. The colonising of Quebec province began three hundred years ago. Therefore a hasty thinker would be apt to suppose that, however much uncertainty may envelop other parts of the Dominion, Quebec province must by this time be well-trodden territory. What smiles that supposition would cause among the urbane politicians and officials I met in the provincial Parliament House!

If the population of Canada, instead of being eight millions, were one hundred and ten millions—that is, an equivalent to the German and French nations rolled into one—and if the whole of that population were concentrated in Quebec province, the inference of the hasty thinker would probably be correct. For the area of Quebec province is nearly equal to France and Germany combined.

How can a couple of million busy people inspect and investigate, let alone settle and develop, such an area? Necessarily they and their homes, their farms, their factories, and their railways occupy but a fraction of their vast territory. All the rest of the country is available to whomsoever cares to go and unlock its riches.

Time was when the French-Canadians gave little attention to the problems and possibilities presented by the unknown geography with which they were associated. Prosperous, healthy, and happy, they were satisfied to let the land north of 48° latitude and west of 70° longitude look after itself. But nowadays settled Quebec is much interested in unsettled Quebec. I will tell you why.

Canada, having a pre-vision of her destiny, is vigorously engaged in promoting it. She has set herself the task of attracting population by proclaiming her resources. The paramount need has become the ruling interest. In travelling through the country, you will find that matter uppermost in the mind of every adult with whom you converse. And it is recognised as a leading concern of the State. The Federal Government and the Provincial Governments are expending much thought, ingenuity, and money in furthering this national policy of promoting immigration. The collecting of facts, with a view to their publication, is recognised as one important means to that end. Therefore the Governments are constantly sending prospecting scientists into the unknown lands to scratch the face of Nature and gain some clues.

To give an idea of Quebec province, I will briefly outline a journey made in 1905 by Mr. A. P. Low (now Deputy Minister of Mines) into the Chibougamau district. It is by no means remote, being not much more than a hundred miles from a railway. How Mr. Low came to be sent there was because certain prominent citizens of Quebec, having received interesting tidings from the Chibougamau district, suggested to Sir Wilfrid Laurier that a member of the Geological Survey ought to go and have a look at it. The interesting tidings are worth recalling, since they illustrate the sort of treatment pioneers receive at the hands of Fate. It appears that Mr. Peter McKenzie made a “prospecting and trading journey” through the region in 1903, and while this enterprising gentleman was looking for iron ores “he chanced upon an important discovery of asbestos” (I quote from a Government record, save that I decline to spell the infusible fibrous mineral with a “u”). Thus encouraged, Mr. McKenzie re-visited the district in the following year, and this time he searched for copper deposits, and found “a large mass of gold-bearing quartz.” Had he gone yet a third time, and tried to locate a tin mine, he would, I presume, have stumbled upon a reef of diamonds; but that is mere conjecture.

Now for Mr. Low’s experiences. Leaving Ottawa on June 21st, he went by rail to Lake St. John, and there secured the services of eight Indians, four (who knew the Chibougamau district as well as I know Charing Cross) being engaged to act as canoemen, the other four being required merely to assist with the baggage on the outward journey. And here let me point out what a useful rÔle, in connection with the development of Canada, is served by the red man, now that he has been tamed and completely cured of his old abominable practice of removing people’s scalps. To the prospector and the surveyor the Indians are invaluable pilots and porters, their navigation of swift currents being marked by a skill to which the average white man is a stranger. Sustained toil is not to their liking, since it is inconsistent with that large measure of leisure and meditation which they associate with human existence; but, for the rest, Canada’s pioneers and explorers give them a good name. One distinguished surveyor, who has had much experience in the wilds, told me he could recall only a single instance of dishonesty on the part of an Indian who had served him; nor, when he detailed the affair, could I shut my eyes to an element of justification in the delinquent’s conduct.

“I arranged with the Indian,” said the surveyor, “that, for an agreed sum, he should pilot me along a dangerous stretch of river to a portage where I proposed to camp for the night. He did so, and I paid him his money; but you may imagine my annoyance when, on returning to the river-side after half an hour’s stroll in the woods, I found that the ruffian had absconded with a pair of my blankets. Such an unusual occurrence rankled in my memory, and four months later, on the return journey, I made it my business to inquire for that Indian. It turned out that he was still in the district, and when I charged him with the theft he calmly admitted it. But it was right, he contended, that he should take my blankets, and he went on to tell me why. Nine years previously, a white man engaged him as guide, and afterwards slipped off without paying the promised fee. It was a mean thing to do, and a most unwise one, because the Indian has a very tenacious memory for anything in the nature of treachery. For nine years, you see, this Ojibway had nursed his wrong, and from the next white man who came along he exacted retribution. From my point of view this was rather crude justice, and at first I requested the return of my property. But I did not press the point when I saw how incapable he was of grasping the subtlety that white men are not answerable for one another’s sins.”

Before railways were invented, and when the whole world depended on roads and rivers, it must have been hard to say where settlement ended and the wilderness began. But to-day civilisation marks its domain by steel lines, and a territory that lacks railways is unable to compete, whether in agriculture, mining, or manufactures, with territories that possess railways. Mr. Low’s experiences—which are the experiences of Canada’s hundred and one other explorers—reintroduce us to the world as it existed before Watt and Stephenson interfered. No road having been made to the Chibougamau district, he had to fall back on the rivers. And with rivers, be it noted, Nature has liberally endowed Quebec province.

Having laid in a good stock of provisions, Mr. Low secured some stout cedar canoes, and set off on his journey from Lake St. John—he and the Indians. They did not advance with the speed which readers of Fenimore Cooper’s novels would expect. Their rate of progress averaged fifteen miles a day, the responsibility for this dilatoriness lying wholly with the Ashwapmuchuan River. Only every now and then is it a level, composed, and Thames-like avenue of water. In between whiles, after the wont of Canadian rivers, it plays leap-frog down the gradients. On approaching foaming rapids and roaring cascades, Mr. Low and the Indians got out and walked. Carrying canoes, stores, and baggage over portages that are sometimes a mile in length is, of course, a laborious and slow business. On the other hand, it is better to go through with that ordeal than to be whirled over a waterfall that has a sheer drop of sixty feet—to mention one picturesque feature occurring along Mr. Low’s route.

I will not dilate upon the glorious mountains and the verdant valleys that came under the explorer’s notice. The lovely lakes—some of them twenty miles and more in length—rather tried his patience. “Many of them are so indented and dotted with islands,” he deplored, “that it is difficult for even the Indian guides to follow correctly the channels.”

He noted the millions of dormant dollars existing in the form of timber: the black spruce (most abundant of all), the fir, the banksian pine, the aspen and balsam poplars, the white birch, the cedar, and other useful sorts. “White spruce up to twenty-four inches in diameter are,” he reported, “in many places numerous enough to permit of profitable lumbering if any means existed for transport to the southern markets.” But discerning science did not confine itself to indicating the fortunes in forests that awaited human immigrants. It shed a passing tear over the timber wealth that had been already consumed by immigrants of another genus. “Larch formerly grew in abundance,” Mr. Low reported, “and often they exceeded the white spruce in size,” as was obvious from old trees still standing as skeletons. But about twelve years ago, it seems, those forests were destroyed by a visitation of the European larch saw-fly—that wasp without a waist whose caterpillars have a large appetite, twenty legs, and an interesting way of standing with the hind part of their bodies gracefully curled over their heads. So our European saw-fly was the guilty party, was he? One wonders how in the name of Christopher Columbus he got across.

Mr. Low found some white fellow-creatures in the virgin territory he was exploring. To begin with, he saw (as the opening of this narrative will have prepared my readers to learn) a small party of miners working at the asbestos outcrops on Asbestos Island in McKenzie Bay, which is situated in the north-west corner of Chibougamau Lake. He also found in the district other white, or whitish, people, who were residents of long standing. Indeed, the strange fact has to be noted that groups of these white or whitish people are to be found in even the most northerly and remote districts of unexplored and unexploited Canada. The history of the Hudson’s Bay Company—one of the greatest dramas that the world and the centuries have witnessed—was sufficiently outlined in the preceding chapter. In this place it is merely necessary to relate that, on approaching Lake Mistassini, Mr. Low found “a number of old men, women and children” congregated on the shore, awaiting the arrival of some flour and groceries they were expecting by canoe from Hudson Bay. Much earlier in his travels, at a point only some sixty miles from Lake St. John, he had come upon another settlement of the ancient fur-collecting corporation.

In a manner wholly unforeseen, the Hudson’s Bay Company is proving of great value to modern Canada. Each of its outposts of civilisation is a treasury of clues to the agricultural possibilities of an unknown country. The trappers, in their remote isolation, have naturally gone in for a little gardening. It has helped to pass the time, not to mention the advantage of having fresh vegetables and ripe gooseberries on the dinner-table. When the rare visitor now arrives, as an emissary from populated regions away in the south, the Hudson Bay folk must be intensely gratified by the interest he takes in their cultivated back-yards.

Mr. Low is not the man to neglect opportunities. “The surrounding country appears to be fertile,” he noted, “as, in the clearing about the old Hudson’s Bay Company post, timothy grass grows abundantly and small fruits ripen early.” On the other hand, no great success had apparently attended horticultural efforts at the second trappers’ settlement he visited. “Great difficulty is experienced,” we are told, “in growing a small crop of potatoes, although the soil is the best in the region.” Again, “attempts have been made at this place to grow oats, barley, and wheat, but without success.” The explanation of this unsatisfactory state of things is detected by the scientific mind, and a valuable hint to the agricultural world is the result. This particular Hudson’s Bay post happens to be twelve hundred feet above sea-level—indeed, it occurs very near the line of greatest elevation running through Quebec province. “When lands are situated above the thousand-foot level,” Mr. Low points out, “there is constant danger of summer frosts, though these would probably be lessened by clearing the lands and breaking the surface with the plough.” He emphasises his contention by instancing experiences at the Hudson’s Bay post beside Waswanipi Lake, which is situated about one hundred and fifty miles away to the south-west. The climatic conditions are more favourable there because the elevation is only seven hundred feet above sea-level. At the Waswanipi station, we learn, “excellent root crops are grown annually, while experiments with the cultivation of cereals show that oats, barley, and the hardier varieties of wheat easily ripen.” The Canadian settler, when choosing a northern homestead, will be well advised to keep this matter of elevation in mind.

Mr. Low, it will be observed, by no means limits his investigations, when travelling through a new country, to matters germane to his own science. “The fisheries of the larger lakes,” reported this broad-minded geologist, “will undoubtedly be a source of considerable wealth to the province as soon as a railway provides quick transport.” Speaking from personal experience, he goes on to say that “the chief food fishes are lake-trout, brook-trout, pike, pickerel, sturgeon, whitefish, and two species of sucker.” The sucker is, I believe, also known on the North American continent as the “stone-roller” and the “red-horse.” No doubt it is more appetising than it sounds.

Coming now to matters belonging to Mr. Low’s special province, I must first mention his discovery of an interesting freak of Nature. “Near the western end of McKenzie Bay,” it seems, “is a low cone of dark, rotten serpentine, peculiar on account of its magnetic attraction, the compass pointing to it from all directions within a radius of half a mile.”

A geological report is, of course, a solemn, technical, and unsensational document. The business of a geologist is to identify the rocks, seen and unseen, the word “rocks,” in its scientific application, including pretty well every constituent of the globe save water and air. The geologist does not mine for gold, silver, and precious stones; he merely decides whether and where it would be worth while to mine for them. His task is to go in advance and prepare the way for the prospector.

Thus Mr. Low’s report does little more than hint at mineral wealth. Having confirmed the discovery of a large mass of gold-bearing quartz, he states the conditions under which similar bodies may perhaps be found in neighbouring localities. As to copper, we have to be content with the information that “in a number of places good signs of ore are seen in diabase schists.” Concerning iron, a “locality of promise” is indicated. With regard to asbestos, which lends itself to readier identification, we have more definite information. “All the areas of serpentine discovered in the region up to the present time,” Mr. Low’s report bears witness, “contain veins of asbestos, and in many places these veins are of sufficient size and number to form valuable deposits as soon as a railway is built to the shores of Chibougamau Lake.”

Mr. Low made the return journey in fine style, “shooting all the rapids along the river,” and arriving at Lake St. John on September 1st. Thus his explorations occupied more than nine weeks, and—rendering testimony on yet another important point—he mentions a sustained experience of fine weather, “not a day having been lost by rain or head-winds.”

Thus by following in the footsteps of a scientific scout of civilisation, we have had a peep at one morsel of a huge territory which man has scarcely begun to utilise. There are no means of measuring its natural resources; we know only that they are vast. Conjecture may, however, be based on analogy. The present population of Quebec is practically restricted to a tenth part of the province. What is being done in that tenth part does not by any means represent finality, since development in many districts is still at an early stage. Nevertheless, the achievements of a part supply a clue to the possibilities of the whole, so I will mention a few instructive facts.

Last year some fifty million bushels of oats were grown in the province of Quebec; and since to most persons 50,000,000 is an indefinite total, and only vaguely impressive, like 5,000,000 or 500,000,000, I may mention, for the purpose of affording the reader a standard of comparison, that in 1909 the quantity of that grain grown in Scotland—the national head-quarters of oat-cakes and porridge—was only thirty-eight million bushels. Let me quote another item from the long list of products yielded by the fraction of Quebec province that is at present under cultivation. The French-Canadians and their neighbours annually grow about seventeen million bushels of potatoes, or enough to supply the entire population of Ireland from one year’s end to another, allowing for a consumption of 2½ lbs. per week for every man, woman and child. They also grow enough tobacco (principally black and strong kinds, but including a good deal of Havana) to meet the annual requirements of over a million moderate smokers; while Quebec’s immense quantities of apples, cheese, cherries, butter, pears, pumpkins and melons also provide the statistician with much food for thought.

And, while I am about it, let me give a hint or two with reference to the present mineral output of the province. Note, then, that in 1909 some three thousand miners received £270,000 as wages for wresting £459,000 worth of asbestos from the serpentine rocks of Quebec—a region which in the same year enriched the world with over a million barrels of Portland cement (representing a value of £263,000), besides noteworthy quantities of copper, graphite, marble, granite, phosphate, mica, chromite, and ochres.

As to the forests, they represent a vast treasury from which the lumber and pulp industries draw annually a value of about £4,000,000; nor should we forget the six thousand tons of luscious syrup tapped from the maple trees. Again, there is not an area of the earth more richly endowed with water-power; and therefore to Quebec’s manufacturing activity, which has had a brilliant beginning, no man can foresee the end.

Those of my readers who are well-read sportsmen will have been wondering why, all this time, I have omitted to mention a supreme attraction of the region under notice. With its vast virgin forests full of game, its thousands of lakes and rivers alive with fish, Quebec has won the title, in Canada and the United States, of the Angler’s and Sportsman’s Paradise. Many a wealthy American whiles away delightful months hunting the caribou, moose and red deer, the beaver, mink and yellow fox, the woodcock, partridge and widgeon, in that beautiful country of the St. Lawrence River and the Laurentian Range. American angling clubs lease Quebec’s famous salmon pools, and hundreds of New York’s busy citizens spend their holidays capturing the monster trout, bass, pike, and whitefish for which the province is famous.

And anybody may acquire the freehold of one hundred acres of that favoured country on paying 16s. 6d., with four following annual payments of the same amount, the price of Crown land being 10d. per acre, rising to 2s. 6d. in certain areas. For the rest, steamers ply on some of the lakes, the Government is rapidly extending its network of colonisation roads, and in one district free railway transport is conceded to arriving settlers and their families, with 300 lbs. of household effects.

Nor do these facilities exhaust the measures taken by the provincial authorities to secure population. They recognise a necessity to make further special effort in view of a notable disadvantage in the matter of immigration that is peculiar to Quebec. The majority of new arrivals from the United Kingdom—little dreaming what charming and helpful neighbours the French-Canadians make—elect to locate themselves in the provinces where their mother-tongue prevails, and, the number of immigrants from France being insufficient to adjust the balance, Quebec has its grievance. Perhaps I ought rather to say that Quebec had its grievance, for the genius of French-Canadian politicians has proved a match for the situation.

A law was passed granting boons and honour to the mothers and fathers who rear twelve children or more. I first heard of this stroke of enlightened statesmanship when discussing Canada’s future with M. E. E. TachÉ, the Deputy Minister of Lands and Forests in Quebec’s noble Parliament House.

“We do not get our due proportion of the inrush of settlers,” explained M. TachÉ. “Very well, then, for peopling our vast province we look rather to the natural increase of the population already here;” and he presented me with a copy of Volume II. of an interesting Government publication.

This publication shows the law of the twelve children in working. It seems that during the first fourteen years of the existence of the statute 3,395 heads of families were registered as qualified to receive the free grant of 100 acres (or, in the alternative, fifty dollars) by which a progressive Government recognised the service they had rendered to Canada by rearing large families. Those 3,395 names had been printed in Volume I., and the significant fact has to be added that, in the comparatively short ensuing period of fifteen months, as many as 2,018 heads of families were added to the roll of honour.

Those prize-winners are recorded in page after page of a table printed in six columns. The first column gives the name of the head of the family—usually, of course, the father, but occasionally his widow or his eldest son. Then occurs the name of the wife, or, in the case of a second marriage, of the wives. The third and fourth subdivisions indicate the parish and county of residence. From the fifth column we learn how many children there are in the family, and the sixth column reveals whether the hundred acres or the fifty dollars were preferred. Since the grant of land is associated with an obligation to clear and cultivate it, and since the people of Quebec are already provided with ample farms, it is natural that choice alighted, in a majority of cases, on the money payment. Here and there, indeed, the table reveals a large family so wealthy and contented that they have waived their claim alike to the land and the cash. The proud father accepts as a sufficient reward the honourable publicity conferred by having his name conspicuously printed in State archives.

The column devoted to “Nombre d’enfants” repays examination. The repetition of the number 12 is constantly interrupted by 13, and, less frequently, by 14; but you do not have to turn many pages before you come upon a 15, then other 15’s, with a sprinkling of 16’s, and with even a 17 here and there. When, on page sixty, I found evidence that a French-Canadian of Montmorency had 18 children I did not doubt that here, at last, I had reached high-water mark. Yet no; on turning to page 127 I learnt that M. Cajetan Vezina, of Hebertville, in the county of Lac St. Jean, had 19 children. Among the 2,018 entries that proved to be the top score. Vive QuÉbec! Vive la famille!

At night I stood upon a steel suspension bridge that hung high above the mighty river it spanned. Electric lamps shed light even down to the water, visible as streaks of foam moving in the eddies. A deep bass drummed unceasing in the ear, and I knew this muffled thunder came out of the great ghostly cloud lying in the darkness away up stream. The deep bass was a background of sound for the treble of crickets piping on the precipitous banks, black with dense vegetation.

Crossing the bridge, you enter the light and bustle of an American city, with its stores and saloons and hotels, its girls without hats and its men without waistcoats.

That night, in cosy quarters on the Canadian side, I was lulled to sleep by the subdued, dull roar, which next morning greeted my awakening. From the hotel window I had my first glimpse of Niagara Falls—of a section, rather, for an outhouse obstructed the view. I saw a wall of water glistening in the sunlight—green transparency the upper part, opaque whiteness the lower, with a cloud of rolling vapour at the base. From a balcony I saw all—the straight American falls on the left, the recessed Canadian falls on the right, and the intervening island. At that distance Niagara Falls are peaceful and beautiful. Leisurely the water curves from the top in flashing emerald; slowly and softly it descends in thick, broken, snowy coils; indolently it evaporates at the bottom into pale fog.

The American portion seems small beside the far sweep of the Canadian. Look curiously and you will see one thin thread of water detached from the main body of the American falls. During the afternoon I was one of a party of friends on the island, close to the top of that thread.

Entering a house divided into dressing-rooms, we, under instruction, exchanged the whole of our own attire for strange, picturesque costumes—enormous boots of felt tied to the feet with string, blue woollen knickerbockers, a blue woollen jacket, and an oilskin hat that covered the ears. Others of the party accepted outer suits of oilskins, so that they looked like fishermen in northern latitudes equipped for a hurricane. It was a hot afternoon, and I declined to be burdened with those waterproof additions. “Oh, very well,” said the attendant with composure; and he went on munching his chewing-gum.

Out in the roadway we stood in a group to be photographed. Two carriages came to a standstill in our proximity, and the ladies within them laughed, and laughed yet again, as they gazed upon us. Beginning to descend a flight of wooden steps, we met an old man coming up, an old man who, arrayed like my companions in oilskins, looked to have had a recent narrow escape from drowning. Wet and glistening, he walked with bent back and heavy footsteps, a saturated moustache assisting his melancholy aspect. He was, it seemed, to be our guide, and soon we were following him down the staircase, which was spiral, and contained within a wooden tower.

At the bottom, thunder stunned our ears, and only by signals and grimaces could we communicate one with another. The thunder never ceased as we followed a downward path cut in the rugged cliff. Presently, at a bend in the path, we saw a frightening sight. I felt like a helpless insect watching the disruption of the universe. The bottom of that thread of Niagara Falls was immediately before us, edge on. Oh, the weight and speed of the endless world of waters smashing down upon the huge boulders! I strove to look upwards to the full height of that grey cataclysm; but the spray was blinding.

Following our guide to the right, we soon were upon a rustic bridge spanning rocks washed by a running riot of waves. The fine rain became a deluge of great spots of heavy water, which hurt my shoulders like pellets of lead. Bitterly did I regret my refusal of the oilskins.

Now we were in front of the waterfall, gasping, with bowed heads, clutching by both hands at wooden rails draped with slimy weed, and shuffling shamelessly along the deluged planks. So we made our way over several bridges—shuddering, blinded, deafened; and as we crept up wooden stairs—a pitiful procession of bent, helpless, suffering men—I found myself doubting the wisdom of making this excursion when so high a wind was blowing.

Somehow we gained a footing on another bridge, and when I forced open my eyes it was to find ourselves between a cliff of rock and a cliff of water. Still were we bombarded by violent rain; still did thunder numb our brains; still was my poor body pierced with cold. But chiefly were our senses afflicted by the wind. In that awful cloister the atmosphere seemed thin and insufficient, and to be moving so quickly as to leave us no time to breathe it.

My right arm was clutched by the man ahead. Instinctively I gripped the man behind. And so we dragged one another through several moments of amazement, blindness, and repressed fear—suddenly to emerge, with a chorus of laughter, into dry, still, sunny air. For there was no rain that day, and no wind—brilliant sunshine pouring from the blue American sky. The only thunder was caused by water falling 167 feet on rugged rock in unending millions of tons. We had passed round the base of the thin, detached thread of the American falls. We had visited the Cave of the Winds. I should not like to take that heroic shower-bath every morning.

As we reascended the pathway to the tower—dripping, aglow, delighted—we turned our heads, and beheld an unbroken rainbow shining in the clouds of vapour that rolled across the river.

All of that is but one experience of Niagara. Afterwards we went on board the Maid of the Mist, where special clothing was once more proferred us; and this time I dressed in accordance with suggestion. On the little steamer’s deck we soon were seated, cowled and habited like a company of friars, with only our faces showing. The stout little craft crept cautiously towards the cataract. Soon we were cruising through the clouds and into the white confusion of eddies, our craft riding perceptibly deeper in water of a buoyancy reduced by myriad intermingled bubbles of air. From the Maid of the Mist we saw the might and majesty of the Niagara Falls from a fresh, if somewhat hazy, point of view.

Niagara is certainly a most unsuitable place for a river. First, there is that appalling, unavoidable tumble down a precipice; then, when equilibrium and composure have been recovered, and dignified progress is resumed between verdant cliffs clothed with flowers and innocence, more geographical treachery is met with. Out of the left bank a bay has been scooped, and water entering there is doomed to rush round and round, entrapped and helpless, carrying branches, leaves, and other floating objects in a monotony of aimless circles. This is the whirlpool, and residents of the neighbourhood tell you grim stories of men in canoes, women in barrels, and derelict human corpses travelling for weary hours in those dizzy waters, until some chance eddy at last brought them within reach of rescuing arms.

Still lower down, the river knows the grievous disadvantage of a channel inadequate to its bulk. Forsaking their parallel relation, the banks deflect in gradually converging lines. At once the water takes alarm. Its face puckers into wrinkles of distress, then is bedabbled with foam; and anon the panic-river, blanched with terror, flings itself forward in delirious haste, white wave climbing over white wave until, at the point of greatest restriction, one sees high piles of struggling water.

Between the whirlpool and the rapids I noted strong men on the rocky banks fishing with thick rods in the fierce current. Out on the Queenston heights locusts droned in the trees on the battlefield, and wild grapes were growing on slopes that commanded a far view of fair scenery.

I have concluded my cursory sketch of Canada’s greatest coal mine—white-coal mine. For a remarkable change has come over the character of Niagara Falls. In my school-days it was merely one of the wonders of the world, and of no more practical account than the Sphinx. Now it is a thing of infinite utility, and has as definite a commercial value as the bullion in the Bank of England.

In the history of mankind no fact is more quaint, I think, than that the greatest achievements of civilisation should be dependent, almost entirely, upon the carboniferous strata in the crust of the earth. Coal, as a means of producing steam, has long been the vital, indispensable factor in human affairs. What would become of the world, people have anxiously asked, when our stock of the grimy mineral should be exhausted? Nay, against that evil day we have long been eagerly awaiting the discovery of an alternative source of heat, the automobile almost suggesting that man has at last put his finger on the substitute. Coal’s great rival has been found; but it is not oil. It happens to be (and this is another quaint fact in the history of mankind) the waterfall.

Who would have thought it? Who could have dreamed that water would prove the substitute—the superior substitute—for fire? It was so natural to suppose that coal could only be deposed by something that was, at any rate, inflammable. We failed to remember that steam and the piston-rod are but means to an end; that end being—power. In the waterfall we find power ready-made.

To convert mechanical energy into the electric current and utilise that current for practical purposes of illumination, was a great achievement, now more than thirty years old. To convert mechanical energy into the electric current, dispatch that current to a distant point, and there re-convert it, without serious leakage, into mechanical energy, was a far greater achievement, now about fifteen years old. Just exactly how it all happens I will not attempt to explain, there being many things concerning electricity that are not known to science, as well as many things that are known to science but not to me.

In visiting the power-houses at Niagara I went behind the scenes, so to speak, and saw everything. Also I saw nothing—energy being invisible. A power-house is a shining palace of repose and polished machinery. Each gallery of dynamos is a cloister of peace, where a poet might compose verses to his lady’s eyes. Huge turbines hum softly in the trim wheel-pit—so deep, so quiet. The giant generator slumbers in a death-like stillness only to be attained by machinery revolving at the pace of twenty-six miles a second. At Niagara one stands in the clean presence of a volume of power measurable by the united strength of a million men.

White coal gives forth no smoke, dirt, or smell—which reminds me of an instructive personal experience.

I was at Hamilton, a city of between seventy and eighty thousand inhabitants, and situated amid delightful scenery at the western end of Lake Ontario. With its hills and magnificent views, Hamilton suggests a small Edinburgh, and (because of its tree-planted avenues and public gardens) an Edinburgh built on Garden-City lines. The train had lately taken me through the orchards and vineyards of the Niagara Peninsula, and here, in the market-place of Hamilton, I found glowing produce from that region—tons of peaches (selling for a few cents the large basketful), and great consignments of apples, pears, plums, and other fruits, massed with pyramids of vegetables and glorious clusters of flowers, so that, in passing along the bustling avenues, I walked amid the most seductive perfumes.

“This, then, is the Fruit City?” I suggested to the resident of Hamilton who accompanied me.

“That is a new name,” he replied, “for the Birmingham of Canada.”

At this I could not help laughing as I looked around at Hamilton, a city bathed in unpolluted sunshine and almost innocent of factory chimneys.

“Birmingham,” I pointed out, “is a manufacturing centre.”

“Exactly,” said my companion; and he went on to tell me of Hamilton’s four hundred large factories, which annually produce I don’t know how many million dollars’ worth of cotton goods, farm implements, boots, furniture, and goodness knows what.

Still was I mystified when dinner-bells rang in the part of the city whither we had wandered, and from out great buildings there poured swarms of high-spirited toilers, who mounted their thousands of bicycles and swept hungrily over the hill.

I began to understand. The machinery in those factories was worked by the water plunging down the Niagara escarpment, over forty miles away. This was a sunny, white-coal Birmingham. I prefer it to the smoky, black-coal Birmingham.

When I first crossed the Atlantic, some nine years ago, the Americans were deriving light and power from Niagara, but the Canadians had merely begun preparations to that end, preparations which, by the way, provided a touch of romance. For a temporary breakwater had been constructed some distance above the Falls, thus laying bare a strip of the river bed, and on that area of polished rock, which during countless ages had been swept by a terrific force, little toddling children were engaged in innocent frolics.

Driving last year amid smiling homesteads, I saw the great steel cable which, suspended from a succession of lofty metal towers, transmits the power of the falls to municipalities of Western Ontario, a share even going to Toronto, which is more than eighty miles from the famous cataract.

The palatial power-houses, the illuminated cities, the smokeless factories, the superb systems of electric tramways—all combine to make a strong appeal to the imagination. Yet Niagara, with its yield of 400,000 horse-power, is but a sample of the Dominion’s unnumbered sources of force. Note this portentous fact—Canada’s supply of white-coal, which is fifty per cent. cheaper than black coal, greatly exceeds that of any other country. In Ontario, prospectors have surveyed readily-available sources to the extent of 3,500,000 horse-power. Some idea of British Columbia’s wealth of waterfalls is conveyed to everyone who travels through that glorious region. Quebec measures its available horse-power by tens of millions.

“When all the coal on the earth shall have been consumed by our machines,” said M. FabrÈques, an eminent French engineer, “Canada will be mistress of the world.” At the time those words were written, water-power and fire-power stood, or were supposed to stand, on an economic equality. The superiority of white-coal has since been demonstrated.

Thus to the future expansion of Canada’s manufactures, who so rash as to prophesy a limit?

Newly arrived in Ottawa one afternoon last summer, I was standing amid its noble buildings, chatting with a fat policeman; and the fat policeman, having identified me as a visitor from England, said I must certainly call on his friend J. R. Booth. My comment was directed to the necessity for an introduction and an appointment, whereupon a puzzled face revealed the friendly constable as wondering what I was talking about. Thus this incident epitomised the great difference between two peoples, otherwise identical, who are divided by three thousand miles of ocean.

I am British, and, consequently, a snob; the fat policeman was Canadian, and, therefore, unhampered by any sense of social distinctions. It would never occur to a fat policeman in the Old Country that he was everybody’s equal. If he happened to know a millionaire, he would talk of that person with awe, instead of with affectionate respect, as was the note sounded in my corpulent companion’s references to J. R. Booth. The untravelled English reader may find a difficulty in realising that it is not a natural law, by Providence ordained, which divides humanity into ladies and gentlemen on the one hand, and common people on the other. In this dear old country many excellent folk would be shocked at the idea of dining at the same table, or praying in the same pew, with a man who does useful manual work; but the people of Canada, while very much alive to the power of the dollar, are blind and deaf to the idea that personal wealth has anything to do with personal worth. The fact is that kid gloves and the silk hat are emblematical of a country that has reached a ripe, not to say rotten, stage of development. In a new and progressive country like Canada muscle commands, not emolument alone, but honour.

From the terrace of the Ottawa Parliament House—that majestic Gothic pile which crowns the architectural beauty of the capital—I looked out upon a far sweep of beautiful Canadian scenery. Down below, in the foreground of that living panorama, the eye noted, on the farther shore of the broad stretch of glistening river, a little town of workshops and factories clustering behind the white smudge that marked a waterfall. I was looking at the head-quarters of the industry out of which the city of Ottawa has grown. I was looking at the largest lumber-mill in the world. I was looking at a part of the property created, owned, and controlled by J. R. Booth, the friend of the fat policeman.

During my tour of the Dominion’s great cities—so full of light, racing tramcars, human enthusiasm, and other forms of electricity—Canada became typified in my mind as The Man Without a Waistcoat; for the energetic citizen permits himself that toilet modification during the brilliant summer months. But an abstract personification was destined to be superseded in my thoughts by a definite human example. In J. R. Booth I felt that I had met the spirit and genius of Canada in the flesh.

I went to him under the conditions which had the sanction of national usage—that is to say, I went without introduction or appointment.

An old man, thick-set and of medium height, with white beard and clean-shaven upper lip; an old man in a suit of dark grey homespun, with peaked cap to match; an old man standing by himself, thinking, in the lee of a wooden shed—that was the multi-millionaire as I happened to find him. It is not many persons who have found him thus.

A while ago Sir Robert Perks dropped in from the Old Country to discuss high finance with the Lumber King of Canada. Sir Robert was shown into an office, where he presently was much astonished by the entrance of an elderly individual in overalls, sprinkled with red dust and mortar. The old man on that occasion had been laying bricks. Visitors sometimes find him at the bottom of an excavation showing his men how to lay concrete.

There was someone with me who, when we saw him standing beside the wooden building, said that was J. R. Booth. I should not have known. At a casual glance he might, even in Canada, have been anybody; in England he could easily have been mistaken for nobody. But when I stepped forward and spoke to that upright, impassive old man, when I confronted his calm, strong countenance, with its wise, blue, penetrating eyes, I realised the presence of J. R. Booth. I cannot find the right word to reflect the impression he produces. The strength of simplicity; the oak pillar or marble column unadorned; a man content to lean on mind instead of manner—those are but imperfect suggestions.

I asked if I might go over his works, and he said “Yes.” I asked if I could have a chat with him afterwards, and again he said “Yes.” For he is a straightforward Aye-and-Nay talker—there is no polite pretending, no verbal embroidery, with J. R. Booth. He struck me as being the rare human marvel—a genius without vanity.

Genius is not an exaggerated definition. J. R. Booth gave the first clues to his future career at an early age by doing something that his relatives considered silly and something else that they considered insane. I should mention he came of a stock of seven brothers Booth who, over a century ago, emigrated from Ireland to Waterloo—a district within that vast stretch of Quebec territory known as the Eastern Townships. There they toiled, prospered, and multiplied; and it came to pass that J. R. Booth, of the rising generation, had to plough, chop wood, and tend stock. But homestead duties did not monopolise the young man’s attention. It was in his mind that the utmost power of a man’s body can accomplish but a minute fraction of the work waiting to be done in the world; and, undeterred by the titters of his intimates, he put in a lot of private time constructing amateur watermills on a rivulet that coursed through the paternal property. Those wheels were running in his mind when, at the age of twenty-one, he broke away from the traditions of his youth, and, with no more than nine dollars in his pocket, set forth to conquer the world in his own way, the good people of Waterloo shaking their heads over the departure of one whom they feared must be crazy.

We may jump a few years spent bridge-building in the States, and so come to the time, fifty-eight years ago, when J. R. Booth, a carpenter without capital, stood on the banks of the River Ottawa, bending an appreciative eye on the ChaudiÈre Falls. There they were, rushing and roaring—a mighty volume of sustained force running to waste. J. R. Booth decided that they were what he was looking for.

Lower rungs of the ladder were quickly mounted—from factory hand to foreman, from foreman to tenant of a mill, from tenant to owner. A bank was willing to back such a man; and at a public auction J. R. Booth bought, for £9,000, a large territory endowed with timber wealth which—as he had taken the precaution to ascertain—was almost incalculable. Local lumbermen regarded the transaction as hopelessly vast and audacious. But with J. R. Booth it was just a beginning.

From having water-wheels on the brain, he now had them on the Ottawa, where they propelled powerful machinery that hauled and sliced his logs. The reader will not, of course, confound this time-honoured water-power, as used at the place of its occurrence, with modern “white coal,” which is water-power in a fluid, invisible form that lends itself to distribution. J. R. Booth had not introduced a new method. He merely introduced an old method into a new place. By the one plan you must bring your factory to the waterfall; by the other plan you send the waterfall, along a metal cable, to the factory.

If the ChaudiÈre cataract illustrates the latent resources of Canada, J. R. Booth illustrates the qualities that go to make good Canadians—those men with daring imaginations, industrious brains and educated hands. But he is not the type—he is a supreme example. It is as though Nature had prepared a store of business capacity sufficient for a townful of merchants, and then, on second thoughts, had bestowed it all on one man.

So fully did J. R. Booth post himself on the practical details of logging and lumbering, so securely did he lay the foundations of every fresh extension of his enterprise, that, of all the forest properties in the world, his became the largest. Mr. Paul E. Bilkey put the case comprehensively when he wrote: “Rivers, streams big and little, snow-covered forest tracks, roads that are good and roads that are bad and roads that are no roads at all, lead ultimately to the coffers of J. R. Booth; veins and arteries stretching over two great provinces and an American State, parts of or tributaries to a great industrial system whose heart pulsates day and night at the ChaudiÈre, to the uttermost agency devised and dominated by the genius of one man—Booth.” And again: “The river is bitted and broken to do the work that Booth requires it to do: turns the wheels of his mills, takes the logs and timbers down through his slides, floats his noisy tugs and carries his booms; and Booth, to keep it all going, draws upon a timber empire in the north which, if strung out in a line a mile wide, would stretch from Quebec to Victoria.”

Thus to measure the scope of this colossal enterprise your imagination must first roam over large areas of Ontario and Quebec, and then (J. R. Booth having felt cramped in a little place like Canada) take cognisance of great slices of the United States. But it is easier to find the limits of the business than of the brain that controls it. Of that brain, the more obvious feature is its organising power. For J. R. Booth is the sole and actual head of the vast concern. It is not run by a syndicate or a company. He easily and successfully carries a burden of mental responsibility, and exercises a volume of mental control, that would suffice to keep half a dozen boards of directors out of mischief.

But the most remarkable feature of this brain, I think, is its capacity for detail. It is not only a mental telescope that sees things too large for ordinary vision; it is a mental microscope that detects minutiÆ invisible to most men. I will give two illustrations.

A certain amount of carting having to be done, there are some five hundred horses at the Booth lumber yards, and, one of them recently dying suddenly overnight, it was replaced within an hour or so by the responsible foreman. “Where did the new horse come from?” asked the eagle-eyed old man next morning, soon after arriving on the scene at seven o’clock, as is his daily custom. The other incident occurred one afternoon, when many hundreds of the hands were streaming homeward on the conclusion of their day’s work. The old man, standing by, called to one of the men by name. Said the venerable employer: “Are you satisfied with your wages?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Then why do you steal my property?” came the further inquiry. At first the man made faltering protestations of innocence, but when requested to raise the lid of his dinner-can—which, indeed, proved full of copper nails—he confessed his fault in an extremity of penitence and dismay. The old man—who, by the way, associated a reprimand and a warning with forgiveness—had not been blind to the fact that a dinner-can swings in one way if empty (which is its normal state at four o’clock in the afternoon), and in another way if it be full of metal.

And all this time I have been speaking of J. R. Booth merely in his capacity of Lumber King. He is other things as well. For example, he has long been a wood-pulp magnate. You get a tree, and pound it into a fibry mass which, with added water, resembles thick oatmeal porridge; and when you have spread that mess out and let it partly dry, it rolls up like a thick, coarse blanket, in which form you can ship it across the ocean to be the basis of the great reels of paper that feed the daily Press. The old man acquired the necessary knowledge and machinery for doing that class of business, and he does it on a grand scale.

Thus on my conducted tour of inspection there was much to see. First, I beheld a stretch of river where the water was hidden by wood—logs floating end to end and side by side, giving a ribbed surface to the vista, which suggested acres of a Brobdingnagian corduroy. They look flat and tame—those trees without roots or leaves or branches. Here one saw the forest suspended midway between the poles of its destiny—no longer an asylum for birds and beasts, nor yet house and furniture for man.

I knew something of the stages through which that floating timber had passed. For I have penetrated into Canada’s lofty jungle and visited the camps where companies of sturdy men fell the trees and saw them into logs, and haul those logs to the nearest river, along which they are borne by the current or drawn by tugs, until at last they join the dense congregation of their fellows massed within sight of the mill.

I now saw the places where, one by one, the logs were pushed within reach of mechanism that lifted them out of the water and bore them up an incline, thence to be delivered into the maw of complex, ingenious, deafening, ruthless machinery. You had some inkling of the force of the ChaudiÈre Falls when you saw what that force was doing. Metal platforms went racing airily about with huge logs as though they were featherweights. Sometimes a great blundering log would roll off the platform, whereat a devilish iron arm arose out of the floor and pushed all that timber tonnage back into position. Always the heavily burdened platform was running forward; and, looking ahead, you saw an obstruction along the route—an obstruction of whirling, shrieking machinery. Still looking, you saw the logs, without any jarring or delay, melt miraculously through the obstruction as if they were no more substantial than cloud. And on the other side they were logs no longer, but merely clusters of planks—circular saws having sliced them like so much cheese.

In those vast chambers of clean, quick mechanism—fed at one end with tree-trunks, and elsewhere belching forth streams of boards, beams, laths, and shingles, with avalanches of chips and cascades of sawdust—in those vast chambers, I say, one’s ears are put out of service by the shrieking din, and the visitor has the more occasion for his eyes. He must walk circumspectly, lest peradventure he be hurled hence by an iron arm, and cut with swift precision into thin, wet slices.

From the lumber mills I passed into regions where J. R. Booth makes wood pulp. My guide began by introducing me to a grinder—a huge affair that swallows six tons of logs a day and files them to fibre. Twenty-two of these grinders were growling away at their mammoth meals, and there were others, I learnt, in process of construction. It was certainly a case of lost identity with the thick, grey stuff that went flowing on to the screens. That it had once been the solid part of a forest was a thought as unthinkable as that little boys would soon be running about with it in distant cities, shouting “’Orrible murder! Lytest special!”

The screens are discriminating. The bulk of the fibre passes through a one-hundredth-of-an-inch aperture, and is good for paper. Then the residue runs on a screen having apertures of about a sixtieth of an inch; and while that which penetrates the interstices is available for fine cardboard, that which remains above is suitable for coarse cardboard. Now the several streams of porridge are pumped upstairs to wet-presses that contain revolving cylinders. You next see the stuff clinging to a hurrying felt band that transfers it to wooden rollers. When several thicknesses have wound round a roller, they are cut with a pointed stick, removed, and folded; and there you have your mechanical ground pulp, which is nothing but washed wood fibre loosely matted by water. That mechanical ground pulp constitutes about three-fourths, in bulk, of paper used by the daily and weekly Press. I was conducted to the range of buildings where J. R. Booth makes the constituent which, with certain small accessories, completes the substance of our news-sheets. Again logs are the raw material. But this time they are not ground. They are first despoiled of their bark by one piece of mechanism; then by another piece of mechanism they are cut into chips. It seems ungracious to criticise a machine; but I observed that the “chipper” is apt to be a little remiss. Some of the chips it turns out are rather larger than J. R. Booth requires them to be. So all are subjected to a screening test, those of excessive size being dealt with in an auxiliary apparatus called a “re-chipper.” The little nuggets of wood are now sent upstairs in a carrier, and shot into big bins, each of which holds nearly two hundred tons. Thence they pass through funnels into great steel digesters, in which they are packed down close with long iron rods. The digesters have an acid-proof lining of bricks and cement; and, to be informed of the reason for this, I was taken downstairs again. We visited a part of the premises which, by reason of certain fumes, suggested “Paradise Lost.” I am not a chemist, and I cannot describe what the agents of J. R. Booth were doing with their immense supplies of lime and sulphur. It must suffice to say that they produced sulphurous acid and a horrid smell.

The former is conveyed to the upper story, and pumped into the digesters, previously packed with chips. “Digester” is the technical and literal description, for the acid-saturated wood is now cooked with steam for ten or twelve hours, at the end of which time it is reduced to white fluff. After being washed in cold water it is called sulphite, and is ready to be mixed with mechanical ground pulp to form paper, small quantities of china clay, size, soda-ash, resin, and blue and red earth being added as a kind of seasoning.

Such, at least, is J. R. Booth’s recipe; for I found that, by a recent addition to his manifold activities, he now makes paper. They took me through the mill, a long building containing several machines stretched out in a perspective of great cylinders, suggesting the segments of a huge iron caterpillar.

It seemed that the mixture of pulp, sulphite, and accessories has to pass through a refining engine on its way from one receptacle to another. Afterwards I saw it pouring like gruel on to each caterpillar’s tail. Under a shower-bath of water sprays—necessary for breaking bubbles—the liquid paper ran on to rotating screens, and was received on moving belts of wire gauze. The endless web of grey liquid soon became a web of white substance.

My companion bade me note the “suction box.” This was a gap in a metal cylinder, and as the material ran over that gap it was sucked inward, with consequent loss of moisture. Now watch its gliding, serpentine course over thirty cylinders, heated by steam, until, finally—as dry, warm, immaculate paper—it is wound into rolls of from four to five miles. Its journey has been to and fro, back and turn, for the cylinders are ranged in double and treble tiers; yet but a minute or so elapses between the fluid state and the finished stage, each caterpillar reeling off paper at the pace of 525 feet per minute.

I have forgotten how many tons of J. R. Booth’s paper are now absorbed by England, what quantity goes to the States, and the proportion consumed in Canada; but I remember that thirty-nine rolls make a car-load, and that those destined for an ocean voyage are furnished with an extra wrapper and have their edges protected by burlap hessian.

To be talking with the Lumber King is to find yourself in the presence of a man unlike anyone you have ever met before, the reason being that J. R. Booth is content to be J. R. Booth. As a matter of fact, everybody is unlike everybody else; but the average mortal disguises his personality with conventionalities of manner, so that only after a while, and from chance clues, do you “get to know him.” J. R. Booth is natural and genuine even at a first acquaintance; in this respect, as in others, being a conspicuous example of a national virtue. For, whereas the island-bred Briton loves to present a surface of polished veneer, the Canadian is satisfied to be solid oak.

To have briskly opened the door, to have entered the office graciously smiling, to have uttered a few formal words of welcome—that is how it would have been with most people. That is not how it was with J. R. Booth. Sitting sideways at the corner of the table, I did not know he had arrived until, on turning, I found him, with head thoughtfully bent, quietly seated at right angles to me. A bearing so devoid of pretence wins instant confidence and respect, if at first it be a little disconcerting.

It was left to me to start the conversation, and I plunged into some unpremeditated talk about trees. What was the best sort for paper-making? Hemlock, he explained, was good, but any kind of hard timber would do if it hadn’t gum in it. Gum prevented the acid penetrating the fibre. Couldn’t they extract the gum? Yes; they were learning how to do that, and paper had been made from pitch pine after the turpentine and gum were extracted. Did his own processes yield any by-products? Well, a good deal of gummy substance came out of spruce during the cooking process, but it was mixed with the acid, and a market for it had not been found. “Except for the acid,” said J. R. Booth thoughtfully, “it would make good chewing-gum.”

In an interrogatory spirit, I mentioned the great trees of British Columbia. But the old man shook his head. There was, it seemed, a great deal of pitch in them. “I don’t know of any place in the world,” he added, “where, for softness and lightness and durability, you would get anything to match our white pines.”

But all this time—as the keen blue eyes seemed fully aware—my questions were unrelated to the matter uppermost in my mind. I really did not feel curious about the trees. It was not my intention to start a rival pulp and paper mill. I was not even proposing to write a treatise on the subject. My desire was to gain some clues to the working of an abnormal business brain. I sought to lead the conversation in that direction.

How much paper did he make? One hundred tons a day, and about forty tons of cardboard. How many hands did he employ? In summer, 2,400 at the mills, and very nearly as many more in the woods. Then I gave tongue to my thoughts.

“Paper-making is obviously a very delicate and complex matter,” I said. “How came you to strike out in that new direction at the age of eighty, and when you already had such vast undertakings to engage your attention?”

Had I asked him the time, he could not have replied with greater readiness or in a tone more matter of fact.

“Yes,” he said, “paper requires a great deal of care. When I took it up I didn’t know anything about it, and that was a little disadvantage for a while. You ask why I took it up. Well, I had a railroad—four hundred miles—and I sold it. I felt rather lost without my railroad. So I took up paper.”

Could any explanation be more complete or more simple? J. R. Booth hadn’t enough to occupy him, so he “took up paper.”

Before going further with our conversation, I ought to explain what lay behind that other simple sentence: “I had a railroad.”

From an admirable biographical sketch in Collier’s I take the following interesting facts: “Booth had no idea of becoming a railway owner till Governor Smith, of Vermont, came along one day and told a hard-luck story. Smith and his associates had started the Canada Atlantic as a feeder to the Central Vermont, and the enterprise was costing money. They asked for the co-operation of Booth. They got it; and one day J. R. Booth woke up to the realisation that he must take the work over and carry it on himself if it was to be done at all. It might be throwing good money after bad, and it might not. Booth plunged again. He built the Canada Atlantic from Couteau Junction to DepÔt Harbour, and he built the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, four hundred miles of main line and a hundred miles of sidings. He bought engines and cars and he built shops. There being no terminus on the Georgian Bay, he created a terminus. When the line was nearly completed to the bay, he invited the Premier of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—then in his first year of office—to go over it with him. They went to the end of the steel, and from there walked half a mile to the shores of the bay, described by Sir Wilfrid as ‘a bleak shore, without a building upon it.’ ‘This,’ said J. R. Booth, ‘is the terminus of my railway.’ The Prime Minister asked: ‘Where is your trade to come from?’ Booth answered: ‘I shall have to create it. I shall have to collect it from Port Arthur, from Duluth, from Chicago, and from both sides of the lakes. I shall have to build elevators. I shall, perhaps, have to buy wheat in order to furnish trade for my railway.’

“All that the one-time bridge carpenter told the Prime Minister he would do he did. He made DepÔt Harbour. He built elevators. He put a line of steamers upon the lakes, and he forced so much of the Western trade into a new channel down through Ontario that the Canada Atlantic was carrying yearly two hundred thousand tons of flour and package freight and twenty million bushels of grain. The man who built it had seen to it that the railway was a good one. Other people saw that it was a good one. The Canadian Northern hankered after it. Seward Webb, of New York, went so far as to get an option on it—an option which is said to have left the New York financier poorer and J. R. Booth richer by a quarter of a million. The Conservative Opposition in the Canadian Parliament wanted the country to buy the Canada Atlantic, and join it to the Inter-Colonial as an alternative to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. The Government refused to do it, because they said that they could not do what J. R. Booth had done. Then along came the Grand Trunk and took the Canada Atlantic, and John R. Booth put fourteen million dollars down into his clothes.”

I think he must, at first, have been glad to be rid of his railroad responsibilities. At any rate, that was one of the occasions when, as though in festive mood, he played the part of Santa Claus in the family circle, presenting each of his two sons and each of his two daughters with one million dollars—a little attention certainly calculated to fortify a parent in the esteem of his children.

But, as we have learnt, any temporary feeling of relief was followed by a sense of not having enough to do; and so he set in to assist feeding the newspaper Press and the cardboard users of Europe and North America.

And now to resume the report of our conversation.

“But,” I said, when he confessed to having felt lost without his railway, “you still had your enormous timber business to occupy you?”

“Oh,” he replied, “I’ve been in lumber so long that the exciting part of it has got worn off.”

The “exciting part!” Here was a clue, and I eagerly probed further.

“Then the interest lies in the doing, not in the results?” I asked, speaking from the depths of my ignorance of what it feels like to be a millionaire.

“Yes,” said J. R. Booth, “to build up and afterwards to improve—that occupies the mind, and is a great pleasure; but he is a miserable man who gets to the end of it.”

His words carried a note of pathos to the ear. There was no mistaking the implication—a great organising capitalist, a millionaire many times over, was suggested as a case for compassion.

I did not speak. The earnest expression of those blue eyes told me there was more to come.

“The advantage,” J. R. Booth went on, “is certainly with the manual worker, as distinguished from the man who does the mental part. If he is healthy, and sleeps well, and eats well, no man enjoys life more than the working man. Only,” he added ruefully, “you can’t make him believe it. I have been in both places, and I prefer the heavy end of it.”

Those words were ringing in my memory when, later in the afternoon, I was talking with one of J. R. Booth’s lieutenants. He was telling me something that I scarcely needed to be told, namely, that the entire staff felt, not merely respect, but personal affection for the old man—the wonderful old man whose knowledge, patience and industry seemed without limit; the old man who was never known to be beaten by a difficulty.

And even while we were talking I chanced to look through the glass panel of a door that gave entrance to an inner office. In that office I again saw J. R. Booth. But it was J. R. Booth in a new aspect—an aspect that held my eyes enthralled. The Lumber King was leaning over a desk studying some document, his face alight with interest, yet immovable as marble.

Only once before in my life had I seen that absorbed expression on a human countenance. I was being conducted over the library of the late William Ewart Gladstone, while the venerable statesman sat there writing at his table near the window. A member of the family accompanied me, and began to explain, in a loud voice, the space-saving arrangement of the books. “Hush!” I whispered, “we must not disturb Mr. Gladstone.” “He will not hear,” came the hearty reply. “I had no idea,” was my comment, “that his deafness was so serious.” “Neither is it,” I was informed; “but when Mr. Gladstone is absorbed in mental work a pistol-shot would not disturb him.”

The unmoving face I saw last year in the Ottawa office, like that other unmoving face I saw years ago in the Hawarden library, seemed mesmerised, and to have the power of mesmerising me.

I was paying but scant attention to my companion’s explanations about some knotty business problem that had arisen to engage the attention of J. R. Booth. It was a matter, he mentioned, that must be settled before the mail went out.

At this I pricked up my ears, realising, with a curious sense of regret, that the old man’s present ecstasy would be short-lived. This thought brought in its train a further reflection: obviously the paper enterprise was now running on a smooth and perfected basis. Therefore it must have lost its efficacy as a substitute for the railroad.

“When does Mr. Booth start his new venture?” I asked.

“But,” exclaimed my astonished companion, “you surely have not heard——”

I hastened to explain that I spoke from the merest abstract conjecture.

“Strange!” he rejoined. “As a matter of fact, a new departure is in contemplation. Come back here in two years’ time, and—well, I think you will be interested in what you see.”

Montreal, like Quebec, is rich in historic associations, fine old buildings, and French-Canadians. To stand on Mount Royal—a precipitous park rising to a height of seven hundred and forty feet—and look down over the magnificent, ruddy city of domes and spires, with the St. Lawrence sweeping away into a lilac haze of Canadian geography, is a thrilling experience one never forgets. When I last saw that scene, little birds were singing in overhanging trees, and I heard the peaceful music of bells ringing in the old convents far below.

In point of population, and because it is the headquarters of commerce, shipping and railways, Montreal holds the title of the metropolis of Canada. Its shops and theatres are superb, and greatly have I enjoyed my sojourns in that city. It makes a wide appeal to one’s sympathies. It belongs not only to the present, but to the past. It represents old Canada and new Canada. It contains both Protestants and Catholics. And because of its manifold merits and ineffable charms, Montreal misses the quality that makes Toronto so fascinating.

Not that the two cities admit of comparison. As well might one weigh the attractions of Bruges against those of New York, or set the useful qualities of chalk against the nutritive value of cheese. Montreal is a city of to-day and yesterday. Toronto is a city of to-day and to-morrow. The history of Montreal would make an interesting fat volume; Toronto’s two-pennyworth of history would go into a paragraph.

I admire Montreal. But I simply fell head over heels in love with Toronto. It has a population of 350,000 progressive optimists. The whole city is full of bustle, but of bustle without hustle. It is a hive of healthy and vivacious industry. Toronto lives at the brisk pace that keeps the blood in a healthy glow. The people have discovered the happy mean between the hurry that wrecks nerves and the sloth that impairs digestion. Everybody in Toronto seems to be busy for the sheer joy of the thing. Tread on a man’s foot in that city and, instead of swearing, he smiles—then goes bustling off on whatever matter of business may happen to engage his enthusiasm. Nobody in Toronto gave me the impression of working under a sense of mere necessity. Everybody seemed to find his or her daily occupation an absorbing hobby.

In a word, the spirit of Toronto is the newest spirit of the New World, undiluted. The life of Toronto is the life of modern Canada as developed amid the amenities of a city; and the life of modern Canada is the life of modern England—with the care and worry left out. The mechanic commands his £5 a week; a living wage, with some margin for luxuries, is accessible to everyone. The loss of a berth in London is apt to be a catastrophe. The loss of a berth in Toronto doesn’t matter—you can easily get another. Hence the prevailing optimism. And optimism is a condition of progress. When a man is not living in daily dread of what the morrow may bring forth he dares to do things.

Toronto is a dashing, go-ahead, clean, handsome, well-governed city. It is not run in the interests of ground landlords and private monopolies. The inhabitants, when they pay their five cents for a ride by electric tramcar (and you go as far as you like for that), are putting money into their own pockets. Indeed, the municipal revenue from the tramway traffic since 1891 has totalled about £1,000,000, the annual instalments having appreciably assisted to keep down the rates. The tramway system is not a haphazard growth—it is not, as in some English cities, a tangle of unrelated parts. It is a scientific unity supplying means of quick transit over the twenty-eight square miles on which the city stands. No one dreams of walking any distance in Toronto. Its electric cars annually carry a number of passengers equal to the population of the United States.

Toronto, I say, breathes the spirit of progress and of the opening era—of the good new times controlled by a concern for the many, instead of for the few. Still in its early youth, Toronto is already one of the notable cities of the world. It is growing vigorously. Measure its future greatness if you can.

There is no need to preach Garden City principles in Toronto. Its administrators will never be under the necessity of seizing upon half-rood burial grounds, and clearing off the gravestones, in order to provide a gasping population with a little live air. In addition to broad, tree-planted thoroughfares, Toronto has fifty parks and gardens, covering an area of over fifteen hundred acres. Not that the city is in any danger of running short of unpolluted atmosphere, since it is situated beside a lake that is wider than many parts of the English Channel and nearly two hundred miles longer. Moreover, electric power from Niagara obviates the nuisance of smoky chimneys.

Another source of substantial civic revenue is the water supply—that advantage being accompanied by the boon of low charges to the consumer. For a four-roomed house the annual water rate is 8s. 4d., subject to an increase of 2s. 1d. for every additional room, and to a like charge for a bath; while by meter the tariff is a trifle over 3d. per 1,000 gallons for ordinary manufacturers and nearly 8½d. for brewers. The local exchequer also derives considerable assistance from a system of licensing the vocations that derive profit from the organisation of a populous city. Thus the bill-poster, the milkman, the fish pedlar, the plumber, and the rag collector are among those who pay toll to the tune of 4s. 2d. per annum; the cab-driver being let off lightly with a fee of 1s. 0½d. The proprietor of an ice-cream parlour or of a wax-work show has to disburse £1 0s. 10d.; the auctioneer’s yearly tax is £10 8s. 4d.; while the owner of each of Toronto’s one hundred and ten taverns has to pay £340 for his annual licence. With regard to the last item, I may mention that, Canada being a free country, there are places in Toronto where a man may consume alcoholic refreshment, either in moderation or to excess, according to his individual bent; but neither in Toronto nor elsewhere in Canada do you find liquor shops at almost every corner, and dotted along the principal streets, as in England.

But, as I have already hinted, what particularly took my fancy in the Ontario capital was its population. When the people of Toronto do a thing, they do it heartily, and therefore well. Let me give an instance of their thoroughness.

Some thirty-and-odd years ago the authorities of the province decided to institute an annual Provincial Exhibition, and the people of Toronto assisted the project on the understanding that their city was to be the scene of the event for two succeeding years. This concession, if it were ever made, was withdrawn; whereupon Toronto felt spurred to institute a more important annual exhibition (on national, instead of provincial, lines) that should perpetually recur within its boundaries.

For this purpose it set apart an area of 260 acres in the heart of the city and having a frontage to Lake Ontario extending for a mile and a half. On that area it erected exhibition buildings—not temporary edifices of wood and plaster, but huge, handsome structures of brick, stone, concrete and steel. Then it beautified the surroundings with terraces, promenades and flower gardens.

Control was vested in a board of twenty-five directors, eight being elected by the City Council, eight by the manufacturing interests of Canada, and eight by agricultural associations, the remaining seat being allotted to the Minister of Agriculture. The first exhibition, held in 1879, was a success, the number of visitors being 101,794, and the receipts reaching a total of £11,400, while £3,400 was given away in prizes. Year by year the scope of the Exhibition has been enlarged, and year by year the success of the Exhibition has increased. Last year (1910) the visitors numbered 837,200, the receipts were £58,000, and the value of prizes £10,260. And note these two remarkable facts: the Exhibition is open for only a fortnight every year, and it always shows a handsome margin of profit. The amount in 1909 was £13,000. This surplus is handed over to the City Council, to be used in extending the buildings and improving the grounds. When not in use for the Exhibition the place is available as a public park.

Thus the Toronto Exhibition is popular, prosperous, and permanent. Special excursions are run to it from all settled regions of Canada, the railway and steamboat companies granting reduced rates for the occasion. Also the event always attracts a host of Americans.

It is said—and I believe with justice—that so successful an institution of this character is to be found in no other country. What is the explanation, the reader will ask, of this remarkable achievement of a Canadian city? The only answer I can suggest is—enthusiastic thoroughness.

Let us glance at the scope of the Exhibition. From each section of the Dominion the Provincial Government sends a representative collection of local products. Distinct buildings are allotted to agriculture, manufactures, industries, art, transportation, dairying and machinery. In addition, there are an “Applied Art Building,” a “Women’s Building,” an “Administration Building,” a “Press Building,” a “Dog Building,” and a “Poultry Building.” Stabling is provided for 1,500 horses, 1,200 head of cattle, and 600 swine. A livestock arena was recently constructed at a cost of £22,000. There is a grand stand (having a length of 725 feet and seating accommodation for 16,800 persons), which cost £46,000, and is built of brick, steel and concrete. Including police and fire stations, telegraph and telephone offices, a bank, restaurants, rest rooms, etc., the Exhibition buildings represent a value of nearly half a million pounds sterling. Apart from visitors, there is a permanent population of ten thousand persons on the grounds during the annual fortnight.

To each day belongs a special interest. Thus, last year’s diary was as follows: Saturday (August 27th), Preparation Day; Monday, Opening Day; Tuesday, Inauguration Day; Wednesday, School Children’s Day; Thursday, Manufacturers’ Day; Friday, Press Day; Saturday, Commercial Travellers’ Day; Monday, Labour Day; Tuesday, Stock Breeders’ and Fruit Growers’ Day; Wednesday, Farmers’ Day; Thursday, Americans’ Day; Friday, Fraternal Society and Review Day; Saturday, Citizens’ Day; and Monday (September 12th), Break-up Day.

Everything that Canada makes and that other countries sell to Canada is found at the Exhibition. In 1909 that represented a mammoth collection of goods which filled the four large buildings devoted to manufactures, transportation, industries and machinery, besides overflowing into a Manufacturers’ Annexe, and into a vast area beneath the grand stand. Even so, the collection was cramped, so last year, to relieve the pressure, a special building was provided for British exhibits. Goods in process of manufacture are a feature of the Manufacturers’ department, and dense crowds gather daily to witness the making of silks, cotton, shoes, and a hundred and one other articles.

The Exhibition attracts the finest collection of horses and cattle to be seen in Canada, the number of animals totalling about ten thousand, and including many herds specially imported to compete against those bred in the Dominion.

The Art Loan Exhibit, selected by a resident agent in England, affords Canadians an opportunity to see examples of the great European Masters. Prominence is given to work done in the public schools of Canada, the co-operation of manual training colleges of the United States giving an international interest to this department. New inventions are another strong feature of the Exhibition. The first electric railway to be seen on the Continent was operated there, and that may also be said of the important developments in telegraphy, telephony, and other branches of applied science that recent years have witnessed. Nor does the energetic Board fail to provide high quality in music, military tournaments, and such frivolities as fireworks and variety-concert performances.

I cannot forbear in conclusion to quote the words used by the public-spirited directors to describe their achievement. “The Canadian National Exhibition,” they say, “is the one place to see Canada at a glance. It shows all that Canada makes, mines, and grows. It gathers the products of her homes, her farms, her forests, her waters, her mines and her industries, within the limits of the finest Exhibition Park on the North American Continent. It is recognised from coast to coast, and from the frozen north to the Gulf of Mexico, as the greatest of all annual Exhibitions, distinctly Canadian in its characteristics, and educational in its tendencies, and yet including so many high-class amusements and attractions as to make it the annual holiday centre for three-quarters of a million people drawn from all parts of North America. And the number is increasing every year.”

Bravo, Toronto!

Standing on high ground in Manitoba—and also, for the matter of that, in Saskatchewan and Alberta—you may gaze upon a vast encircling panorama of grey grass and gentle undulations, visible in the dry atmosphere and bright sunshine to a remote purple distance. That is one sort of prairie, the open sort, so suggestive of the sea. Also there is bush prairie, with trees and heavy undergrowth. A third kind is scrub—the resurrected bush after forest fires have swept it.

But, whether you be on moor or woodland, you will see flowers and birds and bees. For Canada is a land of sunshine, blue sky, and beautiful perfumed blossoms.

Only by hearsay do I know of the North-West when the ground is jewelled with violets, blue anemones, ladies’ slipper, and the bird’s-eye primrose. I know it well, and like it best, in the season of the prairie rose—surely the fairest flower anywhere to be found on the world’s circumference. It is petalled like our own wild rose, but of a sweet fragrance; the plant dwarfed and dainty, and nestling against the earth, with its upturned blossoms ruddy and conspicuous or of palest pink. I’m sure the fairies pluck buds of the prairie rose when they go to gather their posies. Indeed, I am sorry that the maple leaf—eloquently though it advertises the flaming glories of the autumn foliage—should have been chosen for the national emblem. Canada will always be to me the Land of the Prairie Rose.

The queen reigns not in lonely majesty. Prominent in her court is a royal relative (the three-flowered geum), an orange-red lily (Philadelphicum), a scarlet columbine that dances in the breeze, and the evening primrose, with fringed gentian and a campanula among the purples, not to forget the wild bergamot and flax and a mauve convolvulus. In autumn, Manitoba and her sister provinces are aglow with nodding sunflowers, gaillardias, golden rod, Michaelmas daisies, and three kinds of rudbeckia. Thus the wild nosegay of Canada has much in common with the garden bouquet of old England.

Manitoba is the smallest and (because it contains Winnipeg) the greatest of the prairie provinces. “It looks like a postage stamp on the map,” I happened to remark to its Prime Minister. “Well, sir,” replied the Hon. R. P. Roblin, with twinkling eyes, “there are half a million people on your postage stamp, and that is but a fraction of the population it is able and destined to maintain. You might report to the English and Scotch farmers that we have over twenty million acres of good agricultural land waiting for them here.”

It is, of course, the curious fact that, even in the smallest and most settled of the prairie provinces, oceans of superb land are still going a-begging. The area each year surveyed, and thereby rendered available for occupation, is as large as the area annually appropriated by the arriving stream of settlers. That stream is steadily increasing in volume, and to-day thousands of English and Scotch tenant-farmers, and tens of thousands of their agricultural labourers, are cogitating the question: “Shall we go to Canada?” Some persons counsel that course. Others attempt to dissuade them. But what those hesitating farmers and labourers are conscious of needing is, not advice, but information—and information in the form of definite facts rather than of general statements.

It was with this thought in my mind that I had approached Mr. Roblin, who is not merely Premier of Manitoba and its Minister of Agriculture, but one of the foremost living authorities on Canadian farming, his knowledge being based on practical experience in cultivating a large holding in the province.

I told Mr. Roblin that I desired an authoritative account of the process known as “breaking the prairie,” and he very kindly supplied me with the following particulars:

“Where the original prairie is thick and tough, it is customary to break and back-set. The former is best accomplished with a hand breaking-plough that has a rolling coulter, but, if the land be very smooth and level, fairly good work can be done with a sulky plough. In the case of such smooth land, the breaking should be shallow, and it is desirable to have the work completed by the end of June. The sod will be rotted a few weeks, after breaking, and the land should then be back-set. This is done by ploughing in the same direction as before, but to an additional depth of about two inches, so that fresh soil is brought up to form a seed bed. Afterwards the land must be made as fine as possible with a disk-harrow, or similar implement. Then only a light harrowing will be necessary in the following spring, when the seed is put in.

“Where the land is rough instead of level, thin breaking, of course, will not be practicable. Here the plough must go to an additional depth of from four to five inches, and the work should be done as early as possible in the year. Back-setting is unnecessary, but there should be a good harrowing to produce a level surface, as well as a further harrowing before seeding.

“So much for the two sorts of open grass land—the smooth and the rough. Now we come to the land that is covered with light trees and scrub. It will be found so very fertile as amply to repay the work involved in clearing it—work which, of course, bears no analogy to the task of dealing with the heavily timbered land to be found in other parts of the continent. The larger poplars and willows are chopped out, this being usually done in the winter. Then a fire is run over the land to burn off the remaining trees and the scrub. Afterwards the ground may easily be broken with a strong brush plough, and, when levelling has been done with a harrow, the seed can go in. Large returns are yielded by that class of land, of which immense areas are still obtainable, principally in Northern Manitoba, either as free homesteads or at a nominal price.”

To practical farmers, as well as to other persons having a grasp of farming principles (and this chapter is designed to serve the interests only of those two classes), the foregoing clear and exact statement by Mr. Roblin will convey a definite knowledge of the easy agricultural preliminaries that have to be faced, not only in Manitoba, but also in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

From the expert and obliging Premier I sought and obtained other useful facts about prairie farming.

As to the wheat most suitable for Manitoba, I learnt that many kinds have been grown on the homesteads, while the search for new knowledge is never slackened at the Government experimental farms; but accumulated experience may be summed up in seven words—there is nothing to beat Red Fyfe. The plant is healthy and vigorous and very productive, the hard and white berry having unequalled milling qualities, with thin bran and high gluten contents.

Concerning oats, I derived the following information from the Premier:

With proper care, this grain does very well in Manitoba, and there is a yearly increase in the demand (both for feeding purposes and oatmeal), and consequently an increase in the price obtainable. In some districts the soil is more favourable for oats than for wheat. Careful selection of seed and thorough cultivation result in immense yields, many farmers reporting an average of eighty bushels per acre on large holdings. For a number of years the Banner oat has been most favoured by growers, this being a thin, hulled sort, very productive, and of excellent quality. The white varieties, known as Abundance, Ligowa, and Newmarket, also receive attention and sell at good prices for milling purposes. What can be done by good cultivation on the rich soils of Manitoba is illustrated by this fact: At the Brandon experimental farm, over a period of five years, the average yield of Banner oats, on summer fallowed land, and without the use of a fertiliser, was one hundred and sixteen bushels and four pounds per acre. In the rotation of crops the place occupied by oats is usually after wheat and before either a barley crop or summer fallow.

I learnt that the Chevalier varieties of two-rowed barley have not given satisfaction. Two-rowed Duckbills, such as Canadian Thorpe, are stiffer in the straw, and, as a rule, the heads fill well. The six-rowed varieties—notably Mensury and Odessa—have been found best adapted for general cultivation. They can be sown later than any other grain, and mature so early as to escape danger from autumn frosts. It nearly always happens that the straw is stiff and bright and that the ears fill well.

With regard to fodder crops, I learnt that farmers in newly-settled districts have no need for them, abundance of excellent hay being obtainable from the natural prairie grass on the lower lands and water meadows. When, with the growth of a district, those areas are drained and utilised as grain fields, the farmers have no difficulty in raising fine crops of timothy, western rye, millet, broom, and other grasses. Lucerne and the clovers also thrive well under proper treatment, while Indian corn grows to a height of from eight to ten feet, and, yielding about twenty tons to the acre, is excellent as green fodder or as ensilage.

Having thus gleaned the salient facts as to preliminary operations and the crops that do well in Manitoba, I obtained the following particulars as to methods of farming practised in the province:

“Most of the wheat crop is grown on land that has produced a grain crop of some kind during the previous year. After the stubble land has been ploughed as early in the autumn as possible, it is furrowed and left ready for sowing in the following spring. In the case of new land, this inexpensive method of cultivation usually results in large profits. Sooner or later, of course, a regular system of rotation has to be adopted. The common practice is to include a summer fallow in the rotation, the grain stubble being usually ploughed in June, when the weed seeds have begun to germinate. Then the soil is compacted with a sub-surface packer, or similar implement, this operation being followed, during the summer, by thorough surface tillage, to kill weeds and prevent evaporation.

“Some of the largest and best crops of wheat are associated with summer fallowing, which greatly improves the condition of the soil. The more advanced farmers include grass in their rotation, timothy or western rye being usually sown with a nurse crop of grain, and the land being used for pasture after two season’s hay crops have been cut. Where clover is grown, a nurse crop is not recommended, although in favourable seasons there may be a light seeding of hay to be cut early as a green feed. Excellent results have been obtained by ploughing grain stubble in spring, harrowing once, then sowing about twelve pounds of red clover to the acre, harrowing again, and rolling. When weeds of the ‘volunteer’ grain crop are about a foot high, a mower should be run over the land, the cuttings being left to form a mulch. The clover plants become large and well rooted before the autumn, and there is no danger that they will be killed by the winter. In the following year two cuttings of clover can be taken.”

My attention was drawn to the fact that, the areas under cultivation being large, farm operations have to be carried through as expeditiously as possible. Hence the most improved machinery is in use on the homesteads. Immediately upon the ripening of the grain, large binders are set to work, and are kept in operation from dawn to sunset. At times a score of these machines, each drawn by four horses, are to be seen moving in close succession around an immense field, with the result that, in a few days, the crop from hundreds of acres is safely stooked. In a few more days the standing grain is cured; then the farm is visited by one of the threshing outfits, which consist of powerful steam traction engines and separators. The threshing is done direct from the stook, and is carried out so quickly that only a few days intervene between the ripening of the grain and its delivery on the market.

I went into the question of live stock, beginning with the animal of chief importance in agriculture—the horse. The application of mechanical power in farming has gone much farther on the North American continent than in this country. In England or Scotland a man has to be content with tilling a farm; in Canada and the United States the ambitious grain-grower will often till a landscape, waxing exceedingly rich in the process. For the man who measures his land by square miles the seasons are no longer than for the man who measures his land by acres. He is, of course, in a position to multiply teams of horses to any extent, but—human labour being as scanty and high-priced on one side of the Atlantic as it is cheap and superabundant on the other—he can never be sure of securing enough men to drive the teams. So he turns eagerly to the machines, driven by petrol or steam, which are being placed on the market in forms of increasing efficiency.

But the average Canadian farmer, with his one hundred and sixty or three hundred and twenty acres, is dependent upon animal power for ploughing, harrowing, and reaping; and, therefore, possible emigrants among our Scotch and English agriculturists will desire to learn something as to the quantity and, more important still, the quality of the animal power available on the prairie.

The history of the horse in Manitoba, I learnt, is divisible into three chapters. In the early days of settlement, stock-raising was the mainstay of agriculture, and the pioneer farmers introduced into the province some fine horses and cattle, the imported stock thriving wonderfully on nutritious prairie grasses which had long sustained vast herds of buffalo. To this day, indeed, one hears of the magnificent steers that fed on the sweet upland pastures and revelled belly-deep in vetches and wild pea-vines. So much for the first chapter—concerned with the laying of a good foundation, whereof the influence is felt in some of the best studs and herds of to-day. Afterwards, Manitoba discovered how splendidly its soil and climate were adapted for grain-growing; and everybody turned his back on stock-raising and went in for wheat. Thus the second chapter represents a period in which the raising of horses was neglected. And so we come to the third chapter; and here I cannot do better than quote Mr. Roblin:

“Many a traveller has marvelled at the myriad beacon fires illuminating the autumn sky from the far-reaching stubble fields, where the straw piles are burned as soon as the threshers have completed their task. This improvident waste, coupled with careless methods encouraging the introduction and spread of weeds, is causing the pendulum to swing slowly back again. In order to improve the mechanical condition of the soil, to restore exhausted fertility and to control noxious weeds, the wiser farmers are now cultivating grasses and clovers, fencing their holdings, and giving serious attention to the raising of live stock.”

There are about a quarter of a million horses in Manitoba to-day, and the supply does not keep pace with the demand. Until a few years ago the farmers were dependent upon supplies from east and west and from the United States; nowadays numerous animals bred in the province appear in the Winnipeg market, and command good prices.

In my part of the Old Country there is a saying that when it comes to buying a horse a man cannot trust his own brother; and I learnt from Mr. Roblin that, even in honest Canada, equine dealings have not always been above reproach. “Importers from the United States,” I was advised, “not only brought with them American-bred stallions, but also introduced American methods of disposing of them. One of these methods was commonly known as ‘syndicating.’ Ten or a dozen farmers were induced to take shares in a stallion, and to sign notes of joint ownership. In many of these cases the stallion so disposed of was stated to be worth from £400 to £800, which was generally three or four times its actual value. The notes were discounted before maturity, and the salesmen decamped. Such practices have done much injury to the horse-breeding industry, but, happily, they are now almost a thing of the past.”

Legislation, I learnt, has been introduced in the western provinces to foster horse-breeding. The objects of that legislation are to encourage the use of sound, pure-bred stallions and to eliminate others. Owners are compelled, under risk of a penalty, to register stallions with the departments of agriculture of the several provincial governments, certificates being issued that state, in the case of each animal, whether it be pure-bred or graded, and whether it be sound or unsound. A copy of this certificate must be printed on advertisements and route-bills and be conspicuously displayed on the door of every stable occupied by the horse during the breeding season.

Draft breeds are the most popular with prairie farmers, Clydesdales predominating. There are also many Percherons and Shires. As numerous registered Clydesdale mares are stationed throughout the country, and as a good Clydesdale stallion is to be found on nearly every section, this breed is likely to maintain its position. Of horses bred on the average farm, few would scale up to the draft class, the majority having to be registered as agricultural horses because they weigh less than 1,600 lbs., while there are many horses bred from small nondescript mares that could only be styled “farm chunks.” Although lacking in weight, these are useful horses on a farm, being hardy, and having good wearing qualities.

Concerning the lighter breeds, I learnt that there are many American trotting stallions in the country, and that excellent road horses are produced. Thoroughbreds, hackneys, and some of the coach breeds have been introduced into Manitoba, and among the resulting crosses are a good many saddle and heavy leather horses. These are useful animals for light farm work and for certain kinds of road work, but they do not command high prices.

Mr. Roblin certified that on the whole the country is good for horse-breeding, though, against the healthy climate and the abundance of good feed, one has to set a rather high mortality among foals from the disease known as “joint ill.”

I now come to the matter of cattle. And here let me say that the English or Scotch farmer will gain an excellent idea of Canadian conditions if, taking his balance sheet for a year, he will remodel it on the supposition that he has no rent, interest, or tithe to pay, and only a merely nominal taxation, in respect to a holding of one hundred and sixty acres or more, and on the further supposition that he has the free use of excellent and unlimited grazing outside that holding. To do this is to translate farming profits secured in one part of the British Empire into farming profits obtainable in another part of the British Empire. Indeed, the difference between the United Kingdom and Canada, from the agriculturist’s point of view, is this: in the former country he is allowed to use the air, sunshine, and rain for his private profit free of charge; while in the latter country he finds another natural element also given away, and he no more has to reckon with a landlord than with an airlord or a rainlord.

Having owned and tended a cow or two in my time, and having a fondness for those beasts, I found myself regarding the prairie herds with a keen interest, and an interest not wholly free from jealousy. Grain-growing with up-to-date machinery on ample new acres that harbour few weeds and need no manure, was a sufficiently tantalising contrast to the elaborate methods necessary in an old country where land is precious and in need of costly fertilisers. But it was hard for an Essex small-holder to keep his temper on noting the simple, not to say automatic, lines on which kine may be kept in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. At least one cow will generally be retained on the homestead, and be duly milked, so that the farmer’s wife may make puddings, and her children grow sturdy on an unstinted supply of cream and butter; but often enough the herd is permitted to look after itself and roam at large on any unappropriated and unfenced land, drinking from rivers and growing fat on the nutritious prairie grass. I spoke to some farmers who confessed that, during the greater part of the year, they never see their cattle and have no definite knowledge of their whereabouts. Every farmer has his distinctive registered brand, and, before permitting his animals to depart on their wanderings, he sees to it that each bears the mark that will establish and safeguard his ownership. Where calving takes place in a herd out on free range, the unbranded youngsters will run with their mothers, and so remain within the pale of proprietorship.

“What a waste of milk!” was my comment. “Oh,” the prairie farmer has replied, “I can’t be everlasting rounding up the bunch to milk ’em. Then look at the daily bother of sending the stuff into town. No, sir, wheat is my line, and it pays me best to look after the land. Of course, the beef end of it is different. I don’t mind driving a score or so of fat beasts to market now and again, and it’s a few hundred dollars easily earned.”

But I will no further pursue the thread of my personal experiences, since I have designed that this chapter shall contain comprehensive data, bearing the stamp of high authority, concerning farming on the prairie.

With regard to cattle, then, Mr. Roblin furnished me with these particulars:

“The little Red River cow of early days—rugged, short-legged, crumple-horned, and brindled—has almost entirely disappeared. The foundations of several herds of shorthorns were laid in the early ’eighties, and the progeny of these, and of many similar herds subsequently established, have been widely distributed throughout the country. Indeed, the blood of this cosmopolitan breed now flows in the veins of most of our cattle.

“Of the special beef breeds, the Hereford and the Aberdeen Angus are fairly well represented. Where the calves run with their dams, and beef production only is desired, both these breeds, as well as Galloways, are found to answer well. They are good grazers, and mature heavy, compact carcases of the best quality. The cows, however, are not such good milkers nor so docile as shorthorns.

“Of special dairy breeds, the Holsteins are steadily gaining in favour. They are robust and large-framed, have great capacity for assimilating ‘roughage,’ and produce immense quantities of fairly good milk. Ayrshires and Jerseys have been introduced, but while the former are numerously represented in the dairying districts, the latter make no headway.

“In localities that have been longest settled, wheat has tended to displace cattle from the sweet grazing of the uplands and drive them to the lower-lying and flatter lands, where the grass is coarser and less nutritious. Consequently there has been some deterioration in the quality of the herds. But, with the adoption of more ‘intensive’ methods, including the growing of corn, clover, and lucerne, and with greater care bestowed on stabling, better results are accruing. Already there are indications that cattle-feeding is receiving due attention in Manitoba, and that cattle-raising promises to become in this province one of the most important branches of agriculture. The straw and screenings of the wheat-field, instead of being burnt, are destined to be ‘marketed on the hoof,’ the manure serving to fertilise and mechanically improve the soil, thereby causing the grain crops to give a greater yield and to mature more quickly.”

From Mr. Roblin’s statement it will be seen that already, following the natural evolution of a country’s agricultural development, the more settled parts of Manitoba have entered upon the stage of mixed farming. The factors that make grain-growing so remunerative have the same influence on dairying. Manitoba, like Ontario and Quebec, is alive to the importance of co-operation in this industry, and the machinery of cream-collection and of butter- and cheese-making in factories is working on a large and increasing scale.

With regard to sheep, Mr. Roblin supplied discouraging information. So far as climate and soil are concerned, the prairie provinces are admirably suited for sheep-raising. Moreover, prices for lamb and mutton rule high. But the coyote, or prairie-wolf, while harmless to other stock, preys on sheep. It is the farmer’s one enemy in the animal kingdom of Canada. Governments and municipalities offer bonuses for coyote scalps, and ultimately, no doubt, canis latrano will be exterminated. Meanwhile those prairie farmers who have flocks of Shropshires, Oxfords, and Leicesters are put to the expense of close fences.

“But,” said Mr. Roblin, “although I speak in this disconsolate tone about sheep-raising, it has, I believe, a great future; in this way. The prolific yield of the earth has caused farmers to become careless and to allow noxious weeds to grow rampant. Now sheep thrive and produce excellent mutton on these very weeds, which means that the sheep-owner is achieving a double purpose: he is cleaning his land very thoroughly—the sheep absolutely exterminate the weeds—and he is securing a handsome return from his fine fat sheep in doing so.” As for the outlet, Mr. Roblin declared that Winnipeg, “with half the population of Montreal, has double the demand for mutton.” Indeed, he considers that the sheep-raiser finds a better local market in Manitoba than anywhere else in Canada.

With the advance of dairying, hog-raising is assuming importance. But, as Mr. Roblin pointed out, every farmer can, if he chooses, cheaply rear without milk a few swine on by-products that would otherwise be wasted. Not enough pork is produced in Central Canada to supply the local demand, but market conditions do not greatly encourage the industry. As the people of Manitoba want light, mild-cured bacon and hams, Yorkshires and Berkshires stand in chief favour.

Finally, I gathered these further facts of interest to anyone who contemplates tilling the prairie soil:

Currants, gooseberries, raspberries, and strawberries have long been cultivated profitably in Manitoba; and of late years some hardy apples have proved successful on the Siberian crab. All garden vegetables, save a few that require a long season, are grown to a high state of perfection in the prairie provinces. Eggs and poultry command a good market and receive increasing attention. Following upon the widespread cultivation of clover, bee-keeping has become easy and profitable.

To watch the development of North America is to see Nature performing an endless conjuring trick with the human race. At New York, Quebec, and the other ocean ports there is that interminable procession of arriving liners, crowded in the steerage with persons who, in face, speech, clothes, ideas, and demeanour, are foreigners—foreigners obviously, and, as would seem, unalterably—yet when you travel about the country you make the bewildering discovery that they are not there. A family of newly landed foreigners, it is true, you may chance to fall in with, but the accumulated mass, the avalanche of emigrants who have been arriving in daily thousands for tens of years past—they have mysteriously vanished. And in their place you see millions of Yankees and Canadians who have dropped, apparently, from the skies.

The process of absorption, of adaptation, of transmogrification, is rapid, as two personal incidents may serve to show. Crossing the Atlantic recently, I happened to be standing in the between-decks promenade of the steerage, with my attention engaged by a group of inert Scandinavians, who—because of their strange attire and talk, their clumsy movements, and their wondering eyes looking out helplessly from flabby countenances—seemed creatures from another planet. By way of contrast, there stood at my side a dapper little elderly man in a cowboy hat, and having alert and penetrating eyes and a neatly trimmed tuft of hair on his otherwise clean-shaven face—in a word, the typical smart Yankee as one sees him on the stage.

“I suppose,” said I, a trifle dubiously, “those people will somehow settle into shape out in the West?”

“I guess they will,” murmured the calm little Yankee.

“They certainly look a most unpromising lot,” I blundered on.

“Perhaps they might improve,” drawled my companion in the same even tone, and still looking straight ahead of him.

“They appear to be so uncouth,” my evil genius prompted me to add, “so dull, so lacking in brains and breeding. In fact, they almost seem like——”

“Look here,” said the little Yankee, as he turned to confront me, not indeed with any show of resentment, yet with a suggestion of mild protest in his keen gaze. “Some o’ your ideas on this subject might not be just exactly what I should think. I’m Scandinavian born myself, having come over—a boy of fourteen—in a party as like as two peas to that one.”

There remained for me, of course, nothing but a hurried confession that I should not have thought it, since, to my eyes, he looked the walking incarnation of everything that was bright, quick and admirable in the American character: which did something to patch up our relationship; but I am not likely to forget the lesson that, in talking to a Yankee or a Canadian, one is very likely confronting a dual nationality, with half of it hidden from view.

My other experience concerns a little girl named Dolly. As I knew her before she and her people went to Canada, Dolly was a timid, clinging, winsome mite who, as the saying goes, could not say boo to a goose. Before the family had been a year in the new country I had the pleasure of visiting them in their home on the prairie. All were the same as I had known them before, and yet all, in some subtle way, were different. They had become infected by a spirit I can only describe as Canadian—by something that showed itself in a sort of hearty self-reliance—by something that Dolly illustrated for me in a very definite and memorable manner. Entering the parlour one afternoon, I found her a-perch the music stool, industriously playing the piano. “That doesn’t sound much like a piece, Dolly,” I happened to remark; “it’s an exercise, isn’t it?” “You bet your life it is,” replied the complacent child, without turning her head or desisting from her performance.

A rapid assimilation of peoples is, in fact, a law of social development in North America. But the working of that law has, in the case of the Dukhobors, been suspended; and I have been laying emphasis on the rule only that my readers may be able more clearly to appreciate the exception.

I went to Verigin, the headquarters of the Quaker-like Russian vegetarians—the strange sect who were assisted to Canada by Count Tolstoy and a committee of European well-wishers, and who have since given some trouble to the Dominion authorities by declining to take the oath of citizenship and by perambulating the country naked in search of a Messiah.

I found a few Dukhobors living in ordinary Canadian houses at Verigin proper, where the community has a range of offices, a warehouse, a brick-yard, a wheat elevator, and a flour-mill fitted with up-to-date machinery. Also there I found a handful of other nationalities (notably a Scotch family and a Roumanian family, who have both become Canadian), and they testified with two voices concerning the peculiar people in the midst of whom they dwell. But before referring to lines of cleavage in local opinion, I will briefly give my own superficial impressions of a community whose main principles have always engaged my sympathy.

They decline, on grounds of conscience, to serve as soldiers, and I happen to regard warfare between civilised nations as a hateful folly, admitting the peaceful and rational alternative of arbitration. They also object to slay animals for food, or for any other purpose, and, being myself inclined to a non-flesh diet, I was not likely to quarrel with that item of their humanitarian creed, even though I personally am unable to rise to the ethical height of sparing the lives of vermin. Thus such things as I shall say about these non-Canadians will at least issue from a mind unpolluted by prejudice.

The local section of the community (for other sections exist elsewhere in Canada) is distributed among several villages established within a short radius of Verigin. To one of those villages—Varnoe—I went on foot—or, rather, I went part of the way on foot; for a wagon overtook me on the road, and, addressing its two occupants (men who, by reason of their unanimated expressions and a Russian suggestion in the cut of their clothes, were easy to recognise as Dukhobors), I asked if they would kindly give me a lift. That my English was, however, thrown away upon them their expressionless faces clearly showed, so by pantomime I indicated the way by which I desired to profit by their indulgence. They vouchsafed no smile of acquiescence and no frown of refusal; so, without more ado, I scrambled into the vehicle, which promptly resumed its journey.

Now, had those two Dukhobors been possessed of even a moderate sense of humour, not to mention the gift of human sympathy, they must, I think, have betrayed some passing appreciation of the predicament in which I had all unwittingly involved myself. For the wagon had no springs, and I was having the time of my life in the matter of jolting and jarring, with stirring sensations as of the dislocation of one’s bones and the loosening of one’s teeth, as that awful conveyance went blundering along the rough road. Nor did occasion arise for any compassionate concern on behalf of my companions, since the seat they occupied was fixed to pliable steel supports that must have ensured for them a reasonable measure of physical comfort. And when—having had about enough of it—I called a halt and dismounted from that unsympathetic vehicle, there was still no sign of fraternity from either of those two self-centred and apparently depressed Dukhobors.

The village—when I presently arrived at it—proved a surprising place, with strange, foreign-looking and picturesque houses having walls plastered with mud, but with a note of distinction in the disposition of the timbering, in the shaping of the windows, and in the gable ends of the heavy vegetating roofs. Moreover, the eye was grateful for variations of detail in the several structures, no two being exactly alike, though all were affected by common principles of structure and design—all, at least, save a central meeting-place in prim brickwork, which was a civilised eyesore in that setting of primitive architecture.

But if the aspect of those Dukhobor dwellings could not fail to please an artist, their contiguity was calculated to horrify a social reformer. Here on the Canadian prairie, where one human habitation to 160 acres is the rule, there seemed something grotesquely gratuitous in a street of crowded houses, each with a little backyard that scarce afforded latitude for a pig, a wash-tub, and three gooseberry-bushes.

The men were either afield or indoors. But I saw a number of women. Some were applying mud to the walls, using their hands as trowels, and being copiously bemired from head to foot; others appeared and disappeared in their little gardens as they went sluggishly about their household affairs. Indeed, a sense of the sluggishness of those fat-faced, broad-bodied, heavily-clothed and big-booted women is the main impression they left on my mind. There were some children about, and they also seemed overburdened with clothes and deficient in vitality.

The stranger excited no curiosity, and prompted no spontaneous greetings. My friendly overtures to the adults were rewarded with dull nods and a muttered syllable or two. Those people were all quite happy, I suppose, but they were living their lives in a minor key. If one of the boys (not readily to be distinguished, by the by, from the girls) had only called out or whistled, or even set up a hullabaloo of blubbering, it would, I felt, have relieved the tension.

After walking twice from end to end of the village, I determined to see if it were not possible, by hook or by crook, to make a Dukhobor smile. Squatting on a seat in front of one of the houses, I laid myself out to secure the companionship of a little child who stood a few feet away, eyeing me with solemn misgiving. Not until I had produced my watch, fountain pen, bunch of keys and penknife, and spread them out before her, could the dubious youngster be coaxed forward. Yet her interest in these glittering valuables proved still-born; all my laborious attempts to show off their jingling and snappy parts being looked upon with a coldness bordering on boredom. However, that stumpy little Dukhobor toddler did at last manifest a spark of personality by earnestly pointing towards the grass at my feet; whereupon I plucked a bunch and held it out to her. The offering was accepted with alacrity and in a spirit of appreciation; hers being apparently the well-balanced type of mind which, content with things familiar and of established worth, is proof against the glamour of mere novelty. I gathered another handful of herbage and made a show of also surrendering that; but this time the chubby little fist stretched forth only to find the gift denied. Ten minutes later we were still doing that—attempts at surreptitious seizure sometimes prevailing against treacherous withdrawal, and the proceedings being frankly accepted by my tiny opponent as a legitimate and sporting way of passing the time. But all this time she did not smile. Nay, I had already begun to regard my aspiration as hopeless when, chancing to look round, I perceived that a Dukhobor woman—presumably the child’s mother—was overlooking our contest with much the air of a referee; and when I caught the eye of that Dukhobor woman she gave me a most gracious and unmistakable smile.

Soon afterwards, I retraced my steps along the road, and, calling at headquarters, sought an audience of the Dukhobor leader. But Peter M. Verigin, “Representative of the Dukhobor Society in Canada” (to give him the modest title which, on his visiting card, he gives himself), happened to be away on a journey. However, I was received by Mr. M. W. Cazakoff, the manager, who, in answer to my inquiries, made the following statement:—

“This is the Dukhobor Society’s trading store, where we have wholesale and retail departments for the sale of dry goods, hardware, leather, boots and shoes, groceries, crockery, farm implements, etc. We have seven grist mills, including one of 400 horse-power; three brickyards, where over seven million bricks have been made; about 800 horses; 800 head of cattle; twenty-five threshing machines; a number of barns and stables, and a fine assortment of ploughs, harrows, and other agricultural machinery. We have 13,000 acres in Saskatchewan, it being worth at least thirty dollars an acre, and the Society has now bought 15,000 acres in British Columbia—at Castlegar, about thirty miles south of Nelson—where a beginning has been made with fruit-farming. So you will see that our community, which numbers between seven and eight thousand persons, has become rich. The people who have made trouble for us are not many—not quite a hundred—and they do not belong to us, and we do not like what they do. Their Russian name would be called in English: The Men Without Any Clothes. We hope they will not make any more bother.”

Said the jovial Scotch miller, when I afterwards sat chatting with him in his cosy parlour: “I have a lot to do with the Dukhobors, and you may take it from me they are very nice people. As for the wild, fanatical set that sometimes go about with no clothes on, well, they are just the eccentric ones, and they don’t belong to the regular Society. One day I found a long-haired individual in the mill among those that work for me, a-whispering and talking away at ’em fit to beat the band. I saw what his game was—getting up one of those naked-crusade outfits to make a lot more bother. So I took and ran him out of the mill. They are normally as quiet, harmless, and industrious a people as you could meet anywhere. And such simple tastes they’ve got, too! Did you see that little patch of sunflowers along the road? Well, they grow them for their own food, and they munch away at the ripe seed as contentedly as possible. I tried those seeds once—but never again. A cut from the joint with some nice gravy is more in my line. All the same, you can’t help respecting them for their principles, especially when they are always so nicely behaved. And as for Mr. Verigin and the other heads of the Society, you couldn’t want to do business with nicer and more straightforward gentlemen.”

Said the highly intelligent and much travelled Roumanian storekeeper: “Nobody finds any fault with the Dukhobors themselves; but the system under which they live doesn’t give them a fair chance. They oughtn’t to be kept in their present uneducated state, and allowed to live in a superstitious belief that Peter Verigin is their heavenly ruler. The Society make a boast of the property they have amassed; but what an infinitely greater amount so many thousand families would have produced by this time if each man had been allowed to take up his quarter-section and been a free and independent citizen, bringing up his children to be properly educated and to speak the language of the country, instead of carrying on traditions of ignorance and superstition. As for their objection to bloodshed, and their preference for a non-meat diet—well, obviously those ideals can be preserved just as well by people who are mentally emancipated as by people living in a state of mediÆval darkness. I am happy to say that, in spite of the measures taken to preserve the status quo, a little light is beginning to enter the community from without, and already many of the men have struck for independence, and withdrawn from the community. Some are living hereabouts on their own homesteads, and very fine and prosperous settlers they are proving.”

And with what my Roumanian friend said I found myself in hearty agreement. Having escaped from the yoke of autocracy to the political freedom of Canada, the least the Dukhobors can do, it seems to me, is to shed the mental fetters of an ignorant Russian peasantry and become enlightened Canadian citizens.

To establish a great country and christen it after one of its districts—in other words, to take the name of a locality and make it apply over a region stretching away for thousands of miles—is to provide succeeding generations of schoolboys with an opportunity to form life-long misconceptions. If, when London was made into a county, it had been christened Pimlico, we should have a rough parallel to what happened in the case of British North America.

Knowing that Canada has existed for more than three centuries, people are apt (as I have previously pointed out) to scratch and shake their heads over the fact that, while the United States in the south have acquired a population of 92,000,000, Canada numbers only 8,000,000 inhabitants. It takes a lot of explanation to make them understand that historic Canada was a comparatively small area abutting on the St. Lawrence River; and that modern Canada—the huge country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific—is only thirty-eight years old.

You have to hammer away at the fact that the word “union” is the key to the extraordinary contrast afforded by the population of Yankee North America and the population of British North America; that the reason why there was expansion in the south was because the States were united, and that the reason why, until recent years, there was no expansion in the north was because, until recent years, the provinces were ununited.

They were ununited politically (a common allegiance not involving concerted action) and they were ununited physically.

Political union came by stages. The four principal eastern provinces (Canada West, Canada East, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), as we have seen, joined forces forty-four years ago; distant Manitoba threw in its lot with them three years later; remote British Columbia entered the combination during the following twelve months, on condition that its isolation should be remedied by a railroad; and in 1873—or just thirty-eight years ago—with the adhesion of the remaining eastern province (Prince Edward Island) there came into existence the vast Dominion of Canada, embracing not merely the regions named above, but the enormous intervening and adjoining areas known as the North-West Territories.

Political union was accomplished, but its permanence was contingent upon physical union also being accomplished, for British Columbia had stipulated for a railroad. Thus the newly-created Federal Government found themselves confronted by a task which for magnitude and difficulty would have been worthy the statesmanship of a Julius CÆsar. They had to furnish their geographical colossus with a steel backbone. They had to lay parallel rails round a wide arc of the earth’s circumference—traversing the untracked wilderness, skirting mountains and chasms, hewing a way through forests, blasting a way through rock, filling up bogs, lowering lakes and bridging rivers innumerable; they had to make a level roadway three thousand miles long, placing sleepers a foot apart along its entire length, and building stations at intervals of sixteen miles.

The gigantic enterprise was put in hand; but continuity of policy proved impossible with a national executive that was subject to party changes. At the end of several years only 700 miles of line had been laid, and the Government were anxious that someone else should go on with the job. Eight daring capitalists formed themselves into a syndicate, and undertook to have the line constructed by 1891 in consideration of receiving twenty-five million dollars and twenty-five million acres of prairie. They made splendid progress, but, presently running short of cash, they asked the Government to lend them £6,000,000—accommodation that was granted on the understanding that the line should be finished in 1886, or five years earlier than had been originally stipulated. It was finished in 1885, and a few months later trains were running across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Hence its name, The Canadian Pacific Railway—long ago colloquialised by universal usage into the “C.P.R.”

Federation rendered modern Canada possible. But modern Canada was created by a railway—by that railway—by the C.P.R. In 1881, before the line was commenced, the Dominion had 4,324,810 inhabitants, of whom 4,153,800 lived in the settled areas in the East—areas forming but a small fraction of the new country. The balance of population—171,000 persons, of whom nearly half were Red Indians—was distributed as follows: 66,000 in Manitoba, 49,000 in British Columbia, and 56,000 in the remaining far-stretching regions of Canada. To-day there are more than a million and a half people in those territories where, before the railway was made, there were only 171,000; and—with the tide of immigration gaining in momentum every year—the national affairs of this earth provide no anticipation more assured than that the present inhabitants of Central and Western Canada are but the vanguard of a population which, within the experience of persons now living, will be counted by tens of millions.

Most railways have come into existence merely to serve a nation’s needs. It was, as we have seen, the higher fate of the C.P.R. first to create the nation whose needs it was to serve. Out of that fact sprang traditions that have moulded the destiny and that conserve the character of one of the most gigantic, most powerful, most prosperous, and most public-spirited corporations in the world. It is sometimes said that a joint stock company has no soul to be saved and no hindquarters to be kicked. Irreverent remarks of that sort do not apply to the C.P.R. Those who have lived or travelled in Canada will not need to be told about that remarkable and unique institution. But the rest of the world are not in a position to know, and certainly could never guess, the rÔle filled by that railway in a stirring national drama. To the Bourses of Europe the C.P.R. is only a triumphant corporation that makes a clear annual profit of over £5,000,000, that is constantly and successfully extending its enterprises, and that issues to its proprietors at par new stock that commands a high premium. But those facts merely reveal the C.P.R. in its public character. Its domestic character is the interesting study.

The C.P.R. is the servant, friend, partner (and, I had almost written, pal) of the settler in Central and Western Canada. No soul, indeed! Why, of the C.P.R.’s several titles to the world’s esteem, the first place must be given to what I can only call its psychological worth.

One of the growing community of prosperous grain-growers in Alberta was telling me the story of his early experiences—how he arrived with his large family on the land, and how he and his sons set to work and built their house. “Yes,” I said, “but where did you and your family live before the house was ready?” “Oh,” he replied, “the C.P.R. very kindly lent us a shack to be going on with.”

Another settler, also reviewing his initial efforts, explained that, being a muff at his new work, he failed to make timely arrangements for harvesting his first crop, which consequently was ruined. “Having counted on the grain to see me through,” he added, “I was fairly broke. But the good old C.P.R. came to my rescue. They gave me work near my place and paid me well, and next spring they lent me horses and fitted me out with seed—in fact, they helped a lame dog over the stile.” A third Canadian farmer had bought irrigated land from the C.P.R. on the usual basis of easy annual payments. “But,” he explained, “the minor canals had not been completed in our neighbourhood, and water did not reach my ditches until two months after I got there. Having to run up to Calgary, I called in at the C.P.R. and told them about it. They were most apologetic, and said they were very much to blame, as the land ought not to have been sold as irrigated land until the water was actually there; so, quite of their own accord, they gave me an extra year’s grace before my first payment became due.”

There is a conscientiousness about the C.P.R., a thoughtfulness, a something that is downright human, not to say kind-hearted. In travelling across the ocean and the land you see the big things of the C.P.R.—its magnificent liners, its palatial hotels, its superb feats of engineering—but somehow the real greatness of the company seems to lie in the little personal acts of which I have given three examples. It is difficult to find a definition that fits the C.P.R. To liken it to a philanthropic society is out of the question; one cannot associate the idea of philanthropy with an organisation which, with its stock ranging well above 200 “on Change,” distributes over £3,000,000 per annum in the form of a 10-per-cent. dividend. The C.P.R. leaves upon the mind an intangible impression of a paradoxical character. It suggests a sort of Socialist Government run by shareholders for profit.

Chatting with a puzzled C.P.R. officer, I tried to make him realise how deeply a visitor from England was impressed by the C.P.R. in its ethical—quite apart from its engineering and financial—aspect.

“But, don’t you see,” he argued, “that the C.P.R. is directly interested in the success of every settler, and that the greater his success the more grain and other freight will he send over our line? Besides, the more a man prospers out here, the more powerful is he as a human magnet to attract friends and relatives from the old country. Looked at from those points of view, every new arrival is an important asset, and we have to see to it that the asset matures. In other words, if through inexperience or want of cash the settler meets with difficulties at the outset of his career, we have a definite interest in helping him through those difficulties. As a matter of fact, in advancing money for seed, etc., we run no appreciable financial risk, since certain success awaits the Canadian farmer who sticks to his work, provided he possesses the necessary modicum of common sense. If he is any good at all, we know he will get on all right, even if he does not know that himself. Therefore I assure you the action of the C.P.R. has a strictly business, not to say selfish, basis.”

TYPICAL NEW TOWN IN SASKATCHEWAN, VIEWED FROM THE PRAIRIE