In the early ’eighties lads who preferred exercise to examinations looked abroad for work, and parents who feared their failure in competitions agreed with them. Ditties like—

had long moved our agricultural class America-wards; perhaps the next line—

did not so much appeal to middle-class youth, but there were always visions of “broncho-busting” and rope-swinging. Moreover, no one in England, of whatever class, knew what “toil” meant, as understood in Canada and the States.

Land was easy to get in those days, free grants of 160 acres on certain conditions of exploitation which were often evaded. After weary search from Iowa northward I reached a rolling country dotted with small lakes and groves, leading up to the beautiful valley of the Little Saskatchewan. My driver said that some land which I fancied here was certainly taken up, but I saw a Scotchman ploughing and we foregathered. He told me that the other holders around were “jumping” new grants elsewhere, and that the little “breaking” which they had done did not fulfil conditions. Investigation proved this, and I bought two square miles at prairie value from the railway whose line was to traverse this very land. My son eventually did not use it, and, twenty years later, still as “prairie,” it fetched enough to cover the original price plus accumulated interest and taxes.

My son was right; farming, as I saw it in my wanderings, was not attractive. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, the surroundings were delightful, but profits seemed small; while the prairie, from the Canadian Pacific Railway down to Iowa, though certainly productive, was to my eyes as heart-breaking as the plains of India.

Travelling south from Buffalo, after a visit to the Guelph Agricultural College, which later received my son, a farmer joined me. He was Yankee to look at, but his tongue was Devonshire. It attracted a rough-looking customer in our carriage; he was Cumberland, and we three exchanged ideas. Cumberland was a wanderer who had worked all over the States up to the Pacific; Devonshire was naturalised, and thereon Cumberland took him to task. Devonshire, he said, had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Devonshire submitted that he could live on the pottage, while Cumberland did not seem to thrive on the birthright. Both had been agricultural labourers at home, and now Devonshire had a little holding nestling in one of the lovely vales which we were traversing. He could live thereon, certainly, but what a life! Cumberland, I think, had a better time, while able for the varied work which he could always find. Better for either would have been our army, navy, or police. That class does not know the soldier’s advantages when he has risen to sergeant and stays in the army.

Sore though my son’s struggle was he was right not to farm. Certainly he lost his capital, but this is the normal English lot in the States; at his mine in Texas a man came for a watchman’s job who had started with £4000! Such, it seems, is the “footing” which the gentle, handicapped by their traditions, must necessarily pay. Nevertheless, those traditions are an asset, as this book shows; so are horsemanship; the athletics and the “straight left” which public schools taught in those days if they taught little else; also a straight eye and steady nerve behind a pistol. My son’s experience may not tempt others of his class to seek fortune in America, but if they do so they will learn therefrom what to expect, in what spirit to meet it, and what equipment they need.

March 1912.