The fair Dominion : a record of Canadian impressions

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JOHN M. KELLY LIBRARY

Donated by

The Redemptorists of
the Toronto Province

from the Library Collection of
Holy Redeemer College, Windsor

University of
St. Michael's College, Toronto

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THE FAIR DOMINION

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LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE.

THE FAIR DOMINION

A RECORD OF CANADIAN IMPRESSIONS

BY
K E. VEKNEDE

AUTHOR OF
'THE PURSUIT OF MR. FAVIEL,' 'MEBIEL OF THE MOORS,' ETC.

With 12 Illustrations in Colour

from Drawings by
CYRUS CUNEO

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.

DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.

1911

PREFACE

You know how long ago, in the earlier-than-
Victorian days, the country cousin, in order to
see life, went up to the Metropolis. A terrible
journey it was, but well worth the labour and
anxiety. Accounts are still extant of how the
bustle and noise of the streets amazed him, of
how endless the houses seemed, how startled
he was by the glittering, clattering folk, how
innocent and countrified he felt by comparison
with them. Nowadays, though the London
we know is to that old London as a vast and
sleepless city to a small somnolent town, the
country cousin is no longer carried off his feet
by a visit to it. It is not vast enough or noisy
enough or new enough to impress him. Per-
haps no single city ever will be again.

But Canada ! Some Winnipeg school teachers
who came over recently to see London, told
a journalist that it seemed so quiet com-
pared with Canadian cities. ' In our cities,'

vi THE FAIR DOMINION

they said, ' it is impossible to escape from the
noise of the streets.' . . . Yet the streets and
the cities are not really the things that impress
one most in Canada. The amazing things are
the forests and the fields, the prairies and the
lakes and the mountains : all the illimitable
space and the irrepressible men who are closing
it in and giving it names for us to know it by.

Clearly the English country cousin who wishes
to be impressed should go to Canada. It is as
easy to reach as London was in the old days,
and there are no highwaymen. He will come
back — if he comes back — with many stories to
tell his friends of the wonders he has seen and
of the still more incredible things that will
soon be visible. That is at least my position.
I went out originally for the Bystander, which
wanted its Canadian news, like all its other
news, up-to-date and not too solemn, and I am
indebted to the editor of that journal for
permission to make use in parts of the articles
I sent him for this book, in which, by the way,
I have still endeavoured to avoid solemnity.
For some reason or other, many writers upon
Canada do fall into a solemn and portentous
way of describing the country — with the result

PREFACE vii

that people who know nothing of the facts say
to themselves, ' This is indeed an important
Dominion, but dull.' As a matter of fact, of
course, Canada is a highly exciting country —
from its grizzly bears to its political problems —
and having spent delightful months in various
parts, some well known, others, such as the
French River, the Columbia Valley, and the
Selkirks, very little known ; riding in trains or
on mountain ponies, sometimes trying to catch
maskinonges (a tigerish kind of pike), some-
times trying to catch prime ministers (who
cannot be described in such a general way) —
I have tried to set down my impressions as
incompletely as I received them. Never, I
hope, have I fallen into the error of describing
exactly how many salmon are canned in the
Dominion, or what Sir Wilfrid Laurier should
do if he really wishes to remain a great party
leader. The errors I have fallen into will be
obvious, and I need not run through them here.
... As for criticisms — if now and then I stop
to make some — if I start saying, ' Canada is a
great country, nevertheless, we do some things
just as well or better at home,' no Canadian
need mind. Country cousins have said just

viii THE FAIR DOMINION

that sort of thing from all time. Every cousin
— even the most countrified — makes some re-
servations in favour of his own place ; he would
not be worth entertaining otherwise. If the
criticisms are pointless, Canadians may say,
e What can you expect from a country cousin ? '
If there is something in them, they will be
entitled to remark, ' This English country
cousin shows some intelligence. But then
he has been to Canada — the centre of things.'

CONTENTS

CHAP. PACK

I. THE START FROM LIVERPOOL ... 1

II. THE STEERAGE PASSAGE 6

IN CANADA 15

IV. A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC . . .26

V. THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY ... 37

VI. STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRE AND A TRAVELLER'S

VOW . 47

HABITANT VILLAGE AND ITS NOTAIRE . . 56

VIII. GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 66

IX. TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER 81

X. MASKINONGE FISHING ON THE FRENCH RIVER . 92

XI. SOME SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY . 102

XII. THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO . .109

XJII. THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW

TIMERS OF WINNIPEG . . . . . .115

X[V. A PRAIRIE TOWN AND THE PRAIRIE POLICE . 125

XV, IN CALGARY ... . . . • . 138

b -

x THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAP. PAGE

XVI. THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION . .147

XVII. AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS . . .161

XVIII. INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF

THE FAITH . .... . . . 170

XIX. A HOT BATH IN BANFF 178

XX. CANADA AND WOMAN . . , f. . . 188

XXI. THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS . ,. „ . 198

XXII. A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY . 206

XXIII. THE FRUIT LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE . 215

r\ THE SELKIRKS— A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY . 224

XXV. AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK THROUGH THE

COLUMBIA VALLEY . . ', ,/*-> . 232

XXVI. FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST. f .-: . . 246

XXVII. A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY . . 258

XXVIII. THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND . .266

XXIX. A CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF
BRITISH COLUMBIA AND A BIG FIRE AT
VICTORIA 272

XXX. BACK THROUGH OTTAWA . . . .282

INDEX 294

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON

LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE . . Frontispiece

CHATEAU FRONTENAC FROM THE OLD RAM-
PARTS. DAY. QUEBEC . . . To face page 28

CHATEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN

TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC . . „ „ 32

MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES . „ „ 170

A TRAIL IN THE ROCKIES . . . ' » „ „ 176

THE HALT. SADDLEBACK. LAGGAN . . ,, ,,192

LAKE LOUISE. LAGGAN. ALBERTA . . „ „ 198

IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS.

ROCKY MOUNTAINS . . • • » » 204

ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY ,. ,,.^_ , ,, ,, 206

TICE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS „ „ 216

A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES . „ ,, 230

IK THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM

THE HUNT . ,, 254

THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER I

THE START FROM LIVERPOOL

CANADA and its wonders might lie before us,
yet it was not all joy there at the Liverpool
docks, where we waited our opportunity to
go on board S.S. Empress of Britain. For
one thing, the sun on that August day of last
year was so unusually warm that standing
about with a bag amongst crowds of people
who were seeing other people off was hard
work ; for another, I had left behind me in my
Hertfordshire home my bull-mastiff, forlorn
ever since I had begun packing, and not a bit
deceived by the bone she had been supplied
with at parting. Even while she had gnawed it,
she had whined. All those other people already
on the great ship, the people in the bows —
the emigrants — were leaving more even than
a bull-mastiff : friends — for who knew how
long ? — their parents in England perhaps for
ever. Here were thoughts to obscure the

A

2 THE FAIR DOMINION

pleasure of those who were making for a new
world, thoughts to sadden those who, whether
by their own choice or not, were staying behind.
Less than my bull-mastiff could they be either
deceived or solaced. True, they might remember
that this is the way a great Empire is made.
We talk of the Empire often enough. But
then we who talk of it are rarely those who
make it or suffer for it ; and perhaps we are
therefore more easily consoled by a great idea
than they.

Luckily going on board ship has to be a
bustling business. My two companions and I,
who had been promised a four-berth third-class
cabin between us, had to bustle quite a lot —
to different gangways from which we were
rapidly sent back and into various queues,
which turned out, after we had waited in them
for some time, to be composed of some other
class of passenger. We were extremely heated
before we found ourselves in the end about to
be passed up a gangway at which the medical
inspection of a group of Scandinavians was
at the moment going on. Scandinavian seems
to be a roomy word which covers all Swedes,
Norwegians, Danes, Lapps ; and no foreigners
not coming under this category are carried
by the ' Empress ' boats.

THE START FROM LIVERPOOL 3

The theory seems to be in regard to them
that they are the only right and proper ship-
mates for English emigrants going to Canada.
They were being pretty carefully examined
all the same, men and women alike. The
doctors' attention seemed to centre on their
heads and eyelids. Hats were pulled off as
they came level with them, and tow-coloured
hair was grasped and peered into apparently
with satisfactory results, for only a couple of
elderly people were held back for a few minutes ;
and they I fancy had not passed the eye test,
and were therefore not free from suspicion
of having trachoma — a not uncommon North
European disease supposed to cause total blind-
ness, which is least of all to be desired in a new
country. The two detained Scandinavians were
re-examined and passed, after which our turn
came. I think we all three felt a little uneasy
in the eyelids as we advanced upon the doctor,
but we need not have been anxious, for after
a swift glance at us he reassured us by grinning
and saying, ' There 's nothing wrong with you,
I should say,' — and so we passed on board.
For the next hour or two we were part of a
whirl of confused humanity. There is always
a tendency among landsmen to become sheepish
at; sea, and in the steerage there were nine

4 THE FAIR DOMINION

hundred of us, most of whom had never been
at sea before. So we rushed together and got
jammed down companionways and in passages
which even on so big a liner as this could not
hold us all abreast, and scrummed to find the
numbers of our berths from the steward, and
flung ourselves in masses upon our baggage,
and pressed pell-mell to the sides of the ship to
wave good-bye, and formed a solid tossing
square saloonwards when bells rang and we
thought they might mean meals.

Of course there must have been even then
self-possessed passengers, who knew what they
were about and only seemed to be lost with
the crowd, and to be vaguely trying to muddle
through. Canadians returning to their own
country were conspicuous later by reason of
their cool bearing and air of knowing their way
about the world. And the invisible discipline
of the ship that was to turn us all later into
reasonable and orderly individuals was no
doubt already at work. But the impression
any one looking down on us that first evening
would have received would have been the
impression of a scurrying crowd, fancifully and
variously dressed for its Atlantic voyage —
clerks in pink shirts and high collars and
bowler hats, peasants in smocks, women in the

THE START FROM LIVERPOOL 5

very latest flapping head-gear, or bareheaded
and shawled, infants either terribly smart or
mere bundles of old clothes.

Up on the first-class deck superior people
were walking calmly about with just the right
clothes and manners for such a small event
as crossing the Atlantic must have been to
most of them. Occasionally one of these
upper folk would come to the rails, lean over
and smilingly stare at us : wondering perhaps
at our confusion. But then all our fortunes
were embarked on the ship, and only a little
part of theirs.

When I went to sleep that night on a clean
straw mattress in a lower berth, with a pleasant
air blowing in through the port-hole in the
p-assage, we were, I suppose, out to sea, and the
air was Atlantic air, and no longer that of the
old country.

THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER II

THE STEERAGE PASSAGE

APART from its other merits the steerage has
this to its credit — every one is very friendly
and affable. No one required an introduction
before entering into conversation, and the sus-
picion that we might be making the acquaint-
ance of some doubtful and inferior person who
would perhaps presume upon it later did not
worry any of us. I sat at a delightful table.
Some one who knew the ins and outs of a
steerage passage had advised me to go in to
meals with the first ' rush,' instead of waiting
for the second or third. His theory was that
the first relay got the pick of the food. So
my two friends and I had taken care to answer
the very first call to the saloon, which happened
to be for high tea, and, seating ourselves at
random, found that we were thereby self-
condemned to take every meal in the same
order — including breakfast at the unaccus-
tomed and somewhat dispiriting hour of 7 A.M.

THE STEERAGE PASSAGE 7

I do not know that it greatly mattered. In
the cabin next ours there were several small
children, who appeared to wake and weep
about 4 A.M., and either to throw themselves
or be thrown out of their berths on to the
floor a little later. Their lamentations then
became so considerable, that we were not
sorry to rise and go elsewhere.

Besides the three of us, there were at our
table the following : —

(1) A Norwegian peasant. Going on to the
land. Quiet and rapid in his eating.

(2) Another Norwegian peasant, also going
on to the land. He must have arrived on
board very hungry, and he remained so through-
out the voyage. He used to help himself to
butter with his egg spoon, after he had finished
most of his egg with it. Moreover, he would
rise and stretch a red and dusky arm all down
the table, if he sighted something appetising
afar off. As we had a most excellent table
steward, whose waiting could not have been
beaten in the first-class, we all rather resented
this behaviour, and I — as his next door neigh-
bour— was deputed to hold him courteously
in his seat until the desired eatables could be
passed him.

(3) A Durham miner going to a mine in

8 THE FAIR DOMINION

northern Ontario. A cheery red-faced person.
He had bought a revolver before starting for
Canada, because friends had told him that
they were rough sort of places up there. I
afterwards stayed a night in a mining town,
and the only row that I heard was caused by
a young Salvation Army girl, who beat a drum
violently for hours outside the bar. We ad-
vised the miner to practise with his revolver
in some isolated spot, these weapons being
tricky.

(4) A small shy cockney boy who was going
out to his dad at Winnipeg. I don't know
what his dad was, but I should think a clerk
of sorts.

(5) A brass metal worker from the North.
Going to a job in Peterborough. A quiet
pleasant young man.

(6) A chauffeur who had also been in the
Royal Engineers. Had been in the South
African War, and told stories about it much
more interesting than those you see in books.

(7) A horse-breaker, with whom I spent
many hours learning about bits and bridles
and shoes. He was the only married man
among these seven. He hoped to bring his
wife and family out within the year, and was
not going to be happy until he did, even though

THE STEERAGE PASSAGE 9

the kids would have to be vaccinated, and
lie had most conscientious objections to this
process.

All these men — even the Norwegian with
his egg-spoon habits — would be, I could not
help thinking, a distinct gain to any country.
1 fancy too that they represented the steerage
generally. Of course there were other types.
I remember some characteristic Londoners
of the less worthy sort — gummy-faced youths
in dirty clothes that had been smart. There
was one in particular, whom the horse-breaker
would refer to as ' that lad that goes about in
what was once a soot o' clothes,' who had a
perfect genius for card tricks and making music
on a comb. His career in Canada, judging
by criticisms passed upon him by returning
Canadians, was likely to be brief and unsuc-
cessful.

The food — to turn to what is always of con-
siderable interest on a voyage — was good but
solid. Pea soup, followed by pork chops and
plum-pudding, makes an excellent dinner when
you are hungry. Everybody was hungry the
iirst day and also the last three days. In
between there was a cessation of appetites.
The sea was never in the least rough, but there
was some slight motion on the second day out,

10 THE FAIR DOMINION

and the majority of the nine hundred had pro-
bably never been to sea before. The strange
affliction took them unawares, and they did
not know how to deal with it. Where they
were first seized, there they remained and were
ill. The sides of the ship which appealed to
more experienced travellers did not allure
them. It was during this affliction that a
device which had struck me as a most excellent
idea upon going on board seemed in practice
less good. This was a railed-in sand-pit which
the paternal company had constructed between
decks for the entertainment of the emigrant
children. I had seen a dozen or more at a
time playing in it with every manifestation of
delight. Even now while they were ailing
there, they did not seem to mind it.

Everywhere one went on that day of tribula-
tion one had to walk warily.

Afterwards the sea settled down into a mill
pond, and every one began to wear a cheerful
and hopeful look. In the evenings, and some-
times in the afternoons as well, some of the
Scandinavians would produce concertinas and
violins, and the whole of them would dance
their folk-dances for hours. It was extra-
ordinary how gracefully they danced — the squat
fair-haired women and the big men heavily

THE STEERAGE PASSAGE 11

clothed and booted. There was an attempt
on the part of some of the English people to
take part in these dances, but they soon realised
their inferiority, and gave it up in favour
of sports and concerts. The sports, though
highly successful in themselves, led to a slight
contretemps when the Bishop of London, who
happened to be on board, came over by request
to distribute the prizes. The Scandinavians,
who quite wrongly thought they had been left
out of the sports, seized the opportunity afforded
by the bishop's address (which was concerned
with our future in Canada), to form in Indian
file, with a concertinist at their head, and
march round and round the platform on which
the bishop stood, making a deafening noise.
It looked for a little as if there might be a
scuffle between them and the prize-winners,
but peace prevailed, though we were all pre-
vented from hearing what was no doubt very
sound advice. Apart from this, there was no
horseplay to speak of until the last night but
one, when a rowdy set, headed by a fat York-
shireman, chose to throw bottles about in the
dark, down in that part of the ship where
about fifty men were berthed together. For
this the ringleader was hauled before the
captain and properly threatened.

12 THE FAIR DOMINION

Our concerts went with less eclat. They
were held in the dining-saloon, and there were
usually good audiences. It seemed however
that we had only one accompanist, whose
command of the piano was limited, and in any
case self-consciousness invariably got the better
of the performers at the last moment. Either
they would not come forward at all when
their turn arrived, or else, having come forward,
they turned very red, wavered through a few
notes and then lost their voices altogether.
Our best English concertina player, a fat little
Lancashire engineer, had his instrument seized
with the strangest noises halfway through
' Variations on the Harmonica,' and after a
manly effort to restrain them, failed and had
to retire in haste. We generally bridged over
these recurring gaps in the programme by
singing ' Yip i addy.'

It was so fine most of the voyage, that one
could be quite happy on deck doing nothing
at all but resting and strolling and talking. A
few of the girls skipped occasionally and some
of the men boxed : there was no real zeal for
deck games. The voyage was too short, and
with the new life and the new world at the
end of it we all wanted to find out from one
another what we knew — or at least what we

THE STEERAGE PASSAGE 13

thought — Canada would be like. We stood
in some awe of returning Canadians who talked
of dollars as if they were pence, and we wondered
if we should get jobs as easily as people said
we should. Almost every type of worker was
represented among us, and many types of
people.

Chief among my own particular acquaint-
ances made on the boat were a young lady-
help from Alberta, two Russian Jews from
Archangel, a Norwegian farm hand from some-
where near the Arctic circle, two miners from
Ontario, and three small boys belonging to
Perth, Scotland.

I do not know how the Russian Jews came
to be on the boat. They had some Finnish,
and I suppose slipped in with the Scandina-
vians. They also spoke a few words of
German, which was the language we misused
together. They were brothers, good-looking
men with charming manners. The elder wore
a frock coat and a bowler hat, and looked
a romantic Shylock. The other was clothed
in a smock, and was hatless. They said
they had fled from the strife of Russia, and
they wished particularly to know if Canada
was a free country. The younger man was an
ironworker and made penny puzzles in iron

14 THE FAIR DOMINION

which, so far as I could make out, the elder
brother invented. They had one puzzle with
them, but it was very complicated, and I was
afraid that the sale of such things in Canada
might be limited, unless Canadians fancied
bewildering themselves over intricate ironwork
during the long winters. Still those two fugi-
tives rolled Russian cigarettes very well too,
which should earn them a living.

The Norwegian was a simple youth in a queer
hat, which afterwards blew off into the sea
much to his sorrow. He was very bent on
acquiring the English language during the
voyage, not having any of it to start with. I
used to sit with him on one side and the small
Perthshire boys on the other, while we translated
Scottish into Norwegian and back again. The
Scotch boys would inquire of me what ' hat '
was in Norse, and I would point to the queer
head-gear above-mentioned, and ask its owner
to name its Norwegian equivalent. One of
the things that stumped me — being a mere
Englishman — was a question put by the smallest
Perth boy : ' Whit is gollasses in Norwegian ? '

It took me some time to find out what gollasses
were in English, and I don't know how to spell
them now.

LANDING IN CANADA 15

CHAPTER III

LANDING IN CANADA

IT was while we were still out to sea that I
first realised what Canada might be like, and
how different from England. We had been
steaming for five days, and hitherto the Atlantic
had seemed a familiar and still English sea.
The sky above, the air around, even the vast
slowly heaving waters and the set of the sun
one might see from an English cliff. But on
this last day but one, which was a day of hot
sun, the sky seemed to have risen immeasur-
ably higher than in England and to have
become incredibly clearer, except where little
white rugged clouds were set. Snow clouds
in a perfect winter's sky, I should have said,
if I had known myself to be at home ; yet the
air round the ship was of the very balmiest
summer. We should never get such a sky and
such an air together in England, and we were
all stimulated by it and began to forget England
and think more of Canada. We wondered

16 THE FAIR DOMINION

when we were going to see the lights of Belle
Isle, and somebody said we should pass an
island called Anticosti, and we began to look
out for Anticosti, and anybody who knew any-
thing about Anticosti was listened to like an
oracle. Not that anybody did know much —
even those who had crossed to and fro
several times. After all there was no reason
why they should, for Atlantic liners do not stop
there, and there is not much to be seen in pass-
ing. Still we weighed the words of those who
had passed it carefully, and decided to see
what we could of it so that we might also be
regarded as oracles next time we came that
way.

Though we had not seen Canada, yet we had
received a favourable impression of it, which
was lucky, because the next day, when we had
got into the St. Lawrence, it came on to sleet
and vapour. We of the steerage, who had
brought up our boxes and babies almost before
breakfast, so as to be ready to land at the
earliest moment, had to content ourselves
with sitting on them between decks (on the
boxes, for choice, but the babies would get in
the way too), and watch the little white villages
and tinned church spires and dark woods of
French Canada drive past the portholes in the

LANDING IN CANADA 17

mist. We should like to have been on deck
seeing more of our new home, breathing some
of its bracing air; but the rain was incessant.
Heavens, but it got stuffy too on that lower
deck. Nine hundred of us in our best clothes
and our overcoats — holding on to bundles and
kids, and sweating. It got so stuffy, that I
took the opportunity of crossing in the rain
to the first-class, and hunting out two people
to whom I had introductions. One was the
Canadian Minister for Emigration, who had
already been over to inspect us in a paternal
sort of way and declared that we were ' a
particularly good lot ' — very different, he
hinted, from the sort of English emigrants
who used to be shipped over, and got English-
men a bad name in the new country for years.
His gratification at our general excellence was
so natural that I did not broach the question
of whether Canada's gain was England's loss.
I hope it was not. I suppose we can afford
to lose even good men, provided we are not
going to lose them really, but only station
them at a different spot along the great road
of the Empire.

The other person I was anxious to see was
Archbishop Bourne, who was going out to the
Eucharistic Congress at Montreal. We dis-

18 THE FAIR DOMINION

cussed that extraordinarily lucid book of
Monsieur Andre Siegfried, which deals with
the race question in Canada. The archbishop
admitted its value, though he thought it
unfair in parts. He was assured, for example,
that the unsocial attitude of the Irish and
French Canadian Catholics towards one another
as well as towards those of another religion
was fast disappearing, nor did he seem to think
that the Church any longer tended to frustrate
enterprise by keeping its members under its
wing in the East. Many Catholics were going
West nowadays, and after the Congress he
himself was going West in the spirit of the
times. Perhaps he was right about the rap-
prochement of the Irish and French Catholics,
though men on the spot maintain that their
unsociability is largely due to the fact that
both have a singular yearning for State employ-
ment and the employment will not always
go round.

It was still raining when I recrossed to the
steerage, and it was still raining when we got
into the Canadian Pacific Railway dock at
about 5 P.M. I was standing beside the horse-
breaker at the time, and the first thing that
caught his eye in Quebec was the shape of
the telegraph poles.

LANDING IN CANADA 19

' Why, look at them,' he said, ' they 're all
crooked ! '

A little later, he commented on the slowness
with which the French-Canadian porters were
getting the baggage off the boat. ' They may
have this here hustle on them that they talk
of,' he said, ' but I 've seen that done a lot
quicker in London.'

It was more loyalty to the old country than
disloyalty to the new that prompted the
remark, in which there was perhaps some
justification. A Canadian who was standing
by seemed to think so at any rate.

' This is only French Canada,' he said, c wait
till you get West.'

Still we all of us had to wait a bit in French
Canada anyhow. We did not get through the
emigration sheds till 9.30 P.M., and then there
was one's baggage to be got through the
Customs after. Not that there was much in
that, the officials being most amiable. But
we none of us much enjoyed the emigrant
inspection. It is necessary and desirable no
doubt, but we felt that we had been inspected
pretty often already on board the boat, and
we had been up since daylight, and we were
hungry and miserable, and hot in the sheds
and cold out of them, and the babies fractious,

20 THE FAIR DOMINION

and everybody shoving and pushing, and we
felt like some sheep at sheep-dog trials which
have to be driven through pen after pen, and
would go so much faster if they only knew how,
and the dogs didn't press them. However it
was all accomplished at last, and then the
emigrants got into the westbound train that
was waiting for them. First and second-class
passengers had long since vanished in carriages
to such abodes of luxury as the Chateau
Frontenac and the rest of the leading hotels.
Now there were no carriages left. And we
heard that a hundred people at least had been
turned away from the Chateau Frontenac, so
full was it ; and since in any case we wished to
start our Canadian impressions from a humbler
standpoint, we set out in the rain for a Quebec
inn which some of the Canadians returning in
the steerage had told us of. I suppose we had
a good deal more than a mile to go through
the rain carrying bags, along those awful roads
from the docks. I know something about those
roads, because I not only walked along them
that night, but next morning I drove a dray
along them. I had gone back to the docks to
get my trunk which I had had to leave there,
and the dray was the only thing I could get
to drive up in. Soon after we had started

LANDING IN CANADA 21

I said to the driver — a merry-faced French
Canadian — ' II trotte bien,' referring to the
horse, and he was so pleased with the com-
pliment, or the French perhaps, that he handed
me the reins and let me drive the rest of the
way through the stone piles and mud that
appeared to form the roads in lower Quebec.
In return for the reins I had lent him my
tobacco pouch ; and when the horse leapt an
extra deep hole, he would stop filling his pipe
and hold me in round the waist.

To go back to the inn — I suppose it was ten
o'clock before we got there. A few men sat
smoking, with their feet against the wall in the
entrance room where the office was ; and after
we had waited about for ten minutes or so,
one of them told us if we wanted to see the
clerk we 'd better ring a bell. We did so, and
presently a youth turned up and patronisingly
accorded us rooms for the night.

' Is there any chance of getting a meal
to-night ? ' we inquired, somewhat damped
by his unenthusiastic reception. (I may say
that I never met an office clerk in a Canadian
hotel who did seem keen on welcoming guests.
That is one of the differences between the old
world and the new.)

' Yup, there 's a cafe downstairs,' said the

22 THE FAIR DOMINION

youth, as he lit a cigar and sat down to read a
newspaper.

We went downstairs, and there in a narrow
little room behind a long counter which had
plates of sausage rolls, under meat covers to
keep them from the flies, upon it, and little
high stools upon which you sit in discomfort
to eat the sausage rolls quickly in front of it,
we found a small pale-faced boy who said
' Sure ! ' in the cheeriest way when we
repeated our question about food. Five
minutes later he had produced from a stove
which he was almost too small to reach fried
bacon and eggs and coffee, and while we sat
and ate these good things, he gave us advice
about the future. He evidently knew without
asking that we were emigrants from the old
country, and he supposed we wanted jobs. He
recommended waiting as a start — waiting in
a hotel. Waiting was not, he said, much of
a thing to stick at ; but there was pretty good
money to be made at it in the season. Lots
of tourists gave good tips — especially in Quebec
— and you could save money as a waiter if
you tried. He himself was from the States,
but he liked Quebec well enough. Of course
it was not as hustling as further west, and not
to be compared to the States. If a man

LANDING IN CANADA 23

had ideas, the States was the place for him.
There were more opportunities for a man with
ideas in the States than there were in Canada.
We asked him how much a man with ideas
could reckon upon making in the States, and
he said such a man could reckon upon making
as much as five dollars a day. It did not
seem an overwhelming amount to my aspiring
mind — not for a man with ideas. Perhaps
that is because one has heard of so many
millionaires down in the States, beginning with
Mr. Rockefeller. But then again, perhaps
millionaires are not men with ideas themselves
so much as men who know how to use the
ideas of others.

Having started on money, the boy gave us
& lecture on the Canadian coinage, the advan-
tages of the decimal system, where copper
money held good and why — all in a way that
would have done credit to a financial expert.
We thought him an amazing boy to be frying
eggs and bacon behind a counter in a small
cafe : only you don't just stick to one groove
in Canada. At least you ought not to, as the
boy himself told us. Englishmen were like
that, but it didn't do in the States or Canada.
A man should have several strings to his bow,
and be ready to turn his hand to anything.

24 THE FAIR DOMINION

Refreshed by our supper and his advice, we
adjourned to the bar which was handy, and
got further enlightenment from the barman
there. He was a French Canadian, very
dapper in a stiff white shirt and patent leather
boots. Money was also his theme. He told
us he made forty cents an hour, and meant
to get up to seventy-five cents pretty soon.
That was good money to get, but he was worth
it, and if the boss didn't think so he would
try some other boss who did. It was no good
a man's sitting down and taking less money
than he was worth. A man would not get
anywhere if he did that sort of thing. He
certainly mixed cocktails at a lightning pace,
and all the time he chatted he strode up and
down behind the bar like a caged jackal. He
gave me my first idea of that un-English rest-
lessness— American, I suppose, in its origin —
which is beginning to spread so rapidly through
Canada. In America I fancy they are beginning
to distrust it a little. Too much enterprise
may lead to an unsettled condition that is not
much better than stagnation. Farm hands
tend to leave their employers at critical
moments, just for the sake of novelty. Farmers
themselves are so anxious to get on that they
take what they can out of the land, and move

LANDING IN CANADA 25

to new farms, leaving the old ruined. It may
be that in a newer country like Canada enter-
prise is less perilous. That remains to be seen.
We retired to bed at midnight, sleepier even
than men from the old country are reputed
to be.

26 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER IV

A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC

QUEBEC city is full of charms and memories.
I am no lover of cities when they have grown
so great that no one knows any longer what
site they were built on, or what sort of a
country is buried beneath them. Their streets
may teem with people and their buildings be
very splendid, but if they have shut off the
landscape altogether I cannot admire them.
Quebec will never be one of those cities, how-
ever great she may grow. Quebec stands on
a hill, and just as a city on a hill cannot be hid,
so too it cannot hide from those who live in
it the country round, nor even the country it
stands on. Always there will be in Quebec a
sense of steepness. The cliffs still climb even
where they are crowded with houses. And
the air that reaches Quebec is the air of the
hills. Always too — from Dufferin Terrace at
least — there will be visible the sweep of the
St. Lawrence, the dark crawl to the north-

A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC 27

east of the Laurentian Mountains, and the
clear and immensely lofty Canadian skies.

I spent the whole of my first day in Quebec
on Dufferin Terrace, except for that journey
down to the docks. Once I was on the terrace,
I forgot how bad the roads had been. You
might drive a thousand miles through stones
and mud, and forget them all the moment you
sot foot on Dufferin Terrace. Everything you
see from it is beautiful, from the Chateau
Frontenac behind — surely the most picturesque
and most picturesquely situated hotel in the
world — to the wind on the river below. Most
beautiful of all the things I saw was the moon
starting to rise behind Port Levis. It started
in the trees, and at first I thought it was a
forest fire. There was nothing but red flame
that spread and spread among the trees at
first. Suddenly it shot up into a round ball
of glowing orange, so that I knew it was the
moon long before it turned silver, high up, and
made a glimmering pathway across the river.

During this moonrise the band was playing
on the terrace, and all Quebec was strolling
up and down or standing listening to the
music, as is its custom on summer evenings.
The scene on the terrace has often enough
been described — with its mingling of many

28 THE FAIR DOMINION

types, American tourists and Dominican friars,
habitants from far villages, and business men
from the centre of things, archbishops and
Members of Parliament, and ships' stewards
and commercial travellers, and freshly arrived
immigrants and old market women. The fair
Quebeckers love the terrace as much as their
men folk, and I saw several pretty faces among
them and many pretty figures. They know
how to walk, these French Canadian ladies,
and also how to dress — the latter an art which
has still to be achieved by the women of the
West.

The terrace besides being gay is very friendly
too. My two companions of the voyage had
gone on that morning, being in a hurry to reach
the prairie ; but I found several new friends on
the terrace in the course of the day. One was
a young working man from England, who had
brought his child on to the terrace to play when
I first met him. He was so well-dressed and
prosperous looking that I should never have
guessed he was only a shoe-leather cutter, as
he told me he was. But then he had been
out in Quebec for five years, and he was making
twenty-five dollars a week instead of the
thirty-two shillings a week he used to make in
Nottingham at the same trade. He said he

CHATEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC, FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS.

A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC 29

had been sorry to leave England, but you
were more of a man in Canada. There were
not twenty men after one job — that was the
difference. Consequently, if your boss offered
to give you any dirt, you could tell him to go
to Hell. I suppose we should have counted
him a wicked and dangerous Socialist in
England, but there is no doubt that he is a
typical Canadian citizen, and the kind of man
they want there. Another acquaintance I
picked up was a commercial traveller from
Toronto — a stout tubby energetic man, who
asked me, almost with tears in his eyes, why
England would not give up Free Trade and
study Canadian needs ? He was particularly
keen on English manufacturers studying
Canadian needs, and he put the matter in quite
a novel light as far as I was concerned. His
argument was that we made things in England
too well. What was the use, he demanded,
of making good durable things when Canadians
did not want them ? It only meant that the
States jumped in with inferior goods more
suited to the moment. He assured me that
Canada was a new country, and Canadians
did not want to buy things that would last
hundreds of years. Take furniture, machinery,
anything — Canadians only wanted stuff that

30 THE FAIR DOMINION

would last them a year or two, after which they
could scrap it and get something new. That
kept the money in circulation. Anyway, he
insisted, a thing was no good if it was better
than what a customer required. I had not
thought of things in that way before, and it
was interesting to hear him.

My third acquaintance was a member of
the Quebec Parliament, who started to chat
quite informally, and having ascertained that
I was fresh from the old country took me to
his house, that I might drink Scotch whisky,
and be informed that French Canadians loved
the King and hated the Boer War. I think
when a French Canadian does not know you
well, he will always make these two admissions
— but not any more — lest you should be un-
sympathetic or he should give himself away.

That is why, since the position of French
Canadians in Canadian politics will some day
be of the greatest importance, we ought all to
be thankful for the existence of Mr. Bourassa.
Mr. Bourassa is represented — by his opponents
— as the violent leader of a small faction of
French Canadians, as a trial to moderate men
of all sorts, including the majority of his own
French- Canadian fellow-citizens. All this is
very true. In Canadian politics, as they stand

A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC 31

at present, Mr. Bourassa stands for just that
and very little more. Politically he is an
extremist and a nuisance. But disregarding
for a moment immediate practical politics,
Mr. Bourassa stands for much more than that
—stands indeed for the real essence of French
Canada. He is the French Canadian in action,
shouting on the house-tops what most of them
prefer to dream of by the fire-side, insisting
upon bringing forward ideas which the others
would leave to be brought forward by chance
or in the lapse of time.

He has been called the Parnell of Canada,
but these international metaphors are gener-
ally calculated to mislead. The most that
Parnell ever demanded was Home Rule for
Ireland — that small part of Great Britain, that
fraction of the Empire. Mr. Bourassa does not
only want Home Rule for Quebec. He wants
it for Canada; only the Canada he sees thus
self-ruling is a Canada permeated by French
Canadianism. If Parnell had wanted Home
Rule, so that England, Scotland, and Wales
might be ruled from Dublin, he would have
attained to something of the completeness of
Mr. Bourassa's policy. Mr. Bradley, whose
book on Canada in the, Twentieth Century is
as complete as any one book on Canada could

32 THE FAIR DOMINION

be, and as up-to-date as any — allowing for the
fact that Canada changes yearly — declared in
in it, some years ago, that the French
Canadians realised that for them to populate
the North- West was a dream to be given up.
It may be a dream, but I doubt if it is given
up : and the dreams of a population more
prolific than any other on the face of the earth
may some day become realities. What is
against these dreams ? The influx of English
immigrants ? The rush for the land of Ameri-
can farmers ? But these are only temporary
obstacles. The Americans may go back again.
They often do. The English immigrants are
largely unmarried young men, and there are
no women in the West. They are making
ready the land, but the inheritors of it have yet
to appear. It is not strange if Mr. Bourassa
sees those inheritors among his own people —
only it is not yet their time, not for many years
yet — not for so many years yet that it seems
almost unpractical and absurd to look forward
to it. Even such a faith as that which Mr.
Bourassa has confessed to in regard to the
Eastern provinces — Quebec, Ontario, Nova
Scotia, New Brunswick — that ' In fifteen years
they will have become French in language and
Roman Catholic in faith,' seems highly unprac-

!

CHATEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC.

A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC 33

tioal. Ontario is not likely to become Homan
Catholic any faster than Ulster. But on the
other hand it will only increase in its anti-
Frenchness and its anti-Roman Catholicism
in so far as it is upheld and influenced by
Imperialism. Imperialism to Mr. Bourassa is
that bogey which goes about linking up all
those small non-conforming, hustling, militant
and materialistic communities which unaided
would come into the Catholic French- Canadian
fold. It is that odious system which pre-
vents other nations within the Empire —
such as French Canada — from developing
along their own natural lines. It is some-
thing which easily causes Mr. Bourassa to
forget that England and Englishmen — repre-
senting a distant sovereignty which keeps the
world's peace — have been a boon and a blessing
to French Canadians rather than otherwise ;
and causes him to remember that they may in
a moment become an imminent sovereignty
— imposing conscription, war, chapels (things
that the Ontarian takes to like a duck to
water) upon the whole Canadian community.
Such impositions would not only strengthen
the non-French Canadians, and ruin the natural
progress-to-power of the French Canadians ;
but they would topple down like a house of

34 THE FAIR DOMINION

cards those splendid dreams which might in a
French-Canadianised Canada become realities.
What dreams ? Rome shifted to Montreal for
one, and the Vatican gardens of the future
sweeping down to the St. Lawrence. The
whole vast wealth of the Dominion diverted
to the carrying out of those traditions which
are neither French nor English but Canadian
. . . started four hundred years before by
the captains and the priests, voyageurs and
martyrs, who in an age of unbelief went forth
in response to miraculous signs for the further-
ance of the glory of God.

I said that Quebec was full of memories.
It is well to remember that most of these are
French-Canadian memories. The Englishman,
at home or touring, thinks most naturally of
Wolfe in connection with Quebec, and thinks
with pride how that fight on the Plains of
Abraham marked, in Major Wood's words,
' three of the mightiest epochs of modern times
— the death of Greater France, the coming of
age of Greater Britain, and the birth of the
United States.' The splendid daring climb
of the English army, the romantic fevered
valour of its general, the suddenness and com-
pleteness of the reversal of positions, unite
to make us think that never was a more glorious

A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC 35

event, or one better calculated to appeal to
men of the New World. But do not let us
forget that for French Canadians — great event
as it was, severing their allegiance to France
for ever on the one hand, leaving them free
men as never before on the other — it was only
one event in a new world that was already for
them (but not for us) three hundred years old.
' Here Wolfe fell.' But here also, long before
Wolfe fell, Champlain stood, and French cap-
tains led valiant men on expeditions against
strange insidious foes, and the Cross was carried
onwards by the priests, and amid mystic voices
and divinations, and slaughterings and endur-
ances, the faith prevailed and the character
of the people was formed. They have no
hankering for France — these people to whom
Wolfe's battle seems but one out of many.
France, they think, has forsaken the Church.
But they are French still — these people — and
amazingly conservative in their customs and
their creed. We may tell them that England
— which sent out Wolfe — has given them material
prosperity, equality under the law, the means
of justice. They will reply, or rather they will
silently think, and only an occasional Nationalist
will dare to say : —

' We owe nothing to Great Britain. England

36 THE FAIR DOMINION

did not take Canada for love, or to plant the
Cross of religion as the French did, but in order
to plant their trading posts and make money.'
Gratitude is not a virtue nations take pride
in possessing ; they are indeed seldom nations
until they have forgotten to be grateful. I
suppose French Canadians are on their way
to forgetting to be grateful to England for
what she did in times past, but it is not because
they have any real quarrel with England, or
desire to injure her. Merely because they feel
that from England exudes that Imperialism
which appeals in no way from the past, and
menaces, they think, their future.

THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY 37

CHAPTER V

THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY

ALMOST directly one lands in Canada, one feels
the desire to move west. It is not that the
east fails to attract and interest, or that a
man might not spend many years in Quebec
province alone, and still have seen little of its
vast, wild, northern parts. Again there is the
Evangeline country, little known for all that
it is ' storied.' But the tide is west just at
present. Everybody asks everybody else —
Have you been West, or Are you going West ?
And every one who has been West or is going
feels himself to be in the movement. Some
day no doubt the tide will set back again,
or flow both ways equally. To-day it flows
westward.

I should have been sorry, however, if I had
not gone eastward at least as far as the Saguenay,
and I am duly grateful to the American who, so
to speak, irritated me into going there. He was
a thin, pale youth, somewhat bald from clutch-

38 THE FAIR DOMINION

ing at his hair, who sat next to me at dinner my
third day at Quebec. He announced to the
table at large that he was travelling for his
pleasure, but to judge from his strained face,
travelling for his pleasure was one of the
hardest jobs he had tried. He had been
doing Quebec, and he gave all Canadians
present to understand that Quebec had made
him very very tired. Look at the trips around
too. Look at the Montmorency Falls. Had
anybody present seen Niagara ? Well, if any-
body had seen Niagara, the Montmorency
Falls could only make him tired. One or two
Canadians present bent lower to their food.
But on the whole Canadians do not readily
enter into argument, and half Niagara Falls
is Canadian too, so that finding no opponents
the youth proceeded triumphantly to give the
relative proportions in figures of the two falls.
As he directed them chiefly at me, I felt bound
to say that I had seen falls about a tenth the
size of either which had struck me as worth
going to see. He then said that he guessed I
was from England. I said this was so. There-
upon he told me that everybody in England
was asleep. I suggested that sleep was better
than insomnia, and shocked by my soporific
levity, he advised me to go and have a look at

THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY 39

New York if I wanted to know how things
could hum. I said I supposed that New York
was a fairly busy place. A silly remark — only
ho happened to be a New Yorker, and all that
tiredness left him. I learnt so much about
the busyness of New York that I have hardly
forgotten it all yet.

Afterwards, but some time afterwards, when
the American had left the table, a Scottish
Canadian asked me if I had done the Saguenay
trip, and when I said that I had not done it,
he strongly advised me not to miss it.

' It 's the finest trip in Canada. Yes, sir.'
I decided to go. It takes just two days
from the start at Quebec to Chicoutimi and
back, and you go in a spacious sort of house-
boat which paddles along at just the right
pace, first on one side of the river then on the
other, stopping to load and unload at the little
villages along the St. Lawrence. There to the
left — a great sheet of silver hung from the cliff
— were the Montmorency Falls, which had made
that young American tired. A hundred and
twenty years ago Queen Victoria's father
occupied the Kent house, hard by the Falls,
now a hotel. Wolfe lay ill for two weeks in
a farm close by; probably on no other sick-
bed in the world were plans so big with fate

40 THE FAIR DOMINION

conceived. Then the He d' Orleans floats by
— that fertile island which Cartier named after
the Grape God four hundred years ago, because
of the vines that grew there. All this water-
way is history, French-Canadian history mostly.
With a fine mist hung over the river, conceal-
ing the few modern spires and roofs, you can
see the country to-day just as Cartier saw it
when he came sailing up. Neither four hundred
nor four thousand years will serve to modernise
the banks of the St. Lawrence. Take that
thirty-mile stretch where the Laurentides climb
sheer from the water. That is what Cartier
saw — nothing different. No houses, no people ;
only the grey rock growing out of the green
trees, and the grey sky overhead. Lower down,
with the sun shining as it did for us, Cartier
would see, if he came sailing up to-day, all
those picturesque French-Canadian villages
which have sprung up along the shore — Baie
St. Paul, St. Irenee, Murray Bay, Tadousac,
with the white farms of the Habitants, and the
summer homes of the Quebeckers and Mon-
trealers, and the shining spires of the churches,
and the wooden piers jutting far out into the
river. Those piers are particularly cheerful
places. There are always gangs of porters
waiting to run out freight from the hold, and

THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY 41

a gathering of ladies in gay frocks who want
to greet friends on board, and heaps of little
habitants playing about or smoking their pipes.
The habitant appears to start his pipe at the
age of eight or nine years, judging from those
who frequent the piers.

I think I was the only Englishman on board
that boat. Most of the passengers were Ameri-
cans, but cheerful ones — not like that young
man at the hotel — and we were all very keen
on seeing everything, so that it became dusk
much too soon for most of us. We got to
Tadousac just about dusk, which I was par-
ticularly sorry for, since of all the places we
passed, it held the most memories. In 1600
the whole fur trade of Canada centred round
this benighted little spot, and the men of
St. Malo were the rivals of the Basques for the
black foxes trapped by the Indians of that
date. I should like to have seen this queer
little port by daylight, but I suppose for most
purposes Parkman's description holds good, and
cannot easily be beaten: —

' A desolation of barren mountain closes
round it, betwixt whose ribs of rugged granite,
bristling with savins, birches, and firs, the
Saguenay rolls its gloomy waters from the
northern wilderness. Centuries of civilisation

42 THE FAIR DOMINION

have not tamed the wildness of the place ;
and still, in grim repose, the mountains hold
their guard around the waveless lake that
glistens in their shadow, and doubles, in its
sullen mirror, crag, precipice and forest.'

I know that Parkman goes on to say that
when Champlain landed here in April 1608
he found the lodges of an Indian camp, which
he marked in his plan of Tadousac. When we
landed, there were also a few shacks in much
the same spot, and in one of the best lighted
of them hung a placard to this effect : —

THE ONLY REAL INDIAN

BUY WORK FROM HIM.

The lodges Champlain saw belonged to an
Algonquin horde, ' Denizens of surrounding
wilds, and gatherers of their only harvest —
skins of the moose, cariboo, and bear ; fur of the
beaver, marten, otter, fox, wild cat, and lynx.'

Other days, other harvests. From the shack
of the Only Real Indian I saw one stout tourist
issue forth (a Chicago pork-packer he must have
been, if persons ever correspond to their pro-
fessions), laden with three toy bows and arrows,
as many miniature canoes, and what appeared
to be a couple of patchwork bedspreads. That
the descendant of braves should live by making

THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY 43

patchwork bedspreads seemed too much, even
though I had given up as illusions the Red
Indians of my boyhood. Far rather would I
at that moment have seen the stout tourist
come forth, either scalpless himself, or dangling
at his ample belt the raven locks of the Only
Real Indian.

In the night we went on to Chicoutimi, but
saw nothing of that, being asleep. We had
sung songs, American songs — ' John Brown's
Body,' 'Marching through Georgia,' etc., till
a late hour of the night ; and in any case the
bracing river air would have insured sleep.
Only in the morning as we came down the
Saguenay again did I wake to its beauty and
strangeness. Men have learnt to tunnel through
rocks at last, but the Saguenay learnt this art
for itself thousands of years ago. A wide water
tunnel through the sheer rock, a roofless tunnel,
open to the sky, that is the Saguenay — most
magnificent at the point where Cap Trinite
looms up, a wall of darkness fifteen hundred
feet high.

It is a curious fact that famous landscapes
always produce a remarkable frivolity in the
human tourist visiting them. Perhaps it is
man's instinct to assert himself against nature.
When the boat draws opposite Cap Trinite,

44 THE FAIR DOMINION

stewards produce buckets of stones and passen-
gers are invited to try and hit the Cap with the
stones from impossible distances. I do not
know that it greatly added to the pleasure of
the trip, but we all tried to hit the cliff with the
stones and most of us failed, and had to content
ourselves with drawing echoes from it. After
that we went on, and some of the white whales
which are characteristic of the Saguenay began
to appear, and experienced travellers explained
that they were not really white whales but a
sort of white porpoise. Once again, as we
passed it, Tadousac was invisible, but this time
because a white fog had wrapped it round. So
silently we turned out of the Saguenay into
the St. Lawrence. I think the silence of the
Saguenay was what had most impressed me.
Not very long before I had steamed down the
Hoogly where by day the kites wheel and shriek
overhead, and the air buzzes with insects'
sounds, and all night the jackals scream — a
noisy river, full of treacherous sandbanks, its
shores green with the bright poisonous green
of the East. The Saguenay, unique as it is in
many ways, seemed by the contrast of its deep-
ness and silence, and by the fresh darkness of
the rocks and trees that shut it in, to be peculi-
arly a river of the West. I do not know if it

THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY 45

would have made the somewhat bald young
American tired.

It is only fair to say that his attitude about
Quebec is not at all characteristic of his fellow-
countrymen. For most Americans, Quebec
province (and still more perhaps the woods of
Ontario) is becoming almost as popular a
playground as Switzerland is for Englishmen.
(Damping out has become a great craze among
Americans, and if the camping out can be done
amid unspoilt natural surroundings, close to
rivers where one can fish and woods where one
can hunt, an ideal holiday is assured them. I
forget who it was who said that much of the
old American versatility and nobility had
disappeared since the American boys left off
whittling sticks, but in any case the desire to
whittle sticks is renewed again among them,
from Mr. Roosevelt downwards. And in
Canada this whittling of sticks — this return to
nature — can easily be accomplished. For the
north is still there, unexploited. In Quebec
province, fishing and hunting clubs of Quebec
and Montreal have secured the rights over vast
tracts of country. So vast are those tracts
that one or two clubs, I was told, have not even
set eyes on all the trout streams they preserve.
This may be an exaggeration, though probably

46 THE FAIR DOMINION

not a great one. There remains — especially in
Ontario — much water and wood that any one
may sport in unlicensed, or get access to by
permission of the local hotel proprietor. Some
of the Americans on the boat had been fishing
in Quebec streams and told me of excellent
sport they had had, so that I began to wonder
why no Englishmen ever came this way. The
voyage to Canada is a little further than that
to Norway, but there are more fish in Canada.
And there is certainly only one Saguenay in the
world.

VOW MADE AT STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRE 47

CHAPTER VI

STE. ANNE DE BEATJPR^ AND A TRAVELLER'S VOW

STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRE is usually referred to
as the Lourdes of Canada. When a metaphor
of this sort is used it usually means that the
spot referred to is in some way inferior to the
original. In the case of Ste. Anne de Beaupre,
the inferiority is not, I believe, in the matter of
the number of miracles wrought there, but in
the matter of general picturesqueness. Ste.
Anne de Beaupre is not nearly so picturesque as
Lourdes. If you wish to palliate this fact, you
say, as one writer has said, that ' The beauty
of modern architecture mingles at Beaupre
with the remains of a hoary past.' If you do
not wish to palliate it, you say, as I do, that
Ste. Anne de Beaupre is not in the least pic-
turesque. I did not particularly care for the
modern architecture, and the hoary past is not
particularly in evidence. Do not suppose me
to say that Beaupre has not a hoary past.
Red Indians, long before the days of railroads,

48 THE FAIR DOMINION

travelled thither to pray at the feet of Ste.
Anne. Breton seamen, who belong only to
tradition, promised a shrine to Ste. Anne, if
she would save them from shipwreck. They
erected the first chapel. The second and
larger chapel was built as far back as 1657, and
miracles were quite frequent from then onwards.
Nevertheless, the basilica is quite new, and so is
the whole appearance of the place.

I visited it in company with a French-
Canadian commercial traveller. He was a
great big good-looking youth with curly hair
and blue eyes, and he travelled in corsets or
something of that sort for a Montreal firm.
I could not help thinking that many ladies
would buy corsets from him or anything else
whether they wanted them or not, because of
his charming boyish manner and his good
looks. He asked me to go to Ste. Anne de
Beaupre with him. He said that he supposed
that I was not a Catholic, but that did not
matter. He wished to go to the good Ste.
Anne, and it would be a good thing to go.
He had been several times before, but he had
not been for several years. He could easily
take the afternoon off, and first of all we would
go by the electric train to the good Ste. Anne,
and then on the way back we would step off

VOW MADE AT STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRfi 49

at the Falls station, and see the Montmorency
Falls, and also the Zoo that is there. It would
be great fun to see the Zoo. He had not seen
the Zoo for several years, and the animals would
be very interesting.

So we took an afternoon electric train.
There are electric trains for pilgrims, of whom
a hundred thousand at least are said to visit
the shrine yearly, and there are also electric
trains for tourists. We took a tourist train,
and having secured one of the little handbooks
supplied by the electric company, had the
gratification of knowing that even if the car
was pretty full it was, so the company claimed,
run at a greater rate of speed than any other
electric service.

At times in Canada I found myself getting
very slack in attempting descriptions of things
simply because some company that had rights
of transport over the particular district had,
so to speak, thrust into my hand some pamphlet
in which all the description was done for me.
Thus it was in the case of the district line be-
tween Quebec and Ste. Anne de Beaupre. ' It
is difficult,' I read in the electric company's
handbook which we had secured, 4 to describe
in words the dainty beauty of the scenery along
this route.'

D

50 THE PAIR DOMINION

' That is a nuisance,' I said to my companion,
' because words are the only things I could
describe it in.'

c It is much better to smoke,' said he.

So we smoked ; and now I tell you straight
out of that illogical pamphlet, that ' The route
from Quebec to Ste. Anne may be compared to
a splendid panorama. There are shady wood-
lands and green pastures, undulating hills and
sparkling rivers, whose banks are lined with
pretty villages, the tinned spires of the parish
churches rising above the rest of the houses,
sparkling in the sun.' There, a little un-
grammatically, you have the scene ' to which,'
adds my pamphlet, ' the Falls of Montmorency
river add a touch of grandeur.' Ste. Anne de
Beaupre itself is twenty-one miles from Quebec.
We went straight from the station into the
church, where the first thing to catch the eye
are the votive offerings and particularly the
crutches, walking-sticks, and other appliances
left there by pilgrims who, having been cured
of their infirmities by miracle, had no further
use for these material aids. It is difficult to
arrange such things in any way that can be
called artistic, and since the general effect is
nothing but ugly it might be wise for the church
officials also to dispense with such material

VOW MADE AT STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRfi 51

aids to faith. Apart from these the most
striking object is the miraculous statue. It
stands on a pedestal ten feet high and twelve
feet from the communion rails. The pedestal
was the gift of a New York lady, the statue
itself was presented by a Belgian family. At
the foot of it many people were kneeling. A
mass was being said and the church was very
full, and every time a petitioner got up from
his knees from the feet of the statue another
moved down the aisle and took his or her place.
I suppose we were in the church fully half an
hour before my companion found an oppor-
tunity to go and kneel at the feet of the good
8te. Anne, and having watched him there, I got
up from my place and went out into the village.
]t was rather a depressing village, full of small
hotels and restaurants and shops stocked with
miraculous souvenirs. I suppose more rubbish
is sold in this line than in any other. After
inspecting a variety of it, I bought a bottle of
cider and a local cigar and sat on a fence
smoking until my friend reappeared. He came
out most subdued and grave — not in the least
the boisterous person who had gone in — and
said we would now go back. As we had to wait
half an hour for a returning train, I suggested
that we should go and have some more cider,

52 THE FAIR DOMINION

but he said no, he would rather drink from the
holy spring. ' Although this water,' said my
pamphlet, ' has always been known to be there,
it is only within the last thirty or thirty-five
years that the pilgrims began to make a pious
use of it. What particular occasion gave rise
to this confidence, or when this practice first
spread among the people, cannot be positively
asserted. However it may be, it is undeniable
that faith in the water from the fountain has
become general, and the use of it, from motives
of devotion, often produces effects of a marvel-
lous nature.' Unfortunately, the fountain was
not working, owing, I expect, to the water
having got low in the dry weather, and my friend
had to go without his drink. He said, however,
that it did not matter, and remained in a grave,
aloof state all the way back in the train as far
as the Falls station, and indeed till we got to
the Zoo in the Kent house grounds. There,
the exertion of trying to get the beavers to
cease working and come out and show them-
selves to me — an exertion finally crowned
with success, for the fat, furry, silent creatures
came out and sat on a log for us — livened him
up a bit. But he fell into a muse again in
front of the cage containing the timber wolf,
and remained there so long that I was almost

VOW MADE AT STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRfi 53

overcome by the smell of this ferocious animal.
I got him away at last, and I do not think
he spoke after that until we got to Quebec
and were walking from the station to our
inn.

' I have made a vow,5 he then said suddenly.

' What sort of vow ? ' I inquired.

' I made it this afternoon,' he said, ' to the
good Ste. Anne — never any more to drink
whisky.'

' It 's not a bad vow to have made,' I
said.

' No,' he said seriously, ' whisky is very
terrible stuff. I shall never drink it again.
When I drink it it goes very quickly to my
head. Soon I am tight. That will not do.'

' Much better not to drink it certainly,' I
agreed.

' Yes,' he continued vehemently. ' I am
married. You did not guess that perhaps?
Also it is only recently that I have gone " on
the road." If the company I work for hears
that I go about and get tight, I shall at once
be fired. So I shall not drink any more whisky.
Never. That is why I made the vow to the
good Ste. Anne.'

We walked in silence the rest of the way to
the inn, and I reflected on the nature of vows.

54 THE FAIR DOMINION

It seemed very possible that a vow like this
might easily be a help to my companion.
He was obviously not what is called a strong
character. It is strange how often a charm of
manner goes with a weakness of the will.
And commercial travelling — particularly per-
haps in Canada — lays a man open to the
temptations of drink. If he went on drinking,
it would probably mean the ruin of the young
girl he had married. Only one has always the
feeling that a vow is only a partial aid to
keeping upright, just as a stick is to walking.
A man may lean too heavily on either. More-
over, the making of a vow, while it may
strengthen a man temporarily in one direction
tends to leave him unbalanced in other direc-
tions. It makes him feel so strong perhaps
in one part of him that he forgets other parts
where he is weak. I rather think that the last
part of these somewhat superficial reflections
upon vows occurred to me later in the evening,
and not as we were walking home. We had
had supper by that time, and my companion
had drunk a good deal of water during the meal
— a beverage, by the way, which is not particu-
larly safe either here or in any other Canadian
town. At times he had been depressed by it,
at times elevated. After we had smoked to-

VOW MADE AT STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRS 55

gether and he had grown more and more rest-
less, he jumped up and said :

; Let us go out for a walk.'

' Where to ? ' I asked.

* Oh, up on to the terrace,' he said. ' I tell
you,' he went on excitedly, ' where I will take
you. There is a special place up there that I
know very well. It is where one meets the
girls. We will go there to-night and meet the
girls.'

Really, I could have given a very good
exposition of the temptation offered by vows
at that moment when he suggested this Senti-
mental Journey.

56 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER VII

A HABITANT VILLAGE AND ITS NOTAIRE
C IL TEOTTE BIEN.'

The second time I made use of this simple
compliment I was again being driven by a
French Canadian, and again it was on an
extraordinarily bad road. But the vehicle
was a sulky, and the road was a country road
— about halfway between Quebec and Montreal.
I had been already two days in the Habitant
country which the ordinary Englishman misses.
Tourists in particular will go through French
Canada too fast. Their first stop after Quebec
is Montreal, and the guide-books help them to
believe that they have lost nothing. It may
be that they do lose nothing in the way of
spectacular views or big hotels, but on the
other hand they have undoubtedly lost the
peaceful charm of many a Laurentian village,
and they have seen nothing at all of the life
of the French - Canadian farmer. That is a
pity for the English tourist, because they too,

A HABITANT VILLAGE 57

the Habitants, belong to the Empire, and we
ought to know them for what they are apart
from their politics — courteous, solid, essen-
tially prudent folk, often well to do, but with
no disposition to make a show of themselves.

I had spent my two days at the villa of a
most hospitable French lady, in one of the
older villages on the St. Lawrence. It was
not exactly a beautiful village — rather ram-
shackle in fact — but remarkably peaceful, and
the great smooth river running by must give
ifc a perennial charm, such as comes from having
the sea near. I had missed my train going
from that village, and had passed the time by
taking lunch at a little inn near the station.
It was Friday, and the landlord gave me pike
and eggs for lunch. I had seen my pike and
several others lying in a sandy ditch near,
passing a sort of amphibious life in it, until
Friday and a guest should make it necessary
for one of them to go into the frying pan.
The landlord came and chatted with me while
I had lunch, and was grieved to find that I
was not a Catholic. I was English, but not
Catholic ? I said that was so, and he shook
his head sorrowfully. But there were Catholics
in England, he asked a little later. I said, Oh
yes, certainly. Many ? I said that there

58 THE FAIR DOMINION

must be a good many, but I could not tell
him the exact numbers. Would a tenth of
the English at least be Catholics, he next
demanded ? I said I thought at least that
number, but I left him, I fear, a disappointed
man. He had hoped more from England
than that, and even my strenuous praise of
the fried pike did not draw a smile from him.

My compliment about the horse drawing
the sulky — to go back to that drive, obtained
a better response. The driver replied in the
French tongue : ' Monsieur, he trots very well,
particularly in considering that he has the
age of twenty-eight years.'

I said that this was wonderful, and the
driver replied that it was, but that in French
Canada such wonders did happen. He was
intensely patriotic, and this made the drive
more interesting. He was all for French-
Canadian things, excepting, I think, the roads,
which were indeed nothing but ruts, some
of the ruts being less deep than the others,
and being selected accordingly for the greater
convenience of our ancient steed. I liked his
patriotism. It was at once so genuine and so
complete. For example, when I said that I
had not seen any Jersey cows on the farms
we had passed, the driver said : c No. The

A HABITANT VILLAGE 59

cow of Jersey is a good cow and gives much
milk. But the Canadian cow is a better cow
and gives still more milk.' I was unable to
make out what the prevailing milch-cow was
in that part. Canada has, I believe, begun
to swear by the Holstein, but this can hardly
as yet be claimed as the Canadian cow. Still
it passed the time very pleasantly to have my
driver so enthusiastic, and of what should a
man speak well, if not of his own country ?
He articulated his French very slowly and
distinctly, so that I was able to understand
him more easily than I should have under-
stood a European Frenchman. I was surprised
at this, because one is usually told that French
Canadians talk so queerly that they are very
hard to follow. Perhaps my obvious inferiority
in the language caused those Habitants I met
to adapt themselves to my necessity. I can
only say that from a few days' experience of
conversation with all sorts and conditions, I
carried away the impression that French-
Canadian was a very clear and easy language.
As for the country, I should call it serene and
spacious in aspect rather than fine. The farm-
houses are pleasant enough and comfortable
within, but their immediate surroundings are
apt to be untidy. Very seldom of course

60 THE FAIR DOMINION

does one see a flower garden, and vegetables
do not make amends for the lack of flowers.
On the other hand, the tobacco patch that is
so frequently to be seen in the neighbourhood of
the small farms is pleasant to look at, especially
for one who thinks much of smoke. There is
not much satisfaction to the eye in the small
wired fields, nor would either the farming or
the soil startle an English farmer. I think
that the maple woods are the one thing that he
would regard with real envy.

Nevertheless, no one would have denied that
it was a really pretty village, to which my
driver brought me at last in the sulky. It
was built all round an old church in a sort of
dell, behind which the land rose steeply to a
wood of maples. I had been given an intro-
duction to the cure, and we drove to his house
by the church, only to be told by the sexton
(I think it was the sexton) that Monsieur le
Cure had, much to his regret, been called to
Quebec, but had begged that I would go over
to the notaire, who would be pleased to show
me everything that was to be seen. We went
to the notaire. I think he was the post-
master too — at any rate he lived in the post
office, and a very kindly old gentleman he
was. I do not know one I have liked more

A HABITANT VILLAGE 61

on so short an acquaintance, though he did
start by giving me Canadian wine to drink. It
was a sort of port or sherry — or both mixed —
and was made, I think he said, in Montreal.
It had the genuine oily taste, but also a smack
of vinegar. That in itself would not have
mattered so much, if the notaire had not said
it was best drunk with a little water, and
provided me with water from a saline spring
which had its source in his backyard. These
saline springs seem not uncommon in Canada,
and must be considered as a distinct asset.
But not mixed with port. Some local tobacco
which was very good, as indeed much of the
tobacco grown in Quebec province seems to be,
took the taste away, and after that the notaire
proposed that he should take me out to see
one of the huts where they boil down the maple
water in the early spring. He told me that
my own horse and driver should rest, and that
we should go on the carriage of Monsieur
Blanc which was, it appeared, already in
waiting, together with Monsieur Blanc him-
self. Monsieur Blanc was the local miller,
and solely for the purpose of showing the
village to a stranger from England he had put
himself to all this trouble. After we had all
bowed to one another and exchanged compli-

62 THE FAIR DOMINION

ments, we started for the maple wood, and all
the way the notaire explained to me the economy
of the village. It appeared that the farms
round averaged eighty acres of arable land,
and a man and his son would work one of that
size. Each farmer would also have rights of
grazing on pasture land which was held in
common — not to mention his piece of maple
wood. All the farmers belonged to a co-opera-
tive farmers' society, which saved much when
purchasing seeds, implements, and so forth.
The notaire himself was secretary of this
society. I believe he was also secretary of
pretty well everything that mattered, and
might be regarded as the business uncle of the
parish in which the cure was spiritual father.
As we drove along, avoiding roads as much
as possible, because the fields were so much
more level, he greeted everybody and every-
body greeted him, stopping their field work
for the purpose. Jules left hay-making to
show us the shortest cut to the nearest hut ;
Antoine fetched the key. It was a tiny wooden
shack, the one we inspected — standing in the
middle of the trees — with just room in it for
the heating apparatus and the boilers to boil
the maple water in. The cups which are
attached to the trees in the early spring, when

A HABITANT VILLAGE 63

the sap begins to run — the tapping is done
liigh up — hung along the wooden walls. The
notaire explained the whole process to me.
In the spring, when all is sleet and slush and
nothing can be done on the farm, the farmer
and perhaps his wife come up into the wood,
and tap the trees and boil the water up until
the syrup is formed. It takes them days,
very cold days, and they camp out in the hut,
though it hardly seemed possible that there
should be room for them. But it is all very
healthy and pleasant, and they drink so much
of the syrup, while they are working, that
they usually go back to their farms very ' fat
and salubrious.' So the notaire said, and he
also assured me that seven years before another
English visitor who spoke French very badly
(he put it much more politely than that though)
had come to the village in the spring, and slept
in one of the huts for days, and helped make
the sugar and enjoyed himself thoroughly. I
told the notaire I could quite believe it and
wished I had come in the spring too. I am
not sure that I shall not go back in the spring
some day, for the simplicity of the place was
fascinating, even though the railway had come
closer, and land had doubled in value, and the
farmers were more scientific than they used to

64 THE FAIR DOMINION

be and made more money, though even so —
as the notaire earnestly declared — they would
would never spend it on show. I remarked
that the notaire, even while he was recounting
these modern innovations, such as wealth, was
not carried away by the glory of them as a
Westerner would be. He took a simple pride
in the fact that the village marched forward,
but he was prouder still that it remained
modest. And when we got back to the post
office, he told me that what he liked best was
the simplicity of it all. People used to ask
him sometimes why he who spoke English
and Latin and Greek, for he had been five
years at college, qualifying to become a notaire,
should be content to live in such a small out-
of-the-way place, instead of setting up in
Quebec or Montreal. They could not under-
stand that to be one's own master, and not to
be rushed hither and thither at the beck of
clients, contented him, especially in a place
where the farmers looked upon him as their
friend, and he could play the organ in the
village church. He made me understand it
very well, even though his English was rusty
(for I think the syrup-making Englishman
had been the last he had talked with), and he
had a scholarly dislike to using any but the

A HABITANT VILLAGE 65

right word, and he would sometimes bring up
a dozen wrong ones and reject them, before
our united efforts found the only one that
conveyed his precise meaning.

I think I understood, and many times on
the way back, seated behind the twenty-eight
year-old horse, I said to myself, that altogether
the notaire was a very fine old gentleman, and
if there were many such to be found in the
French Canadian villages, I hoped they would
not change too soon. To make the money
circulate — after the fashion of the Toronto
drummer — is a virtue no doubt ; but courtesy
and simplicity and prudence are also virtues
that not the greatest country that is yet to
come will find itself able to dispense with.

66 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER VIII

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL

JUST as a man who knows mountains can in
a little time describe the character of a moun-
tain that is new to him, so a man who knows
the country in general will soon find himself
becoming acquainted with new country. It
is not so with cities. Only a long residence
in it will reveal the character of a city. I
suppose that is because man is more subtle
than nature. A clay land is always a clay
land ; it produces the same crops, the same
weeds, the same men. But who will under-
take to say what a city on a clay land produces ?
Only the man who has long been familiar with
the particular city, and he probably will not
even be aware that it stands on clay.

This is preparatory to saying that being a
stranger to Montreal, I did not find out much
about it in the few days I was there, and I
will not pretend that I did. It is, I suppose,
architecturally, far the most beautiful city in

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 67

the Dominion, and indeed in the Western
Hemisphere, and for that very reason appears
less strange to European eyes than most other
Canadian towns. I would not suggest that all
European towns are architecturally beautiful,
or that Montreal is anything but Canadian
inwardly. Superficially it looks like some fine
French town. It also smells French.

' But thou thereon didst only breathe
And sentst it back to me,
Since when it blows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee.'

Thus England might address France on the
subject of Montreal, though indeed France
did more than breathe on Montreal. I would
not be taken to suggest that the smell is a
malodorous one — merely French. You get
just that smell in summer in any French town
from Rouen to Marseilles, and it is probably
due to nothing but the sun being at the right
temperature to bring out the mingled scent
of omelettes and road grit, cigarettes, aperitifs,
and washing in sufficient strength to attract
the sensitive British nose. As for Montreal's
French appearance — the city is by all accounts
strictly divided into a French East-end and
an English West-end, St. Laurent being the
dividing line. But when I passed west of

68 THE PAIR DOMINION

St. Laurent, and hundreds of French men and
French women and French children continued
to file past me, and I asked my way many
times in English and was not understood, I
began to doubt the reality of that dividing
line. It seems a pity that there should be one,
but there is of course, and it runs through
Canada as well as Montreal. Race and religion
and language combine to keep that line marked
out, and it only becomes faint in business
quarters.

The time has gone by for great commercial
undertakings to be conducted by means of
gesticulations or by the aid of an interpreter.
Master and man must speak the same language,
at any rate outwardly. Therefore all clerks
learn English, which is also American ; and I
take it that statistics, if they were kept, would
show many more French Canadians speaking
English every year — whatever they may be
thinking.

So commerce, long the butt of moralists,
takes its part among the moral influences of
the world. Already writers like Mr. Angell
have begun to assure us that it alone —
by reason of its enormous and far-reaching
interests — can keep international war at a
distance : here is an example of how it

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 69

increases peace within a nation. In the end,
perhaps, Mammon himself may appear, purged
of his grossness upon the canonical list — St.
Mammon !

Montreal has, so I am told, sixty-four million-
aires— real, not dollar millionaires ; self-made,
not descended millionaires ; strenuous, not idle
millionaires. Most of them live in Sherbrooke
Street, or near it, on the way up to the Mountain.
It is a fine wide road with an extraordinary
variety of houses in it. You cannot point to
any one house and say this is the sort of house a
millionaire builds, for the next one is quite
different, and so is the next and the next.
It is natural that Canadians should be more
original in their house-building than our
millionaires. They are more original men alto-
gether. They have made their money in a
more original way, and when they have made
it, they have to think out original methods of
spending it — unlike ours, who find the etiquette
of it all ready made for them, and a practised
set of people who want nothing more than to
be able to help millionaires scatter their money
in the only correct and fashionable way. You
have to think everything out for yourself in
Canada, even to the spending of your money.
That is, if you have the money in large quantities.

70 THE FAIR DOMINION

For the ordinary person the inherent slipperi-
ness of the dollar suffices, and he will find
that it will circulate itself without his worrying.
The diversity of house-building, such as may
be found in Sherbrooke Street, should give
encouragement to Canadian architects, but
does, as a matter of fact, let in the American
architects as well. I could not feel that they
had altogether succeeded in this street — cer-
tainly not half so well as they have succeeded
in some of the business buildings, especially
the interior of the Bank of Montreal — but that
is not surprising. Architects must have their
motives, and the reasons that went to the
building of some of the stately private houses
of Europe have ceased to exist now. The most
that a man can demand from his house —
certainly in Canada — is that it shall be luxuri-
ous. Nobody is going to keep retainers there.
The three hundred servants even that went to
make up the household of an Elizabethan
nobleman could not be had in Canada either for
love or money. Those three hundred serve in
the bank or the shops — not in the houses —
and it is there that the big man works also.
Slowly we come to the right proportions of
things ; nor am I suggesting that the private
houses of the Canadian millionaires are in the

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 71

least lacking in size. They are as large as they
need be, if not larger ; and where they did not
altogether succeed was, I thought, in the
attempt made with some of them to achieve
importance by rococo effects. The road itself,
curiously enough, was rather bad and rutty ;
I began to think, seeing it, that there is some
strange influence at work in French Canada
which prevents a road from ever being first-
rate. It may be that since roads there are only
needed in summer, for a half year instead
of a whole one, the care and affection we lavish
upon them is not necessary. The good snow
comes and turns Sherbrooke Street into a sleigh-
bearing thoroughfare only comparable with
those of St. Petersburg. The ruts are drifted
up and vanish — why bother about them ?
It is a good enough explanation. If another is
needed, it may be that there is money to be
made — by those in charge of the keeping up of
the roads — by the simple method of not keeping
them up.

Montreal has slums as well as Sherbrooke
Street, which seems to show that sixty-four
millionaires are no real guarantee of a city's
perfectness. I heard about those slums from
the editor of one of Montreal's leading news-
papers. The subject arose out of a question

72 THE FAIR DOMINION

I put him as to whether he could tell me the
difference between Conservatives and Liberals
in Canada. Some people maintain that the
difference even in England is so slight as to be
unreal. To a Canadian who is not much of a
politician (but is, of course, either a Liberal
or a Conservative), the question amounts to
being a catch question. He has to think for a
long time before he answers. This editor, who
was a Liberal, took it quite coolly.

' Oh,' he said, ' Liberals here are very much
like Liberals in the old country ; we stand for
Social Reform and the interests of the People.'

Then he told me about the slums in Montreal.
But for these I should have felt doubtful about
the parallel, even though it was drawn by so
eminent an authority as the editor of a news-
paper. For, naturally, at present in most parts
of Canada there is no People (with our own
English capital P) to stand for, just as there are
no peers and no Constitution. Where there
are slums, there may be a People to be repre-
sented. The more is the pity that there should
be slums. Why does Montreal possess them ?
Largely, I suppose, for the reason that any very
great city possesses them. There are landlords
who can make money out of them, there are
people so poor that they will live in them;

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 73

and their poverty is accounted for by the fact
that cities draw the destitute as the moon the
tides. It seems against reason that Canada,
capable of absorbing hundreds of thousands of
immigrants, calling for them to be absorbed,
so long as they are able men, should have any
destitute to be drawn to the cities ; but it has
to be remembered that no immigration laws
can really prevent a percentage of incapables
arriving. They may not be incapables as such,
but they are incapables on the land, which is
indeed in Canada endlessly absorbent, but
absorbent only of those who have in them in
some way the land-spirit. To expect the land
to take on hordes of the city-bred without ever
failing is to dream. It would be easier for the
sea to swallow men clothed in cork jackets.
Some are bound to be rejected, and they turn
to the cities. But the cities of a New World
cannot absorb indefinite numbers of men ;
London or Glasgow cannot. The work is not
there for them — not for all of them.

The Canadian winter also has to be re-
membered as a factor driving men to cities like
Montreal. Even good men on the land cannot
always during the winter obtain work on the
farms ; or think that the little they can make
there is not worth while. So they, too, make

74 THE FAIR DOMINION

for the cities, not always to their own improv-
ing. This problem of the Canadian winter
is one that has still to be reckoned with, and no
doubt the Canadians will solve it in due course
— perhaps by some extension of the Russian
methods whereby the peasant of the summer
becomes the handicraftsman of the whiter.
It is not the winter itself that is at fault in
Canada, as used to be thought ; it is the method
of dealing with it. The Canadian may not mind
the hard, cold months — may even boast of
them, but he cannot ignore them. And the
solution of the winter problem seems to be that
though Canada is marked out as an agricultural
country, it must also equally become a manu-
facturing one, so that men — who cannot hiber-
nate like dormice — may be able to work the
year through. The whitest nation is that
nation whose leisure is got by choice not by
compulsion.

There must be local reasons, too, for Montreal
slums, but these a visitor is not happy in
describing. Municipal mismanagement is un-
fortunately not exclusive to Europe ; and my
editor gave me examples of it in Montreal
which were impressive without being novel.

He also pointed out that there were forty
thousand Jews in Montreal, as though that

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 75

might have something to do with her slums.
Others point out that the Catholic Church,
which believes that the poor must be always
with us, is supreme in Montreal ; poverty and
the faith, they say, go always together. I think
it is truest to argue that, while all these things
are in their degree contributory, it is not fair
to fix on any one of them as the chief cause of
the ill. One thing is certain. Montreal's slums
are not typical of Canada, but of a great city.
No great city has as yet found itself completely,
and the greater it is, the less soluble are its
problems of poverty. It may be that they can
be resolved only by the great cities ceasing to
exist in the form we know them.

Meanwhile it looks as though the welfare
of employees is not being neglected by the
leading directors of industry. Take, for ex-
ample, the Angus Shops, which are larger than
any other engineering shops in the world.
Here are built these huge houses of cranks and
pistons, the railway engines of the Canadian
Pacific, that hustle one from end to end of the
Dominion ; here also are turned out all else
that appertains to the biggest railway company
in existence. In these shops a system has been
introduced which might be called a Bourneville
system, only Canadianised. The management

76 THE FAIR DOMINION

refers to it as Welfare Work, and it consists
mainly in certain methods whereby the men
can obtain good food — while they are working
— at low prices, apprentices are helped to an
education, the cost of ' holiday homes ' is de-
frayed, and so on. Very sensibly the manage-
ment admits the system to be a part of a business
plan, which it finds remunerative. The idea
that beneficence plays a leading part in it is
almost scouted ; indeed it would not be easy
to persuade Canadian working-men that their
bosses were doing things from charity. I went
over the shops, and found them built on a vast
and airy scale. Not being an engineering sort
of person, I usually feel, when I invade a
machinery place, like some unfortunate beetle
that has strayed into a beehive, and may at any
moment be attacked by the busy and alarming
creatures that are buzzing about there. As I
watched the huge engines, swung like bags of
feathers from the roof, some black demon
would heave showers of sparks at me, and when
I started back, another would come raiding out
with red-hot tongs. I admired respectfully.
But I am one of those who can enjoy my
honey just as much without knowing just
how it was made. Still, here was a big bit
of Montreal, and what miles of French houses

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 77

with green shutters one drove past to get
to it!

It would be absurd to suggest that poverty
or slums are conspicuous things in Montreal.
The average tourist will see none of them, but
only many beautiful things — from the Bank of
Montreal to the Cathedral, from the Lachine
Rapids to the Mountain. I will not describe
shooting the Rapids, it has been so often done.
I wish I could describe the view from the
Mountain. It is the most beautiful view of a
city that can be seen. Marseilles from her hill
is beautiful, so is Paris from Champigny.
From neither of these, nor from any hill that
I know of, is there so complete a view of so fair
a city. The Mountain is wooded, and through
the arches of the trees you gain a score of
changing outlooks ; but from the edge you see
all Montreal — houses and streets and spires,
each roof and gate, each chimney and window —
so it seems. And beyond, the great river,
and beyond, and on every side — Canada. If
there were a mountain above Oxford, some-
tiling like this might be seen.

It was up this wooded steep to Fletcher's
field, where an altar had been set up, that the
great Eucharistic procession of 1910 wound its
way. I was in Montreal just before this event,

78 THE FAIR DOMINION

for which the Montrealers had spent months
preparing, and I realised a little why Montreal
hopes some day to be the New Home. The
whole city was in a fervour of enthusiasm. A
society had been formed for the special purpose
of growing flowers to line the way along which
the Cardinal-legate would walk, and gifts of
money for the same purpose had been received
from every part of Canada. The papers, of
course, were full of every detail about Church
dignitaries arriving or about to arrive. Nor
were the shops behindhand. ' Eucharistic Con-
gress ! House decoration at moderate prices '
was everywhere placarded ; and papal flags and
papal arms were to be had cheap. There were
Congress sales, too, and you could buy Congress
c creations ' from the dressmakers, Congress
hats from the milliners, Congress boots from the
bootmakers.

On the day that Cardinal Vannutelli arrived,
in a dismal and violent downpour of rain, all
Montreal in macintoshes was to be seen
dashing for the Bonsecours wharf to offer its
respectful greetings to the papal legate.

Will the Montrealers' dream of providing the
New Rome ever be achieved ? Who can say ?.
Rome, though Italians may become subversive
of the faith, will perhaps stand for ever. If it

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL 79

ceased, as the centre of the Catholic faith,
Montreal might certainly claim to take its
place. It is already the centre of French-
Canadian Catholicism ; it might become the
religious centre of Canada. There is no cer-
tainty that Catholicism will persist in Canada
only among the French Canadians. It seems
equally possible that Rome will prevail among
non-French Canadians. Both in Canada and
the States her strides forward have been
enormous — comparable perhaps only to the
steps taken in other directions by Free Thought
in Europe. Is it that Catholicism makes
peculiar appeal in a new country, or that in
these new countries the propagation of the
faith has been great and unceasing ? These
are debatable questions (though undebatable,
I think, is the statement that in the New
World Rome has a marvellous history of things
attempted splendidly and achieved without
reproach). I will not debate, then, but rather
return to the Mountain and ask you to picture
the great Eucharistic procession moving slowly
up to it — up to the altar built there in the
open, under the high and clear Canadian skies
— all the inhabitants of a mighty city moving
with it, till the city itself is left behind and
all that is low and earthly left for the moment

80 THE FAIR DOMINION

with it. Then you will have in your mind one
picture of Montreal at least not unworthy of
it. It will be a picture of Montreal at its best
and highest — a city of the faithful — near to their
Mountain.

TORONTO AND NIAGARA PALLS 81

CHAPTER IX

TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER

FROM Montreal to Toronto is a pleasant run
through a southern part of Canada. One
passes orchards and woods and Smith's Falls,
where bricks are made, and Peterborough,
which has the largest hydraulic lift-lock in
the world. The Union railway station at
Toronto, when I got there, was a seething mass
of people and baggage, with an occasional
railway official hidden in the vortex. I spent
an hour trying to put a bag into the parcel-
room, and after that gave up trying. Canadians
are singularly patient in matters of this kind.
Laden with heavy bags, they will collect in
crowds outside the small window of a parcel-
room, and burdened thus will wait there for
hours without a murmur, while the youth
inside lounges about at his leisure. My temper
has frequently' been stretched to the limit in
(rermany when I have had to wait perhaps ten
minutes for a penny stamp while the Prussian

82 THE FAIR DOMINION

postal official behind the glass slit curled his
moustaches in imitation of the Kaiser. I think
the methods at that parcel-room in Toronto
were even more trying. I will admit that it
was Labour Day, and that Toronto was also in
the throes of the World's Fair. But in a city
of that size one would expect some preparation
to be made for forthcoming throes. The truth
seems to be that throughout Canada important
events, attracting immense crowds, are brought
off without any extra provision being made.
Montreal managed to contain its Congress
hordes pretty well, but Toronto during the
World's Fair had a general air about it of sleep-
ing six in a bed, if it slept at all. I kept coming
across the same sort of thing at other places.
Calgary, I remember, looked for the few days
I was there like the Old Kent Road on a Satur-
day night, so crowded was it with people who
had come in to witness the return to its native
heath of a victorious football team. Regina
was overrun with the Canadian bankers who,
in massive formation, were touring the North-
West. In one or two small places in the Rockies
enormous trainloads of Canada's leading mer-
chants, who were inspecting British Columbia
with an eye to its future, were deposited
for a day in passing, and caused as much con-

TOKONTO AND NIAGARA FALLS 83

fusion as the canoe-loads of savages must have
done when they descended on Robinson Crusoe's
island.

Labour Day is in the New World very different
from what it is with us. In Canada, if you
like, you may for three hundred and sixty-four
days labour and do all that you have to do, but
the three hundred and sixty-fifth is Labour Day,
and no manner of work — except transportation
— may be done that day. Transport work is
necessary, because by way of observing Labour
Day it is the thing to go somewhere in great
multitudes, preferably by rail, and pursue the
sort of pleasure that is only to be obtained by
those who seek it multitudinously.

Toronto was on this occasion a chosen spot
for people to rollick in. This, added to the fact
that the World's Fair was also in progress,
prevented me from being able to get a room
for the night, though I applied at five different
hotels. At the sixth, which was full of excited
commercial travellers, I was granted a bed on
a top landing. I did not mind so much because
I was seeing Toronto in a lively state. Ordin-
arily, I imagine, Toronto is the least bit too
decorous, not devoid of cheerfulness, but not
joyous either. There is nothing Parisian about
Toronto, you would say. This stands to reason,

84 THE FAIK DOMINION

because if there is any Parisian air in Canada at
all it belongs to Montreal, and Toronto would
be the last place to imitate Montreal in any
manner. The extraordinary rivalry that exists
between the great East Canadian cities never
leads to imitation. On the plains it is different.
Winnipeg is the great model for all the little
towns on the plains. But while Quebec resents
the idea that Montreal is a much more important
city than itself, and Montreal regrets that
the seat of Government should be at so small
a place as Ottawa, and Toronto considers
Montreal ill-balanced in spite of its wealth,
each of them would only consent to expand
its own real superiority along its own par-
ticular lines and in its own particular manner.
Still on Labour Night Toronto was quite gay.
It did not look like the Boston of Canada at
all, though it has substantial grounds, I read
somewhere, for making this claim. I could
realise that it was entitled to make this claim
if it wanted to. If one shut one's eyes to the
crowds, one could feel an air of brisk sobriety
permeating it ; and everything that one reads
about it goes to show that a brisk sobriety is
what it aims at. It keeps the Sabbath, for
example, most strictly, though it hustles or
almost hustles the rest of the week. I should

TORONTO AND NIAGARA FALLS 85

guess Toronto places briskness next to godli-
ness, not a very bad second either. Its in-
dustries and its opulence are too well known
to be worth detailing here. What struck me
as most interesting about Toronto was that it
seemed to represent more than any other place
in Canada what we mean in England when we
talk of Canadians. We do not mean the
French Canadians of Quebec Province, nor the
American Canadians and English public-school
boys who are to be found in such numbers in
Alberta and the plains. The sort of people we
are thinking of are people who have been born
in Canada, who have even spent generations
there, but are, nevertheless, British by descent
and British in tongue. There are people of
this sort in other parts of Canada. The in-
habitants of the Maritime Provinces are such,
in spite of the fact that Mr. Bourassa has
claimed that within fifteen years they will
have become French in language and Roman
Catholic in faith. Mr. Bourassa has made the
same claim, to be sure, with regard to the
inhabitants of Ontario. In the meantime, it
would be truer to describe the inhabitants of
Ontario as Canadians in the English sense.
And Toronto is their capital. It is, of course,
the home of the United Empire Loyalists who

86 THE FAIR DOMINION

settled here when the States broke away from
our rule. The temper that made any rule but
England's and any liberty that was not English
liberty unendurable still remains, and I think
Mr. Bourassa will have his work cut out to
Gallicise them. Still even the sternest tradi-
tions of loyalty do not prevent — nay, even
encourage — a certain change in the character
of a people.

It is probable that Ontarians are less English
now than they were, just as Quebeckers are
less French. Which have the right to be
held more essentially Canadian may be
questioned, but I repeat that when we
in England talk of Canadians we have in
mind a type of men to which the Ontarians
correspond more than any others. It would
be absurd, no doubt, to look for the English
type in a metropolis like London, and perhaps
it is absurd to look for the Ontarian type in a
metropolis like Toronto. But it is less absurd,
I think, and anyhow I did look for it there.
What did I find ? Well, I hope elsewhere to
go cautiously and delicately into this matter
of what a typical Canadian is like. Here I
will only say that if you can imagine a Low-
land Scot, cautious and self-possessed, out-
wardly resisting American exuberance and

TORONTO AND NIAGARA FALLS 87

extravagance, but inwardly by slow degrees
absorbing — and thereby moderating — that
hustling spirit of which these things are mani-
festations, you have something not unlike the
Canadian of Toronto. Remember that Toronto
is the southern gateway of Canada. It fronts
on the States. It deals with the States.
Between it and the States there is constant
intercourse. It pursues the same industries,
following in many cases the same methods.
Many American managers of men are to be
found in Toronto. It is not unnatural that
some of the American spirit should dwell there
also, and even tend to breed there.

Now for the Fair. Fairing is a pretty old
thing, and I have done a good deal of it, but
fairing at Toronto struck me as being some-
how new. I do not mean in the way of the
exhibits one saw. They were nothing out of
the way to any one who has seen the more
famous exhibitions of the Old World, and the
arrangements struck me as poor. The grounds
by the lake are fairly extensive, but the build-
ings are second-rate. I thought when I saw
the fruit exhibit in one of them that the whole
display was little better than at a little English
village flower show. But the keenness of the
crowd visiting the ground ! There was the

88 THE FAIR DOMINION

novelty. They did not glimpse at things in
our blase European way, and then sink into seats
to listen to the band. They did listen to the
band, but that was because the band was part of
the show ; and they wanted to do the show, every
inch of it. Whole families camped for the day
on the grounds. They brought meals with
them in paper bags and boxes to fortify them-
selves lest they should drop before they had
seen everything. Not that there was any lack
of smartness either. The ladies had on their
best hats and frocks, and the Canadian best in
these respects is very fine. But one did not
suspect them, as one would have suspected
ladies at the White City or the Brussels Exhibi-
tion, of being there merely to show themselves
off. Their frocks were in honour of the Fair.
The Pair was the thing. It was a scene of the
greatest enthusiasm under a tolerably hot sun.
I had been asked to note if any English firms
had taken the trouble to exhibit, and I am
bound to say that I saw very few. It seems
a pity when one considers the sort of people
who visit the Fair — not merely a crowd amusing
itself for an hour or two with glancing at the
exhibits, but a crowd trying to find out what
there was to buy — a crowd with dollars in its
pockets and plenty of dollars in its banks.

TORONTO AND NIAGARA FALLS 89

I dare say there are difficulties in the way.
There was not, for example, indefinite room
for more exhibits, nor are Canadian manu-
facturers, with rumours of reduced tariffs
going about, to be presumed eager to encourage
competitors. Still, it seemed a pity.

I clove my way to bed that night on the top
landing through a horde of keen commercial
travellers joyfully discussing all the business
the exhibition would bring them. Next day
I went to Niagara, by steamer, across the great
lake. Toronto owes at least half its greatness
to the Falls, and there should be, but I do
not think there is, a really big monument to
their discoverer, Father Louis Hennepin. Very
likely, though, the discovery of Niagara was
its own reward, especially for so inquisitive a
man as that friar. He has himself confessed
how, in the old days, when he was only a begging
friar, sent by the Superior of his Order to beg
for alms at the seaport of Calais, he used, in
his curiosity, to hide himself behind tavern
doors and listen to the sailors within telling of
their voyages, while their tobacco smoke was
wafted out and made him ' very sick at the
stomach.' In the end he was the first white
man to see the Falls, in the winter of 1687. . . .

They were framed in a most gorgeous sunset

90 THE FAIR DOMINION

when I saw them on an August day. The
green and white foam swooped from a moun-
tain of clouds all grey and gold — clouds piled
fantastically into the furthest sky. No one
seeing them in such a light could be disappointed
with them, but I would forbid any more writers
to write about them. Every man should be
his own poet where the greater sights of the
world are concerned. On second thoughts it
is permissible to read Mr. Howells on the sub-
ject, and even Dickens, provided one is never
likely to see them with one's own eyes. I saw
the Palls at sunset, by starlight, and in the sun-
rise, and I can commend them at all these times.
The river that drowned Captain Webb and was
crossed by Blondin on the tight-rope, though
extraordinary in its way, seemed to me com-
paratively unbeautiful and uninteresting. Any
big sea on the Atlantic or Pacific is a finer sight
and grips a man harder. I like a river quiet
myself. Moreover, the villas above Niagara
River give the landscape a domestic air in
which its mad swirl seems only like an attempt
to show off malignantly.

One of my pleasantest recollections of Niagara
is a conversation I had with the porter at the
hotel where I stopped on the Canadian side.
He was an American negro, extremely urbane

TORONTO AND NIAGARA FALLS 91

and chatty. He told me that he guessed I
was an Englishman. It was pretty easy, he
said, to tell that. I did not feel sure whether
to feel flattered or not, but I felt sure later,
when he introduced me to the lift-boy — a typical
little stunted anaemic street arab from one of
our northern cities — with a wave of the hand
and the remark, ' Thar 's one of your fellow-
countrymen.' Afterwards, in self-defence, I
steered the conversation towards Canada, and
the porter, who regarded himself as an American
citizen only, told me that the Canadians were
a slow, stupid people, who could not be trusted
of themselves to do anything but cultivate a
little land badly.

' Look at Toronto,' he said ; ' do you think
there 'd be any hustle in that place if the
Canadians had been left to themselves ? No,
sah. But we came along and lent them our
brains and our enterprise, and I guess now it 's
a big fine city.'

92 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER X
MASKINONG£ FISHING ON THE FRENCH RIVER

A FRIEND, acquainted with Canada, met me in
Toronto, and I told him I was tired of cities
and thought of going to the Muskoka Lakes.

' What do you expect to get there ? ' he asked.

' Scenery,5 1 said — ' camping, fishing. A Feni-
more Cooper existence in the backwoods. Isn't
it to be had there ? '

' The scenery 's all right,' he said, ' and you
can camp out of course, and there are some
fish. But if you mean you want a quiet, un-
conventional life '

' I do for a few days,' I said.

' You 'd better go further than the Muskoka
district, then,' he said. c It 's beginning to be
rather a fashionable camping -ground — quite
pleasant in its way. If you care to see
charming American maidens in expensive frocks
falling out of canoes just on purpose to be
able to change into frocks still more expensive,
the Muskoka country is the place for you. If

MASKINONGfi FISHING 93

not, you had better come with me and fish for
maskinonges on the French River.'

I did not know where the French River was
or what maskinonges were, or how you caught
them ; but I said ' Yes,' being very tired of
cities, and we took the night train from Toronto,
and at 4.30 A.M. dropped off it on to a bridge
that spanned a deep, big river. The dawn
was exceedingly cold and grey.

Literally we dropped off the train, for it did
not stop but only slowed down, and after us
the negro porter dropped our bags and tackle.
A minute later the train had vanished, and we
were left alone on the bridge, staring at the
rocky, wooded cliffs that rose on either bank.
Rock, wood, and water indeed met the eye
wherever one looked. It seemed a country
where Nature had once built mountains, savage
and sparsely wooded mountains in the midst
of a great inland sea, then in a cataclysmal
mood had dashed them to pieces in every direc-
tion. And as the boulders and splinters of
boulders flew, some fell in circles and made
little lakes out of the great sea ; some fell in
heaped cliffs and banks, between which the sea
was squeezed into winding, forking streams ;
some fell and sank and left the sea a shallow
swamp above them ; some fell and stood up

94 THE FAIR DOMINION

out of the water and became islands of dry
rock. Every splinter that flew bore in some
crack of it a seed of spruce or fir or birch,
which grew ; so that all this barren rock and
waste of water became crowned with trees.
I dare say any geologist could explain exactly
what did happen. I am merely explaining
what appears to have happened, when you
look at it the first time with eyes still full of
sleep.

It was the French River at which we were
gazing, and it looked at this point somewhat
wider than the Thames at Hammersmith. It
was flat and full with a good current ; and
my friend made some remark about never
having been given to understand, when he
was at school in England, that there was such
a river at all — much less that it was finer than
the Thames.

' I doubt if one would find it marked on an
English school map even now,' he continued.

' I dont know, I 'm sure,' I replied.

' Doesn't it show how disgracefully ignorant
we are of Canada ? ' he demanded in the
hollow tones of an Imperial enthusiast.

' Yes,' I agreed. I daresay I should have
agreed anyhow. It was disgraceful that we
neither of us had known anything about the

MASKINONGfi FISHING 95

French River. But the reason I agreed so
quickly was that, if I had not done so, he was
capable of proving to me that such gross
ignorance, if persisted in, will some day prove
fatal to the Empire. Whereas I merely wanted
breakfast. Any one who has been dropped off
a train at 4.30 on a misty morning in the sort
of country I have described will sympathise
with me.

Luckily the dawn soon became a little less
grey, and presently we beheld a wooden shack
standing on a crag some quarter of a mile up
stream, with a dozen canoes moored below
it. Presently also — and this was more to the
point — some one in the shack became aware
of us standing on the bridge, and put out in
an old boat fitted with a motor to fetch us. An
hour later we were enjoying breakfast inside
the shack, which is really a hotel of sorts, and
its proprietor, Mr. Fenton, was explaining to
us all about the fishing to be had on the French
River. For five dollars — or nine for two
persons, he would supply us with a canoe, an
Indian guide, a tent, provisions, and a hundred
miles or so of first-class fishing.

Now for the benefit of all benighted English-
men who do not know the French River or
Mr. Fenton of Pickerel, but would like to make

96 THE FAIR DOMINION

their acquaintance and that of the maski-
nonge, let me enlarge upon my existence for
the next few days.

Let me begin with Bill. Bill was our Indian
guide. He was an 0 jib way. Youthful, well
built, reserved in manner, he paddled us on
the average eight hours, cooked three meals,
and set up or took down our tent in an in-
credibly short time every day. When either
of us caught a fish, Bill laughed ; when we
did not, he stared into space. He laughed
pretty often, for we caught quite a number of
fish. It seemed unavoidable on the French
River. Occasionally, in answer to questions,
Bill spoke. He spoke English. Once or twice
he spoke on his own account. I remember
his saying that he preferred eggs to fish. I
do not know how much Bill thought. Accus-
tomed to connect such outward reserve and
dignity as Bill showed with a philosophic mind,
I fancied for quite a long time that Bill must
think a great deal. I doubt it now. Those
who have studied the Red Indian in his native
haunts have discovered, I believe, that though
his mind works in mysterious ways, it does
work; but not quickly, or with superhuman
gravity or discernment. As for that look of
reserve — it indicates no more brain-work or

MASKINONGfi FISHING 97

brain-power than the look of reserve on the
face of an alligator. When I read hereafter
that the hero of a book has a reserved face
and an imperturbable manner (he so very often
has in the novels of ladies) I shall think of
Bill, and be delighted. Bill was so soothing.
So was the French River. It is worth an
Englishman's while to know of it — worth his
private as well as his Imperial while. American
sportsmen seem to know it well. They come
fishing up it in fair numbers earlier in the year,
and they come shooting later — deer and par-
tridge and cariboo. The partridge shooting
is said to be some of the finest in Canada.

The French explorers also knew the French
River, for it was by this route that they
first found their way to Lake Huron when,
by reason of Bill's ancestors being out on the
war-path, seeking scalps, they found Lake
Ontario impossible of crossing. In width it
varies considerably. Sometimes it narrows
to rapids, at others it broadens to over a mile
across, and is divided into channels by steep
islands. The scenery of it is as changeful as
its channel. Now the banks are built in sheer
stone, a hundred feet high ; again they rise
terrace by terrace, smooth as if men had made
them ; a little later they are nothing but a

G

98 THE FAIR DOMINION

chaos of strewn rock. Sometimes the firs
predominate, sometimes the birches, pale green
still these latter, or yellowing in the fall. Then
a splash of cherry colour or crimson shows a
maple on its way to winter. There are reedy
backwaters where great pike lie ; and natural
weirs, below which the rock bass wait for their
food ; the deep pools hold pickerel or cat-
fish. Everywhere the air exhilarates, and along
the wider reaches we used to meet a wind like
a sea-wind that put the river in waves and set
them tippling into the bows of the canoe.

For the most part we trolled, six or seven
miles upstream from Pickerel landing, using
an artificial minnow or feathered double spoon,
which latter seemed to attract pike, bass, and
pickerel, though the last, like the cat-fish,
preferred a worm. However, it is a dull fish,
the pickerel, hardly worth catching. Not so
the cat-fish. A six-pounder of this variety
can be very strenuous indeed, and the only
drawback to it is, as an American we met
remarked, you would have to shut your eyes
before you could eat it. Certainly it is one
of the most grotesque and hideous of fresh-
water fish, having four slimy tendrils growing
from the sides of its mouth, with pig's eyes
between. The bass is a fine eater. We got

MASKINONGE FISHING 99

bass up to four pounds, and if it is not mean to
mention such a matter in connection with so
sporting a fish, you know that when you have
landed one you have landed a glorious supper.
Those suppers over the camp fire, which Bill
could set roaring within three minutes — so much
timber and touchwood lies everywhere — what
would one not give to enjoy the like in England ?
In an artificial sort of way you can do so.
Here one is in the wilds as they were from the
beginning — except that the Indian is cooking
for the white man instead of cooking the white
man for fun.

What a delight it was, too, to go to bed on a
couch of fir boughs, with the wind rustling
through the birches, to the soothing sound
of Bill, stretched at the foot of the tent, spitting
gently into the night. It was a soothing
sound, until I awoke one night to find that
Bill had drawn the flap of the tent tight, but
was still spitting — I do not know whither.

We spent four days on the French Biver,
and our catch averaged over twelve pounds a
day. It would have been much more if we
had fished for every sort of fish and taken
no photographs. As it was we took a good
many photographs, and spent most of our
time trying to lure the maskinonge. It is

100 THE FAIR DOMINION

the king-fish of these waters — a sort of pike —
but with the leaping powers of a salmon and
the heart of a tiger. Bill used to madden
us with tales of how the last party he had
guided had landed twenty maskinonges in
three days. We fished and fished, and then
I, trolling with a spoon, hooked one. We saw
him almost instantly take a great white leap
into the sun, thirty yards from the canoe.
Then Bill paddled gently for the nearest
shore at which one could land him, and I
played him the while with such care . . . Oh,
my maskinonge, never to be mine ! I got
him to the bank — a flat piece of rock with a
kindly slope to the water. Perhaps he was
not more than fifteen pounds in weight. Per-
haps he was. Bill said not. But then Bill
had not hooked him ; and in fact it was
Bill who lost him. Anyway, fifteen pounds is
fifteen pounds, even if they do run to forty.
Yes, it was Bill that lost him. I stick to that
— though I admit that we had all been
stupid enough to come out without a gaff. So
it came about that, though I drew him ever
so gingerly to the rock, yet — yet as Bill made
a lunge at him to get him up — my maskinonge
leaped once more — and broke the line !

There for a second he lay, all dazed and

MASKINONGfi FISHING 101

silvery, in the shallow water — then woke up
and vanished, spoon and all ! ...

Bill vowed that the line was too weak ; but
what line would have stood it ?

No matter — though I did not say ' no
matter ' at the time. Some day perhaps I
shall go back to the French River. For fifty
pounds a man could get there from England,
spend three weeks in fishing, and return again
to the old country — a five- weeks trip in all — and
know, maybe, the best August and September
of his life. Yes, I hope to go back and catch
maskinonge, and listen once more to the wind
in the birches, and go to sleep again to the
sound of Bill spitting — for choice into the
night.

102 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XI

SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY

COMING away from the French River, we spent
a night at Sudbury, which lies in the midst of
' rich deposits of nickeliferous pyrrhotite.' Had
I a brain capable of appreciating nickeliferous
pyrrhotite, I should have got more pleasure
out of this prosperous mining town than I did.
My chief recollections of it are that it was
unattractive, that everybody looked prosperous
in it, that trucks were shunted under my bed-
room window all night long, and that the hotel
proprietor forgot to wake us at the time we
had requested, with the result that we got to
the station breakfastless, about half an hour
after the train was due to start. Luckily it
was late. I do not care for missing trains at
any time, but to have missed that train at
Sudbury would have been singularly annoy-
ing. There was, in effect, nothing of interest
in Sudbury if you were not interested in nickel-
iferous pyrrhotite. I know that I should not

SOME REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY 103

make such a remark. Humani nihil a me
alienum should be every writer's motto. But
it is one thing to possess a motto, another to
act upon it after trucks have been shunted
under one's window all night, and one stands
breakfastless on a dull station very early in the
morning, waiting for a train that will not come.
Let me recall what sort of humanity was
about. There was a stout, middle-aged Indian
guide, who told us the finest trout fishing in
Canada was to be had a few miles from Sud-
bury. He was the most cheerful Indian I saw
in Canada — really a cheerful man — creased with
smiles. There were miners looking out for
jobs or leaving them — mostly spitting. They
were all young men. I only saw about four
old men in the whole Dominion. I do not
know if Canadians are shut up after a certain
age, or do not grow to it, or retire like butter-
flies to end their days far from the ken of man.
So that there was nothing surprising in there
being only young men at the station. More
surprising was the amount of nationalities that
seemed to be represented among them. They
seemed of every race and yet very alike. I
suppose a miner is a miner, whatever his nation-
ality, just as a mahout is a mahout. In the
strange worlds both these kinds of experts

104 THE FAIR DOMINION

live in, the one sort in the bowels of the earth,
the other on the necks of elephants, our little
international distinctions would tend to become
of less importance. If a man is a miner, he
may also be a Belgian or a German or a York-
shireman — but his real country is subterranean :
he is before all things a citizen of the under-
world. I do not know if one would get to
recognise a miner in Canada quite so easily
as one gets to recognise a miner at home — for
miners there shift about more than in England,
and spend more time, therefore, in the upper
world; which stamps men differently. Still,
though tales of new finds in new countries,
where wages will be almost incredibly high,
constantly reach them, and tempt them forth,
after all they emerge from one part of the dark
earth only to plunge into another — passing the
between-time above-ground magnificently ; but
less magnificently than their wives. The prices
paid by miners' wives for their hats at some
of the big stores would startle the more extra-
vagant of our own smart set. I believe there
were some lumbermen in the station too,
taking their ease, but I had not then grown
to know the look of a lumberjack as I did
later. The chief thing about him is his magni-
ficent complexion — enviable of women. Canada

SOME REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY 105

is not generous in the matter of complexions,
and one usually hears that the dry winds of
the winter time are accountable for making
them poor, especially on the plains. The hot
stoves of the shacks are a still more likely
cause. Why then should the lumbermen have
such incomparable skins ? Partly because they
are men in c the pink of condition ' — so long
as they work (their condition out of it is best
realised by a perusal of Woodsmen of the West,
one of the few fine local studies of a real type
of Canadian life that have yet been written) ;
partly because their work is in the woods which
are windless and not dry.

Tokens of the lumbering life — besides the
complexion — are jollity, a freedom from care
amounting to something even more delightful
than irresponsibility, an air of equality with
something of superiority in it — indeed, with a
good deal of superiority in it — and a childlike
loquaciousness or an equally childlike dislike
of talk. These last two qualities are both, I
fancy, Canadian in general. One is generally
told that the Canadians are ready talkers,
will always address a stranger in the train,
will be inquisitive and self-revealing to an
extent unimagined by the Englishman. Mr.
Kipling remarked, I remember, in his Canadian

106 THE FAIR DOMINION

letters that you will learn from an Englishman
in two years less than you will learn from a
Canadian in two minutes. Mr. Kipling is
perhaps the best boaster Canada ever drew to
herself. My own experience in the matter of
Canadian conversation is that a lot depends
upon the individual. Introductions are cer-
tainly not waited for, and on a journey one may
chat with strangers to one's heart's content.
But it must be borne in mind that the traveller
par excellence in Canada is the commercial
traveller whose business it is to talk. Off the
line — and on it, where other travellers are
concerned — one finds men with a gift of silence
that can at times be disheartening. It is
natural that this should be so. Men in remote
places lose the use of their tongues. All men
are not talkers, indeed I think the great majority
of men in any country are not talkers. When
Canadians do talk, it must be admitted that
they excel us, or their working-men do. Their
working-men are not only ready, but also,
superficially at any rate, remarkably well-
informed about things outside their own par-
ticular job. They know what is being talked
of, the prices of things, the value of land,
astonishingly well. All Canadians know some-
thing about land ; and about what he knows,

SOME REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY 107

the Canadian is not deprecating. Precisely
for this reason, perhaps, the more educated men
among them are at times considerably less
interesting than ours. It is not that their
conversational topics are few, but that they are
circumscribed. The personal and dogmatic ele-
ment enters into them, with the result that the
subject discussed seems incapable of extension,
and tends to become circular. I have met quite
young men who were bores, and bores not only
in essence, but in manner, like the clergymen
of our comic papers. I do not know why it is,
but I do know that it is sad. It may be that
there are not enough women in Canada to
prevent it. Men are so patient they will
stand anything — even a bore. But where
women abound, a man may not be tiresome
either in his clothes or his conversation. . . .

I believe the train at Sudbury was almost
an hour late, which is why I have gone on so
long noting trifles at large. When it did come
in, somewhere about 8 A.M., we discovered
that it was full up, and people had been stand-
ing in the first-class carriages all night. They
had mostly breakfasted since, and the first-class
carriage we got into was littered from end to
end with bun - bags and sandwich - papers and
orange peel, and all the refuse that results

108 THE FAIR DOMINION

from picnics in trains. Tired parents and
sleepy children were piled above this flotsam
in an atmosphere hard to endure. Yet every-
body was cheerful, and though we both wished
in our hearts that we could have got ' sleepers '
entitling us to Pullman accommodation, we
were both grateful — or ought to have been
grateful — that we were privileged to witness
the contented spirit with which these repre-
sentatives of the great Dominion bore their
trials. Not a grumble — oh, my brother English-
man, not a grumble ! Think of it.

THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO 109

CHAPTER XII

THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO

I SAT in the tail of the train smoking, while
Ontario dropped behind, league after league
of thin trees growing out of the rock, of rock
growing out of bog or lake, of bog or lake
covering all solid things. Sometimes the trees
were green and dark ; sometimes green and
light ; sometimes nothing but scorched trunks
— black skeletons of trees left by a forest fire
which had killed everything within reach like
a beast of prey, but consumed only the tender
parts.

Somebody, as we swung over a typical piece
of muskeg country — black and juicy bogland
covered with a foot maybe of clear water —
began to tell a story of a train that had run off
the rails and plunged head first into just such
a place. It had been a long train, he said ;
a goods train, and it had gone down and down.
When he saw it, the last truck only stuck out
of the muskeg. We listened respectfully. It

110 THE FAIR DOMINION

was at least a well-found story, illustrating the
difficulties the engineers had had in laying the
lines across a treacherous ooze that nothing
seemed to fill or make firm.

What will become of this one-thousand-mile
stretch of swamped rock-land ? Nobody knows.
There it lies separating East from West, as land
impassable, unnavigable as water. Firs and
minerals, these are the only things to be ex-
pected from it. Firs tend to grow less, but the
minerals of course may in the end so count that
no one will wish the country other than the
rock it is. All along the line the railway
authorities have up the names of stations, as
though there really were stations there, and,
even more, as though there were villages or
towns which those stations served. You are
carried past a hundred such stations — names
on a board and nothing more at all, unless it
be a solitary wooden shack in which some rail-
way subordinate passes his life seeing that the
line is clear. The gangs of workers, Galicians
or Italians, who do repairs along the line,
camp out ; you see their camps now and then,
temporary settlements in this No Man's Land.

* Pays melancotique et marecageux ! ' So
Pierre Loti named Les Landes, and the descrip-
tion fits this country too, though I doubt if

THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO 111

melancholy is a word to be found in a Canadian's
vocabulary. ' Pretty poor stuff ' a Canadian
might allow it to be, but would immediately
begin to talk of the fish in its waters, the big
game to be got among the woods, and the
mining possibilities it would reveal as soon as
prospectors and syndicates got together. There
never was a people less born to be depressed
than the Canadians ; nor do I think they will
ever produce a Pierre Loti.

For my part, I began to find this country
most fascinating when I started to think of
its effect upon the history of Canada. It is
easy to see that its very impenetrability
hindered for a long time the growth of the
West. Where there was no road there was no
way for progress, and the great wheatlands
were shut up beyond it, while Eastern Canada
developed. What is less easy to see is the
effect such a waste must have when the country
on the other side has been populated and
fertilised. A little time ago people began to
think that East and West would simply reverse
their order of importance. They said, ' Quebec
and Ontario have depreciated in value. The
rich land of Ontario has been ruined, why
should any one stay there when in the West
there is limitless wheatland to settle on ? '

112 THE FAIR DOMINION

But the trackless country still lay between —
distance is not annihilated by a single railroad,
nor by a dozen railroads. Quebeckers did not
move West much. Ontarian farmers began to
find that exhausted land could be renovated
by scientific methods. If the plains had ad-
joined their farms, they would not have bothered
to try those methods, but the muskeg and
rock lay between. Some of them went West,
but not all ; they did not like it that the West
was being settled from the States and Europe.
In any case the West would have been an
unfamiliar country — the American and English
immigrants only made it more so — and the
boasts of the West roused Eastern pride. Was
the West best ? Ontarians looked about them
and found that not only could their present
farms be improved but that there lay still in
their own particular country virgin land that
needed only to be cleared and worked. Already
there is the new Ontario, north of the old
Ontario, offering fresh fields and pastures
new for the Canadian born who didn't mind
clearing land as well as working it. It is land
upon which the average immigrant is lost, upon
which the average Ontarian is at home. Thus
begins a northern movement which may spread
any distance.

THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO 113

I have not said, and would not say, that the
rock and water of Ontario account for this
northern movement, for the fact that people
are beginning to say, ' This East and West
business is overdone. Canada is not a thin,
straight line from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
but a country stretching north to Hudson
Bay, having the depth of the States almost,
if a race spreads hardy enough to inhabit it.'
The immediate cause of the northern movement
was the discovery that wheat was as hardy as
men, if not hardier, and would grow more
north than an old-time settler ever dreamed of.
The movement began in the North- West. All
I would say is that if the waste country had
not lain between the Ontarian farmer and the
West he would have rushed with the rest, and
the balance of importance would have shifted
altogether westward. As it is, Ontarian farmers
thrive again; new Ontario thrives excellently
in a score of ways ; the Canadian-born prosper
in that part of Canada where they are — and
always have been — most massed and most
solidly Canadian. The West is a medley of
races ; and if it had suddenly become dominant
by reason of its vastly superior prosperity, a
people that could definitely be called Canadian
would have been still further to seek than it is.

H

114 THE FAIR DOMINION

Canada, in effect, would have had to restart
becoming a nation.

All that day the rock and bog and timber
kept dropping behind the train, and it was
sunset before we came to the shore of Lake
Superior. A thunderous glow hung over the
lake, glimmering on the great granite cliffs.
It was dark before we came to Port Arthur —
proud possessor of the largest elevator in the
world, and fierce rival of Fort William. In the
morning we were in Manitoba.

OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN 115

CHAPTER XIII

THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW
TIMERS OF WINNIPEG

WINNIPEG introduces the West. ' If you like
Winnipeg,' I had been told before I got there,
' you will like the West.' I had been somewhat
disheartened by this information. I had pic-
tured Winnipeg as a smoke-laden city of mean
and narrow streets, set off with board walks
and wooden shacks of various sizes. I knew
that I should not like Winnipeg if it were like
that. Well, it is not like that. Main Street,
which follows exactly the lines of the old
Hudson Bay Company's trail, is a hundred and
thirty-two feet wide, and the other streets
are in proportion. Above is the immensely
clear and lofty Canadian sky. The wooden
shacks are not there, and you will have to go
far to find the board walks. True, the buildings
are, on the whole, less impressive than the
streets, but there are some magnificent blocks
rising several stories ; and if you take an

116 THE FAIR DOMINION

observation - car to go and see the sights of
Winnipeg, you will find yourself brought to
spots where further fine blocks are rising ;
and with the eye of the imagination you will
behold Winnipeg as splendidly lofty as New
York. I am not sure that for a place as warm
as Winnipeg in summer and as cold in winter
(I have heard the very truest Canadians say that
they have been nearly frozen there in winter)
the laying out of the town in so spacious a
style is ideal. Streets narrower and more
easily screened from the sun and wind would
have seemed more comfortable to begin with.
But then Winnipeg is growing, growing, grow-
ing ; and it may be that some day even Main
Street will seem shut in when it has its sky-
scrapers.

Certainly it is a mistake to have preconcep-
tions of Canada. I found Winnipeg spacious
instead of mean. I next found that instead
of consisting of elevators and all the apparatus
connected with the storage of wheat, it was
all banks and cinematograph parlours. There
were, it is true, shops and such things sand-
wiched in between. I recall a jeweller's shop
containing the suitable and attractive placard
in its window — ' Marriage Licences for Sale
Here.' It is true, too, that banks and cine-

OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN 117

matograph shows are not unconnected with
wheat. In the banks you store the dollars
you have made out of wheat ; at the cinemato-
graph shows you circulate them. But really
there was an almost incredible number of these
institutions.

Of the two kinds of business I felt that per-
sonally I would rather own a moving picture
show. Winnipegers are, I feel sure, easy to
amuse. And they look exceedingly prosperous.
The air of prosperity struck me as more obvious
in Winnipeg than in any other part of Canada.
This may have been due in part to the ladies'
hats. I saw some wonderful hats in Winnipeg.
Of course there are some women who seem
born to wear wonderful hats. Whatever they
put on seems wonderful. But in Winnipeg
this art of wearing wonders seemed almost
universal. Ladies who might otherwise have
passed for school teachers — so serene and even
precise was their general bearing — were to be
seen in hats that would be astounding either
on Hampstead Heath or in Covent Garden
opera. I was told the hats come direct either
from London or Paris, and form an important
part of the Steamship Companies' freights,
since they are charged for not by weight but
by their superficial area. I thought to myself,

118 THE PAIR DOMINION

after I had seen a few samples of them, what
sleepless nights the creators of these marvels
must pass in the fear that they can never again
rival, much less surpass, the last consignment
to the Wheat City.

The men too have a prosperous appearance
— always new hats, new coats, new cigars ;
and I was so much impressed by it that I
began to study their faces to see if some new
type — with the Croesus gift — had been developed
in this western place. If they had all looked
alike, or had not all looked prosperous, it would
have been simpler. But they all looked different
— more different than Londoners — as they
would — for here all the nations of the earth
are gathered, and over a score of languages
are taught in the schools (just think of it!);
and among these different faces one saw the
old familiar aspects — the shrewd and the
foolish, the strong-mouthed and the weak,
the bluffer's and that of the man who counts.
Clearly, they were not all amazing organisers,
or men with the grit and the brains that must
take them to the top. Not any more were so,
I mean, than you would see in any big place.
No, it was the economic conditions, not the
men, which were changed.

Yet there is one thing noticeable in most of

OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN 119

the faces one sees here. It is a general air of
buoyancy — of greater expectation and, there-
with, of greater self-satisfaction — in a good
sense — than one sees at home. Just as the
London clerk's face might be made to read ! —
' I am merely a city clerk on £50 a year — I
shall never rise much higher, and I hope I may
keep my place,' so the Winnipeg clerk's face
might be taken to announce — ' At present I 'm
helping along the Dominion Elevator Company.
Luckily for them they 're a go-ahead lot. I
guess, though, they '11 have to raise my salary
soon, pretty good though it is now. If they
don't, they '11 have to look for another man.
There are plenty of jobs waiting for me.'

If it is the truth, what could be better ?

That there are more jobs than men in the
West seems undeniable, though most of them
of course are on the land. I had the pleasure
of a talk with Mr. Bruce Walker, through whose
hands all the immigrants to the West pass.
Mr. Bruce Walker's office is in the station,
which is one of the sights of the West, when
an immigrant train arrives. For Winnipeg is
their distributing centre, and in the station,
when the train comes in, you may see more
types of men and women than a year's travel
in Europe would give you, and you may hear

120 THE FAIR DOMINION

more different languages being spoken than
went to the unmaking of the tower of Babel.
To place all these people, men, women and
children, in positions suited to their capacities,
before the small sums of money with which
they have arrived in the New World have given
out, would seem to be a task which Napoleon
might have shrunk from. But Mr. Bruce
Walker appeared quite undismayed. Although
in the first six months of 1910 the immigration
from Great Britain alone had increased 98 per
cent, over any other corresponding period, he
had found no difficulty in dealing with it. He
admitted that it meant increase of work for
himself and his staff, but that was nothing, he
said, so long as there were more jobs than men.
' And there are more jobs,' he said. ' It 's
amazing. But the extent to which Canada
can absorb men seems endless.' He told me
many excellent and amusing stories of the
difficulties that arise in connection with the
new-comers, but I have no space for them
here.

The chief criticism to be directed against
the Canadian Government's methods in dealing
with immigrants is, I think, that it encourages
on to the land men who are in some cases
wasted there. It is natural that it should

OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN 121

place immigrants on the land as far as possible.
The land is there, apparently endlessly absorbent.
It offers, superficially, work that any strong
and able-bodied man should be capable of
doing. Again, that Canadian theory that a
man should be ready to turn his hand to any-
thing, encourages the Canadian Government
to believe that it is justified in turning the
hands of immigrants to the work that most
obviously wants doing. On the other side, it
has to be remembered that while a man may be
capable of turning his hand to anything, he
is probably much more capable of turning his
hand to the work he has been trained to ; and
not only that, but he is wasted to a large extent
if he is not doing it. I am thinking particu-
larly of the skilled workmen who emigrate to
Canada from England. Turn them on to
land and they may do fairly well; but turn
them on to the work they are used to, and
they will do much better. I do not say that
the Canadian Government is bound to find
for such men the work for which they are
iitted ; but in so far as they undertake to find
work for immigrants, they should as far as
possible find the right work. That jealousy
which causes the United States to put obstacles
in the way of the skilled immigrant who

122 THE FAIR DOMINION

comes into the country, should not be encour-
aged in Canada. It is absurd to suppose that
Canada is already stocked with skilled work-
men, and I repeat it is waste to use men, who
are skilled, in work to which they are wholly
unaccustomed. Moreover, though these skilled
artisans may in many cases only spend a
certain time on the land (after which they find
the job which they want and are accustomed
to), yet in many other cases they may be so
sickened by their time on the land, doing
unaccustomed work badly, that they either
become wastrels, or leave Canada altogether,
believing it to be no country for workers like
themselves, and saying so with all the bitter-
ness of men who were capable of succeeding
but did actually fail. Another point to which
the immigration department might give all
the attention it can spare, is that of making
it as simple as possible for decent immigrants
to be joined at the earliest opportunity by their
wives and families. The lack of women in
Canada is a curse which there is no disguising.
For one thing, to have a country full only of
able-bodied men without wives or families is
to give it an air of prosperity which is unreal.
For another, it is to leave it without any of
the ambitions which cause the majority of men

OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN 123

to save the money they make, and lay the
foundations of a civilised nation. The other
objections are obvious. A wise Government
policy might go far towards making the period
of separation between an immigrant and his
wife shorter.

Later on, to get a contrast with Winnipeg,
I went out to see Kildonan with a friend. It
is the village where the Old-timers — the crofters
from the highlands, whom Lord Selkirk brought
out in 1812 to colonise the land — finally settled
down. They had hard years enough; trouble
with the Indians, great trouble with the rival
fur company. The fur-traders could see in the
farmers only men who would reduce the wild
and spoil their own industry. Only after years
were their disputes settled. Kildonan is three
miles out from Winnipeg by electric-car — along
a dusty road fenced with wire from the fat
black land. The crofters must have rejoiced
to see that loam. Nowadays it has mostly
been turned to market-gardening for the
supplying of Winnipeg, and the farmers have
shifted further West. We turned down a
country lane, shaded with maple woods and
golden birches, and came presently to the banks
of the Bed River. Over on the other side,
standing among light trees, stood Kildonan

124 THE FAIR DOMINION

Church, the oldest church in Western Canada.
We crossed by the ferry, and walked up into
the churchyard. It is not large, but it is full,
and everywhere you read the familiar Scottish
names — Macleod — Black — Ferguson and the
rest. The death among infants in those days
seems to have been great — naturally enough —
for Kildonan then was far from civilisation
and doctor's help ; and so, many small, uncon-
scious settlers spent only a few days or weeks
in the new land. But there were others that
lived long. One of the most interesting grave-
stones commemorated the death of a settler
who had come out from Kildonan, Sutherland-
shire, at the age of nine. This in the year
1815 — the year of Waterloo. He had lived to
be past ninety. For his epitaph some one
had chosen those noble words from the Epistle
to the Hebrews : ' He looked for a city which
hath foundations — whose maker and builder
is God.'

I think it cannot matter now that the old
man died before the great Canadian boom came,
before Winnipeg had become the biggest wheat-
centre of the world, before he could realise,
who looked for a city which hath foundations,
that even in his life he had attained to * God's
own country.'

A PEAIRIE TOWN AND POLICE 125

CHAPTER XIV

A PRAIRIE TOWN AND THE PRAIRIE POLICE

ANY one who knows the plains of Canada is
aware that they rise in three tiers, the rise
having a westward trend, and that the scenery
of them varies as greatly as does the vegeta-
tion. Any one who has only been through the
Canadian plains in the train is under the im-
pression that, save for a bit of rolling country
here and there in the distance, they are as
level as a billiard table ; and that, except
that parts are cultivated and other parts are
not, they look the same almost from start to
finish.

The moral is obvious. Do not suppose that
from the train you can see even the surface of
the world.

This seemingly endless flat land, then, holds
hills and gullies, rivers and lakes — everything
indeed but trees. But what am I saying ?
There are heaps of trees in reality. Only they
have a habit of concealing themselves, and

126 THE FAIR DOMINION

those who want to see them in haste should
perhaps take a guide.

There is more monotony in the towns of the
plains, I think, than in the plains themselves.
Not but what these towns must have differ-
ences known to their inhabitants. A man who
lived in Moosejaw might conceivably deny
that he could feel equally at home in Regina.
A citizen of Regina would not dream of admit-
ting that he could find his way blindfold about
Moosejaw. Nevertheless all these little towns
are singularly alike in construction. It is
reasonable that they should be. They are
all centres of a country engaged in a single
great industry — the raising of wheat. Other
things are raised, but in such small quantities,
comparatively, that they do not count. And
the people engaged in this great industry of
wheat-raising are on a particular equality as
regards the work they do, the leisure they have,
and the tastes that result from the combina-
tion of that work and leisure. Some are richer,
some poorer, some are wise, some foolish, but
mostly they are working together pretty hard.
The towns represent the places where they
come after their work to bargain and be amused.
Moreover, as I suggested in a previous chapter,
the model for all other towns of the plains has

A PRAIRIE TOWN AND POLICE 127

always been Winnipeg, and Winnipeg is the
embodiment of the notion that a city may be
a finer city than Chicago if it only tries hard
enough.

Architecturally, Winnipeg looks as though
it always has allowed, and always will allow,
for its own expansion. Other great cities have
grown up anyhow, usually on lines that suggest
that their greatness was thrust upon them
unexpectedly. Winnipeg too has grown big
— beyond all expectation one would have
thought — yet it suggests in its lines that it
never felt, even in those far-off days when
Main Street was the Hudson Bay trail, that
it would be anything but tremendous. Very
likely it is an accident that Winnipeg did
possess this power of expanding and Winni-
pegers did not deliberately foresee and pro-
vide for its future vastness. Be this as it
may, the towns of the plains are not going to
leave anything to chance. They are so planned,
that when the time comes they will be ready
to outdo Winnipeg. They rather expect to
outdo Winnipeg. They even warn you that
they will. Here is an example. I got out
at some little station on the plains — let us call
it Thebes. I don't think there is a Thebes in
existence, but if not, it will come along soon,

128 THE FAIR DOMINION

for the classics as well as the Indian languages
are being ransacked to provide names for
Canada's thousands of new-born towns. I
prefer the classical or Indian-named towns to
those that bear hybrid titles like Higgsville.
I saw at once that Thebes consisted of about
twenty shacks and a store. It was all there,
just outside the station, and beyond was level
prairie again, with one or two farmhouses on
the horizon — wooden boxes, like bathing-
machines off their wheels to look at.

I should not have been impressed by the
greatness of Thebes, present or future, had I
not, just by the ticket office, come upon a
great placard, calling attention to a plan of
the district marked off in square blocks in red
and black cross lines. Beneath were two
fanciful spheres, side by side, such as statis-
ticians use — a large one marked Winnipeg, a
smaller one marked Thebes : also, the following
notification : —

' In 1870 Winnipeg had 240 inhabitants.
In 1910 Winnipeg has 180,000 inhabitants.
In 1910 Thebes has 74 inhabitants.
How many will Thebes have in 1925 ?
Buy a Thebes town lot.'

It may be that the method is an American
one, recalling that by which Martin Chuzzlewit

A PEAIEIE TOWN AND POLICE 129

was persuaded to buy a lot in Eden city. An
old-fashioned Englishman, straight from the
old country, might even now be scared by it,
and decide on the strength of it not to become
a/ citizen of Thebes. He need not be scared.
He can dislike the advertisement if he
chooses, but he should bear in mind that by
just such advertisements men were attracted
uo prosperity in the States as much as to
adversity — even in the Dickens period — that
real cities as well as sham ones were built up
by them, and that anyway most of the Canadian
land thus advertised is of an easily ascertain-
able value. He should remember, too, that
a man nowadays, certainly in the new world,
is not presumed to take every advertisement
lie sees as Bible truth. A smart advertisement,
ksuch as the Thebes one, is to a Canadian or
American simply a proof that whoever it is
wishes to sell Thebes town lots is a go-ahead
person who clearly wants to do business, who
probably knows how business ought to be
done, who is likely to come to the point of
doing it more quickly and ably than a man
who won't even take the trouble to attract
attention. No doubt the purchase of town lots
is bound to be a speculative business. These
little prairie villages may or may not become

130 THE FAIR DOMINION

Winnipegs. Of the particular chances a man
must satisfy himself. That there are chances
is a certainty ; and the advertiser is only
clothing that certainty in what he considers
an attractive garb.

I am very far from delighting in the ' plush
of speech,' as Meredith called the language of
the advertisers. Apart altogether from the
fact that Canadians have not as yet learnt the
art of understatement, the plush of speech is
far too common in Canada. I suppose it was
to be expected. Hard by lie the United States
whose advertisers have, in a very few years,
done more to blazon all the horrors of which
the English tongue is capable than their
great writers have done to point out its beauties.
Their example has spread. So that in Canada,
too, a barber's is announced as ' A Tonsorial
Saloon ' ; a hat shop is ' A Bon Ton Millinery
Parlour.' There may be some magic attrac-
tion in the words. The desire for a hat in
the heart of a woman is not a definitely economic
want ; perhaps to be able to get a hat from a
millinery parlour may strengthen that want.
Only I know that speaking for myself, I would
not willingly have my hair shortened oftener
than was necessary, even if a tonsorial palace
should be open to me for the process.

A PRAIRIE TOWN AND POLICE 131

To go back to the prairie towns, their future
is ever before them, and their citizens talk of
them in the same proud, fond spirit as that in
which a mother will discuss the career of the
creature - in - the - perambulator, which for the
ordinary person is too embryo to be distin-
guished as either a boy or a girl. Already, of
course, the prairie towns are of all sizes, though
you must never judge them by the size they are.
Take Regina. It is a capital city, but the usual
definition of a line — only reversed — best de-
scribes it. It has breadth without length.
Its streets, which are called avenues, are
astonishingly wide, the more astonishingly,
because as soon as you start to walk along them
they come to an end in prairie. I thought a
notice which caught my eye as I wandered
through the town rather characteristic. The
notice was pasted outside a half-built block.
It ran : —

' These premises will be open by September 5.'
It was long past 5th September, and those
premises were not going to be open for some
weeks to come. The roof was not on yet, and
in fact I think the fourth wall had to go up.
Still, when they were opened, they would be
fine and solid. You could see that. It is the
same with many of these western towns them-

132 THE FAIR DOMINION

selves. Some day they, too, are going to be
fine and solid, but they are not really open
yet, though a good deal of business is being
done, with the roof still, so to speak, off,
and the fourth wall still to go up. On the
outskirts of Regina, for example, there are
some 1911 Exhibition buildings which look
rather larger than Regina itself. That is
enterprise.

I stayed a whole day in Regina because I
wanted to see the barracks of the famous
North- West Mounted Police. It was a very
hot day, and I was not sure where the barracks
were, so I went into a hotel, partly to find out,
partly to have a drink. The hotel was cool and
pleasant, and after a little while a well-dressed
gentleman came over and began chatting.
We talked of various things, and then he asked
me if I would not like to have my suit pressed
for Sunday, as he would do it for a dollar. I
said I should like it very well, but I had not
time for it as I had to go out to the police
barracks.

' You don't think of joining them, do you ? '
he inquired with much disdain.

' Why ? ' I asked.

6 You 're a fool if you do,' he said ; ' there 's
too much discipline about them. You spend

A PKAIRIE TOWN AND POLICE 133

your whole time saluting every one you see if
you 're in the police. I know what it is. I
was two years in the American Navy.'

I did not inform the ex-naval clothes-presser
that I 'd rather belong to the police than press
clothes, nor, indeed, did I waste any further
time upon him, and I only mention him because
he is one of the less valuable American types
that find their way into Canada, and also
because he was the only man I met who had a
word to say against the mounted police.

The sun can be very hot on the prairie, and
it was very hot that afternoon when I did at
last set out for a two-miles' tramp to the
barracks. Nobody was walking that way ex-
cept myself, and nobody was even riding.
There was a fine dust about, and I needed
brushing as well as pressing before I reached
my destination. When I did get there, the
courteous welcome of the second-in-command
caused me to forget that the way had been
long, or that anything greatly mattered except
to hear about the North- West Mounted Police
from the officer who was good enough to show
me all round, from the horse-hospital to the
prison cells. The latter were the least in-
viting part of the barracks, and I decided on
the spot that if I committed a crime I would

134 THE FAIR DOMINION

not select the North- West of Canada for the
scene of it.

I doubt if Canada, or England, has anything
to be prouder of than the North- West Mounted
Police. Some of their deeds have been told from
time to time — that of the mounted policeman,
for example, who brought a homicidally-disposed
maniac down hundreds of miles from the frozen
country, saved his charge from frost-bite, and
lost his own reason in the process ; that of the
corporal who went into the camp where Sitting
Bull sat armed with all his braves about him, and
gave him a quarter of an hour to clear over the
border. But under a hundred less-known acts
the same spirit has run — the spirit of the one
representative of justice triumphant over in-
credible odds.

' It 's made possible,' said my guide, ' partly
because we have men who regard every capture
they 're told off to make as a matter of personal
honour, partly because people know that if a
man commits a crime, we get him in the end.
We go on till we do. Sitting Bull knew that
if he killed our corporal we 'd hang him and
every man with him. So he went.'

All kinds of men are represented in the
mounted police, but this officer told me that
the recruit they liked best to get was c the

A PRAIRIE TOWN AND POLICE 135

young man with blood in him,' from an English
public school or university, as much as from
anywhere ; fond of riding and shooting, and
not lost when he is acting alone hundreds of
miles from headquarters. The district patrolled,
remember, by five hundred men is not much
smaller than Europe minus Russia. Wanting
that kind of man, the authorities see to it that,
in barracks at all events, he is comfortable,
and very little in the way of the accommodation
for these police could be improved upon.

The most historic part of the barracks is
that window through which Louis Kiel stepped
out — to drop with the rope round his neck.
I was shown it hurriedly. It is the capture of
their man, not his execution, that is these
policemen's pride. Their record shows that
almost always they take him alive, with no
struggle — a strange thing, and one more proof
of the reputation the police have built up for
themselves. ' What is the use of struggling
with these men ? ' seems to be the natural
thought in the mind of the pursued; and no
doubt much bloodshed is saved as a result of it.
I learnt a lot of stray Canadian facts that
afternoon. I learnt that the immigrants known
under the somewhat vague heading of ' Gali-
cians ' are at present considered the leading

136 THE FAIR DOMINION

toughs, owing to their habit of using their
knives at random. Galicians mean roughly
all those who come from central Europe, and
would, of course, include Letts. So that it is
not, apparently, merely the climate of England
that induces in these particular aliens a homi-
cidal mania. It would be interesting to know
the opinion of a North- West Mounted Police-
man on * the Battle of London.' Another thing
I learnt was that a hundred miles a day is no
unusual distance for one of these policemen to
cover on horseback, and that of all the districts
patrolled by them that in the neighbourhood of
the North Pole is most sought after. They do
not believe in English stirrups and girths any
more than they believe in the British truncheon.
They do believe in sobriety. The man with
the drinking habit cannot continue, so I was
told, a mounted policeman.

As I walked back into Regina, I remember
seeing in one of the principal streets a second
notice which struck me as quaint. The notice
was : —

' Please do not spit on the side- walks.'
The quaintness of it consisted in the last three
words. c Please do not spit ' one could under-
stand. I should like to see that notice up
almost anywhere in Canada, since the habit it

A PRAIRIE TOWN AND POLICE 137

deprecates is almost universal. It is worst,
perhaps, in a smoking compartment, where it
is difficult to get one's legs away from the
neighbourhood of spittoons. I have sat for
hours feeling all the emotions of the son of
William Tell while the apple was still balanced
on his head, and his father was in the act to
shoot. But it is an uncivilised, unhealthy,
absolutely unnecessary habit anywhere. That
is why, for a public authority to suggest that
it may be done, provided it is not done on
the side-walks, is quaint. It should either be
ignored or penalised. When one reads, as one
does so often in the papers, of the ravages
made by tuberculosis in Canada, it almost looks
as if offenders should be penalised. Certainly
they should not be politely requested to spit a
few inches more to the left or the right. And
why provide them with spittoons ?

138 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XV

IN CALGARY

ALB BETA is at present the debutante of the
Dominion.

Countries, like cities, used to grow up and,
if we stick to our metaphor, ' come out ' any-
how. It is true there were people called
statesmen who had at times bright ideas
concerning the commonweal which they tried
to put into practice, and sometimes succeeded
in putting into practice, with not unsatis-
factory results. But the commonweal they had
in mind was a limited one. It was not truly
* common,' either in respect of the people whose
weal was considered, or in respect of the weal
it was desired to affect. Statesmen, in fact,
thought usually only of a particular section or
part of the population of their country and also
thought only of a particular aspect of that
section's welfare — usually either its soul or its
prestige ; very rarely its material prosperity.

Things have not altogether changed. Things

IN CALGARY 139

don't. Statesmen still consider particular
classes rather than the nation as a whole,
and their notions of what weal means are still
limited notions. But there is this difference.
That aspect of the commonweal which can be
referred to somewhat vaguely as material
prosperity now bulks very large in their minds,
and, as a result of it, the idea is beginning
to prevail that not only can cities be planned
before they are built, but that whole provinces
can and should be encouraged to grow in
certain thought-out directions.

In the old world the new idea is likely to
work slowly and somewhat obscurely. Cities
and countries have already grown up there
in the old-and-anyhow style ; and grown-up
things, like grown-up people, are not easily
changed. In England, for example, we may
think that large properties are a mistake;
but they will not, with anything that can be
called celerity, be turned into small holdings.
So with our cities. There they are — fully grown
and fully stocked with vested interests. The
possessors of those interests cannot see in any
proposed change the vast improvement that
the non-possessors see in it. The most that
can be expected in England in the immediate
future is that, slowly and imperceptibly, certain

140 THE FAIR DOMINION

outrageous mistakes of the past will be remedied,
and that where new developments are essential,
they shall be the result of ideas, rather than
of confusions. The Town-Planning Bill is, I
imagine, a case in point. The most conser-
vative people are beginning to see that in itself
an idea is not a vicious thing and may even
produce a good result.

In the new world (and perhaps in the German
Empire too) the notion of planning the future
of town or country instead of leaving it to luck
is having much swifter and more demonstrable
effects. On the Canadian plains, as I have
pointed out, towns are being laid out largely
with an eye to their future. The same thing
is being done for the countryside. It, too, is
being planned with an eye to its future. It is
not growing up just anyhow ; it is being made
to grow in particular directions.

How much this is the idea of statesmen, of
the public officials, that is to say, of the
Dominion ; and how much it is due to the
managers of private companies and enterprises,
historians will some day be able to decide. I
incline to the view that at present the big
railway companies represent far the most influ-
ential force in Canada, and that they, without
any of the outward paraphernalia of office,

IN CALGARY 141

are deciding what Canada is to be for a good
many years to come.

Naturally they work from what may be called
the railway point of view. Their notion of a
Canadian commonweal takes the form, there-
fore, of a country in which a settled and prosper-
ous population lives along the lines of the
railroads, and is so distributed that there shall
be no uninhabited spaces through which the
running of trains will cease to be a paying
proposition. There are bound, of course, to be
some intervals of the kind. The highlands of
Ontario form such a gap in the system of the
Canadian Pacific Railway. That gap is not
easy to fill : Alberta is.

A few years ago Alberta was far from being a
profitable country through which to run trains.
Cattle - ranching maintained the thinnest of
populations, and the leagues of sunburnt plains
east of Calgary seemed to offer few chances to a
more numerous class of settler. Any one who
had prophesied then that they would shortly
be crowded with wheat-farmers would have
been laughed at. But they are being crowded,
.comparatively crowded, now. And the credit
for this must be given those who started the
Bow River irrigation works. No doubt there
are other reasons for the rise of Alberta. The

142 THE FAIR DOMINION

discoverers of new wheats have helped it ;
so have the American farmers who, by spoiling
the land across the line, created a demand for
new land. But the irrigation works are the
main factor, and when the Octopus, as the
Canadian Pacific Railway is not uncommonly
called, is had up for judgment, these and many
other of their achievements will help them to
make a stout defence. True, it is their own land
they are irrigating ; it is passengers and freight
for themselves that they want to secure ; but,
whatever the motive, they are advertising and
causing to be populated and cultivated hundreds
of square miles on either side of their own
particular land which might otherwise have
lain waste for many years.

It may be said — Where is the plan in this ?
Where is it any different from the schemes of
any railway country in the old world. The
difference is that in the old world as a rule the
railway company follows trade, and runs only
through populous parts where that trade is to
be got ; whereas in Canada, railway companies
lay their lines through the desert, so to speak,
and then start to fill it in an orderly and profit-
able manner. Alberta at present is being
planned into existence. It is not booming
simply on its own merits, great though these

IN CALGARY 143

may be. It lay fallow for many years. For
all one knows, other parts of Canada may have
more of a future. But they are not being
boomed as Alberta is, because the time has
not yet come when they must, in the opinion
of the railway companies, be filled in.

The need for the filling in of Alberta is one
of the reasons why Calgary has sprung up so
quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no
future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-
aged, can remember camping in Calgary in
tents. There was only one place to dance in,
and ranchers used to take turns at entering it.
Now Calgary is a stone-built town of solid
appearance, and still more solid importance.
Like so many other Canadian towns, it is
more important than it looks. It looks
bustling enough, but hardly important. There
are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The
hotels are singularly inadequate. They are not
only not comfortable enough for their guests,
but they are not large enough. I had occa-
sion to visit Calgary twice within a week,
and each time I got the last bed in a different
hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did
not succeed. I suppose that prosperity has
overtaken it at such a pace that it has not
had time as yet to consider its responsibilities.

144 THE FAIR DOMINION

A town which permits one of its best hotels
to place three double beds in one bedroom —
and perhaps as many as nine guests in the
three double beds — may already be great,
but it has not realised its greatness.

Calgary differs from the prairie towns which
lie between it and Winnipeg, in that it is not
really a prairie town, but a town on the edge
of the prairie. It looks at the mountains ;
and it is built of the grey stone that is found
near by; the Chinook winds that sweep it
and make its climate comparatively mild,
are mountain winds ; and it stands on the
Bow River, which is a mountain river, swift
and clear, and blue with the blue that is melted
from snowfields. This is none of your turbid
streams like the Assiniboine or the E/ed River.
All rivers must run to the plains at last, but
the Bow River does not seem to belong to
them, though it feeds them more than most.
In the old days Calgary, such as it was, owed
everything to the hills. The cattle-ranchers
settled round there because the Chinook winds,
scatterers of the snow, made outdoor grazing
possible for their cattle during months when
Manitoba and Saskatchewan were deep in
frozen drifts. And since it was just at the
foot of the mountains, the miners in the moun-

IN CALGARY 145

fcains used it as a supply centre. It is still
a centre for ranchers and miners ; but its real
importance is that it has become the head-
quarters of that prairie which produced once,
perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now
yields the finest wheat in the world. If any
.statues are to be put up in the town — and
i t would be as well to wait for a native sculptor
of talent — they should be the statues of the
men who constructed the irrigation works.

Later on, but this is a smaller matter per-
haps, I should like to see a statue put up to
the man who will make it possible for the
bars of Calgary to be allowed to remain open
between the hours of 7 P.M. on Saturday,
and 7 A.M. on Monday. At present they are
shut during those hours, which means, I take
it, that Calgarians, if admitted, would drink
more than was good for them. The person
therefore, to whom the suggested statue should
be raised, would be the man who made the
Calgarian attitude towards the drink question
more civilised. I know that the problem is
not peculiar to Calgary or to Canada. It
may even be that Canada for a new country
does more to solve it than most. I recollect
than when I got back to England, one of the
first things that caught my eye was an inter-

K

146 THE FAIR DOMINION

view given to a local paper by a leading
Hertfordshire man, who had also just returned
from travelling through Canada. He assured
the interviewer that, having been from end
to end of Canada, he had never once seen a
man the worse for liquor. It must have been
a delightful, but perhaps unique experience.
I had not his good fortune, and having talked
with many decent Canadians, seldom fanatics,
and rarely indeed total abstainers, who never-
theless deplored the prevalence of the drink
evil in the West, I cannot think that that
Hertfordshire traveller's happy blindness is
a thing to be imitated. Drink takes another
form — perhaps a less vicious one — in a new
country ; but it ruins more good men than
it does in an old one.

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION 147

CHAPTER XVI

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION

THERE is vague talk at times about the
Americanisation of Canada. Very dismal
people talk about its Americanisation by force
of arms. Minor pessimists think the change
will come about peaceably. How can the
Canadians — they ask — continue to assert them-
selves for ever against the constant influx
from the other side ?

Monsieur Andre Siegfried, in that most
lucid and excellent book, Les Deux Races en
Canada, considers this question a little, but
the very fact that he has called the book
Les Deux Races en Canada, shows that he
considers the question premature. The two
races he treats of are not the Canadians and
the Americans, but the French Canadians and
the Canadians who are not French. Certainly
these two peoples are at present, and must for
a considerable time to come, be considered
the two main races of the Dominion. They

148 THE PAIR DOMINION

are still for all practical purposes separate
without being hostile ; and it is quite possible
that one of these may Canadianise the other
before any real Americanisation makes itself
felt. Should the French Canadians get the
upper hand, it is pretty certain that American
influence would get a set-back of perhaps
centuries. Yet English writers as a rule
never seem to consider this contingency. Per-
haps if they did, they would begin to think
that they would rather see Canada Ameri-
canised than Gallicised.

Still the Americanisation may happen, and
it is at least an interesting possibility. Let
us consider the task that lies before the Ameri-
cans. They will have to absorb —

(1) The French Canadians.

(2) The Canadian born, who are not French.

(3) The English who have immigrated.

(4) Foreign immigrants ; e.g. Scandinavians,
Galicians, Italians, Doukhobors — all that
strange assortment of people who have flowed
in from the poorer countries of Europe.

The Americans themselves represent at pre-
sent only a small fifth in this conglomeration
of nations. Still, they have this in their favour,
that they start in while Canada is still an
unfixed nation. French Canadians — a small

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION 149

third — only number about three millions. Non-
French Canadians about the same. The whole
population is under ten millions. It may in
fifty years be ten times that number. So
that anything may happen.

Meanwhile, many effective American influ-
ences are at work. Their order of effective-
ness is not easy to define, but when one
considers their representatives of business
enterprise, capital, journalism and farming
at work in the country, one can see that the
Americans are likely to go far.

What is their present value to the Dominion ?
Take American farmers. They are an un-
doubted gain to Canada in so far as they
possess energy, capital, a knowledge of the
]ocal conditions, versatility and adaptability.
I hardly know if it is an example of their ver-
satility or their adaptability, but as soon as
they cross over the line, American farmers
who were Tariff Reformers instantly become
Free Traders. It is not, of course, that they
have adopted nobler principles in their new
country. It is merely that, having become
Canadians, they have now to support Canadian
manufactures, and pay more for their farm-
ing machines and shoddy clothes. Naturally
they think tariffs a mistake.

150 THE FAIR DOMINION

Setting aside for a moment this political
elasticity as of doubtful value, Canadians may
still wonder if the American farmer is all
gain to them. Is it an objection, for example,
that the American introduces the purely com-
mercial spirit into farming ? Not entirely.
Not certainly so far as love of gain induces
promptness and enterprise. It is, however, an
objection if it destroys that love of the land
which causes the English farmer to stick by
his farm, generation after generation. Per-
haps American farmers have not that land
love in any case. If they had, they would
not have crossed the line. In most cases,
they have crossed it to make money — more
money. It may be argued that the English
farmers come further for the same purpose,
but that is not really the case. English
farmers who come are mostly men who were
tenants, and find themselves either not making
money or expecting to have their rents raised
if they do. Or they are the sons of farmers
who have not the capital to start farming in
the old country, or cannot get the land. The
American farmer is usually quite ready to
admit that he is in Canada to make money,
and his enemies will admit for him that though
this ideal may lead him to adopt new methods

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION 151

of farming which are good, it also induces
him to adopt that very old method of farming
which consists of getting all you can out of
the land, putting nothing into it, selling it
to a fool and moving on to fresh land — which
is a bad method. Any one who is acquainted
with the States at all, knows how at present
people there are awakening to the viciousness
of this practice. All their papers and speakers
are full of the wastefulness which Americans
practised in the last century thinking it to be
smartness. Fine land, they say, was spoilt
by it ; forests were annihilated ; water supplies
were overdrawn ; people were made restless.
It was getting rich quick at the expense of
posterity, and it bred in Americans a nomadic
spirit, and an imprudence in considering the
future, which has become a menace.

Canadians cannot altogether condemn the
American farmer, for just these methods spoilt
so much of the land in Ontario ; and only
now are their farmers beginning to improve on
them. Still, they would do well to indicate
to American farmers that they are welcome
only as improvers and not as wasters of the
new country. The trouble is to give an effec-
tive indication of that kind. Settlement of
the land is still reckoned, especially by the

152 THE FAIR DOMINION

railway companies, as the first of virtues,
covering a multitude of sins ; though even
they, I think, are recognising a little that
the English farmer, whose aim is not an imme-
diate fortune, but a home which he can retain
for his life and hand over to his children
after him, is not to be scorned as he was a
few years ago. The ready-made farms, made
possible by the irrigation work of the Canadian
Pacific Railway, are the chief example of the
attempts made to draw the Englishman. ' We
hope,' said one of the Canadian Pacific Railway
officials, speaking a few months ago before the
London Chamber of Commerce, ' that the
Englishmen on these farms will leaven the lot.'
A few years ago, compliments of that sort were
not being offered to the English farmer in
Canada. Probably he was not so good a type
as comes in now. But it is to be remembered
that the English immigrant has always had
more adaptations to make than the American.
To the American from the northern States,
Canada is the country he is used to — only
a little more north. The Englishman finds
a new soil, new climate, new manners, and
new methods. I should say that man for
man, the English farmer knows at least as
much as the American about farming, and

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION 153

a great deal more than the average Canadian.
But when he goes out to Canada he has to
put this knowledge behind him and learn
afresh — a difficult thing for a conservative
race. The American can hold on to what
he knows and simply go ahead. The accident
of birth has given him a fine start over the
Englishman.

The same advantage belongs to other Ameri-
cans in Canada. Business men, capitalists,
journalists have only had to cross a non-
existent line, instead of an undeniable ocean.
When Canadians complain that Englishmen
take no interest even in those Canadian schemes
for which they have found the money, they
j'orget that capitalists cannot always be close
t,o their investments. I repeat, the Atlantic is
not a thing to be denied, nor is it fair to call
the English mere moneylenders because they
have not always personally accompanied their
loans. At least they have shown themselves
trustful of the men on the spot.

Nevertheless, I think that Canada has every
reason to be grateful for the able business
men whom the States have sent her. That
negro porter at the Niagara Hotel who said
that Canadians were a stupid people, and
would have done nothing without the Ameri-

154 THE FAIR DOMINION

cans, was taking rather a spread-eagle view
of the facts. Still there is no doubt that
American brains have been — and still are —
of great service to Canada ; nor can I see
that they can be charged with Americanising
tendencies. Business men are nearly always
cosmopolitan in their achievements, whatever
their motives may be.

It is rather different with American journal-
ists. They can hardly as yet be charged
with being citizens of the world, and where
their influence penetrates, an American trend
is noticeable. They are beginning to leave
their mark in Canada. Canadian papers are
numerous and creditable, but an American
atmosphere broods over them. The most
trivial incident is magnified by headlines,
which repeat three times over in large type
and increasingly pompous language all and
more than all that follows in the news space.
I am not talking of the best Canadian news-
papers but of the average ones. If their
methods are American, so very largely are
the matters they deal with. In some small
up-country Canadian journal one will find
the leading columns occupied with the account
of some dinner given, say, by Mrs. Van So-
and-So of New York, wife of the Coffin King,

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION 155

with full accounts of the costumes, menu,
etc., — wearisome and vulgar matter, staringly
of no interest whatever to the bucolic readers
of the journal in question. But it was all
very cheaply wired from the States : whereas
news from England would be costly in the
extreme. The result is that Canadians — in
spite of their local sagacity — are at least as
ignorant of the things that happen in Great
Britain and Europe as we are of what is
happening in Canada. Often I have felt
while the Canadian-born were talking to me
of the ' Old Country,' talking of it too, not
only in a loyal, but a fond and even wistful
manner — that they had in their minds a pic-
ture of it that would probably have fitted
England better in the fourteenth century than
it does now. A poor, worn-out, tottering old
country is what they are thinking of ; and
nothing would amaze some of them more
than to see modern England as it is.

Why should they have got this idea into
their heads ? Largely, I suppose, because the
new with them is necessarily best. The old
things were put up anyhow by men in a hurry
and they are always superseded by better
things. The very epithet ' old ' connotes bad-
ness to a Canadian. Then, again, it is a

156 THE FAIR DOMINION

country of young men, and young men are apt
to favour youth, which they hardly associate
with England. No country — not even Spain
— can be as antique and ramshackle as many
of them undoubtedly believe England to be.
Birmingham and Manchester are on paper
such very ancient cities compared with Regina
and Moosejaw that the untra veiled Canadian
thinks pityingly of the former ; whereas he
considers the latter infinitely up-to-date and
important, and would be hurt to know that we
have in England hundreds of little prosperous
country towns very like them, of which the
ordinary Englishman hardly knows the names
and, if he did, would think no more of than he
would think of Regina and Moosejaw.

I would not seek to minimise that Canadian
pride and optimism which finds such satisfac-
tion in everything that they build. Pride
and optimism are valuable assets to any
country. All I would suggest is that they
should realise that the English habit of grum-
bling and self -depreciation does not indicate
that all Englishmen live in a tottering old
realm, doing nothing but decay and grumble.

Here we come back to newspapers. Most
people derive their facts from newspapers
nowadays, and if Canadians find that every-

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION 157

thing of importance happens in the new world,
whereas in the old world nothing happens
except an occasional sensational murder or the
deposition of a third-class king, they cannot
infer that Europe is still an important continent,
and that perhaps the most important country in
it is England. What is to enlighten them ?
I suppose the receipt of more news from Europe.
Probably the All Red Cable would do much
in this direction. News has to be cheap or it is
not news (the converse proposition that news
if it is cheap must be news, is not true). Much
also might be done by private enterprise.
English publishers could do more to push their
wares. So could English magazine proprietors.
Most of the books and magazines one can get
in a hurry in Canada are American. English
Cabinet Ministers might now and again make
a tour in the Dominion and explain to Canadians
some of those political principles in which at
home they have such fervid belief. It may be
that the Americanising tendency is too strong
for any of these suggestions to be of much
avail in combating it. Reciprocity treaties
between the States and Canada may inevitably
result in closer union, though I never could feel
that it was a marked human characteristic to
pine for fellow-citizenship with the man whom

158 THE FAIR DOMINION

one supplies with bread in return for a reaping-
machine. Trade relations may result in that
mystic fraternal sentiment by which nations
come together, though hitherto in the world's
history men have never shown any very frantic
desire for a heart-to-heart intimacy with their
tradespeople. ' Utility, Reciprocity, Fraternity '
sounds rather a cold cry by which to rally two
great people together.1

When all is said and done, and there are a
hundred other pros and cons which might be
considered, the chief obstacle to the American-
isation of Canada is climate. Canada is north
and America is south ; and those two show less
inclination to rush together than even east and
west. Of course it is not extremes of north
and south that are represented in the two
countries; — along the boundary the climates
are not dissimilar. Yet it seems to me that
while Canada is bound to be mainly a country
of northern peoples, Americans are fast becoming
more and more southernised, I do not mean
in the old sense of becoming languid and
effeminate and semi-tropical, but southernised
in just the same way as the French from being
Norsemen have become southernised. Have

1 This chapter was written before the Reciprocity business flamed
forth. I return to the subject later.

THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION 159

you seen prints of old Paris when it was a Gothic
city ? If you have, you will realise the com-
pleteness of the change that has come over it.
It spreads itself to the sun now, faces to the
Midi, and some such change might easily come
over New York, Chicago, and the rest of those
at present northern cities. Already the typical
American is far from being the son of a grim
and dour Pilgrim Father. Rather he is lively
and energetic — with a temperament always on
tiptoe — logical and apt to be materialistic, yet
sentimental and passionate too. You find such
a temperament among the French and Italians
of northern Italy. It is the sun working on
them. Even the stolid German and the moody
Scandinavian feels it when he gets to the States,
and thaws — into an American.

It is not so in Canada. The northern immi-
grants there remain silent and frosty, though
the touch of fortune makes them perhaps
more genial. Canada will never become a
southern country, even though its northern
parts are rendered temperate by the cutting
down of timber and constant ploughing. No,
I think Canadians will remain a hardy and
somewhat dour race, slow-moving on the whole,
but industrious and virtuous, suspicious of
talkers and hustlers ; so suspicious, too, of free

160 THE FAIR DOMINION

thought and new morals as to lay themselves
open maybe to the charge of hypocrisy ; given
at times to self-distrust and self-depreciation,
but for the most part steadfast, and holding in
their hearts the belief that there is no place
like Canada and no men like the inhabitants
thereof.

In short, they are as likely as not to end by
becoming Anglicised.

AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS 161

CHAPTER XVII

AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS

THERE was a time when Englishmen got a very
bad name in Canada. It was not to be wondered
at. For a long time English youths, who came
to be known as Remittance Men, used to be
shipped out by relations anxious only to get
rid of them. These helped to create an opinion
that Englishmen were more remarkable for
their drinking than their working powers ;
and when to them was added shipload after
shipload of unemployables from yet lower
classes, Canadians began to get impatient of
English immigrants. It was not logical of
them to suppose that these were favourable
specimens of our working-classes ; it is never
logical to suppose that the best men of a
country are ready to leave it. Logic, however, is
difficult to insist on under these circumstances,
and though there were plenty of Englishmen
even then, and even more Scots perhaps, who
were obviously as good as any farmers on the

L

162 THE FAIR DOMINION

prairie, the bad name of the English clung to
them. That is all, or nearly all, changed now ;
and the project connected with those farms,
which came to be known in the English papers
as the Ready-made farms, proved that the
Canadian Pacific Railway Company at any rate,
which is the biggest landowner in Canada, was
ready to welcome English farmers to the land,
if they could get the right sort. Readers will
perhaps remember that the idea of the company
was to provide farms ploughed, irrigated, sowed,
and furnished with house and out-buildings,
into which English colonists, having been handed
the front-door key, could enter — straight from
England — as well equipped almost as settlers
who had lived there for years. The purchase
money was to be spread over a certain term,
after which the land would become the property
of the farmers.

The plan saves all that intermediate period
during which the ordinary homesteader has
to set up his shack, sink his well, and generally
unsettle himself over the tedious work of
settling in. Good farmers are not necessarily
born pioneers ; and since the prairie in winter,
when work is slack, does not show a very
hospitable climate to new-comers and those
unaccustomed to it, it generally happens that

AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS 163

the English immigrant has to waste the spring
and perhaps the whole working season in the
unremunerative business of settling in. The
Ready-made farms were intended to save all
this time and trouble, and they were at once
filled — in the spring of 1910 — by specially picked
men from the old country. The men were not
all necessarily farmers, but they were, hypotheti-
cally, at any rate, men of intelligence and grit.

I wanted to see how they were getting on
after six months of this new life on the prairie.
For that purpose I took train from Calgary
with a friend, back along the line to Strathmore,
which is forty miles east, and is the station for
Nightingale, as this first colony of ready-made
farmers has been named. Strathmore itself is
not peculiarly beautiful or peculiarly interesting,
though it has a demonstration farm which is.
We went over the demonstration farm with
Professor Eliott, its manager, who struck me
as one of the keenest and most interesting men
of the West. What he does not know of the
productivity of the prairie is probably not
worth knowing ; and his experience seems to be
at the service of any farmer who has the in-
telligence to apply for it. He showed us his
barns and splendid teams of horses and leviathan
oats, and the little trees which he has planted

164 THE FAIR DOMINION

in this country where it was thought no trees
would grow, and which he believes will change
the face of it in a few years. We were full of
the future of the prairie when we got back to
Strathmore, and put up for the night in the last
bedroom of the one and only hotel. The two
of us were lucky to get that last bedroom
containing a double bed to ourselves, for more
often even than in Calgary six people sleep
in such a room and are very glad of the accommo-
dation. So I was told. It shows how things
move in Alberta ; what a hustle there is upon
the country.

We tossed for the bed, and I got it, and the
other man took two blankets and the floor.
I slept very well, especially after a mounted
policeman came in and threw out two gentle-
men next door who were, as the hotel boy
tersely put it, ' seeing snakes together.' My
friend slept less well. The room was small,
not much bigger than the bed, and we could not
get the window to stay open. It had not been
constructed with a view to admitting fresh air.
Still, after breakfast in a dark chamber, where
about thirty guests of every profession and
clothing (but all land-seekers) ate in silence,
we started pretty fit for Nightingale in a two-
horse rig.

AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS 165

I wish I could describe the prairie. Harvest-
ing was over, so that in any case the leagues of
golden wheat which you read about in advertise-
ments were not visible. It was another kind
of monotony altogether that we drove through
— a kind I cannot begin to suggest the charm of.
It was a kind of bare, rolling, sunburnt country,
with a high sea-wind blowing through it, and
waves of dust and an endless sky. Intensely
wearisome or intensely refreshing it must be,
according to a man's temperament ; and going
there from trees and hills must be like changing
from a room with patterned paper to one with
whitewashed walls. And then the soil, light
and fertile, stoneless, ready for the plough —
the farmer wants no variety of that.

We drove fourteen miles, as far as I can
remember, to get to Nightingale, and it was
all bad driving. Alberta seems to want roads
badly. In the old ranching days roads mattered
less. The prairie was a ready-made riding
country, and nothing was produced or needed
that could not, so to speak, go of itself across
country. ' I never owned a plough the seven-
teen years I was there,' a retired rancher told
me proudly. ' It was a fine country then.'
But it is a fine country now, too, and going to
be finer still when it has roads. At present even

166 THE FAIR DOMINION

the roadways are changing. Once you could
go everywhere. Now from day to day a new
farmer takes up a new piece of land, and what
was the road is enclosed by a wire fence.

One of the most inspiriting farms we passed
was that of a man who had been out from
Cheshire only three months. He was now a
chicken rancher — kept fowls, as we say ; and
in his brief occupation had got up — off a quarter
block — eighty tons of hay, besides winning
thirty-eight prizes at Albertan poultry shows.
This would seem to show that Alberta is not
yet rich in pure bred fowls. The Cheshire
chicken rancher said he hoped to show the
people round what a good table bird ought to
look like. He was already a Canadian in all
but accent. May he prosper !

After talking with him we drove on again
towards Nightingale in the same sea- wind along
the same bad roads. The sameness of the
country was amazing ; nor should I have known
in the end that we had come to Nightingale
but for the man driving us. ' See that
avenue ? ' he said. ' The shacks standing
along that are the farms. It seems more
sociable being along a road.' ' Certainly,' I
said. So it is more sociable to live along a
road, provided you know it is a road. I

AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS 167

didn't, but the colonists did, and that was the
main thing. We found those we visited ap-
parently contented and undoubtedly hopeful.
Canada has the gift of making men hopeful.
Though it had been in this part a very poor
year, owing to drought, and though the irriga-
tion had not been properly ready (but accidents
will happen, and the company was charging
only a nominal rent as a result of this) the
farmers seemed as cheery as they would have
been dismal in England. The crops had been
poor, but they would do for chicken-feed.
A bumper year was a sure thing some time or
other. The future held no clouds. They were
going to study Canadian methods suited to
the country. I rubbed my eyes. These senti-
ments were being enunciated by an English
farmer, who was meanwhile giving us a most
hospitable English lunch. He was going to
tell more people to come out. It was the
finest farming land possible, once you get the
water on it. Only one must take local advice
how to run things. It was no good standing
out, and knowing better than people on the
spot, as one of the colonists was doing. He, I
gathered, was the only man regarded as likely
to do badly, being determined to stick to the
methods of his English forebears. His leading

168 THE FAIR DOMINION

wrongheadedness was in declining to believe
that the winter was going to be or could be as
long and as hard as people said, and he had not
got in half the food needful for his cattle.

I suppose, but for that winter, the prairie
would be the most sought-after country in
the world. But for that winter, however,
it would not possess the amazing friable soil
it does. As has been remarked, one cannot
have everything all the time. The winter
is very severe, and there should be no dis-
guising of the fact, nor indeed any exaggerat-
ing of it. Formerly its hardships were no
doubt exaggerated. People had no use for
a hard winter. Nowadays leisured people go
in search of it — on the understanding, how-
ever, that it shall be made easy for them.
They would like it less if they had to work
in it in a below zero temperature, twenty
or thirty miles from anywhere. I do not
say that work under such conditions should
or would disgust healthy and energetic men,
provided they were prepared for it. It might
even delight them. But it should be pre-
pared for. English farmers in particular
should be made to understand the drawbacks
an well as the advantages of the new land they
are going to. Honesty is in fact the best

AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS 169

emigration policy. Given that, it is toler-
ably certain that these transplanted English
farmers are going to find it more than worth
while to have settled in Nightingale or any
of the newer prairie colonies, and what is
more — Canada is going to find it more than
worth while to have them settled there.

170 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XVIII

INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF
THE FAITH

FOR several days I had seen the Rockies far
off — a black and jagged coil of mountains,
that seemed at times almost to be moving
like some prehistoric great scaly beast on
its endless crawl across the plains. Now I
was to see them near by — some part of them
at least. What has any man seen in that
ocean of mountains but a few drops ?

At the unpleasing hour of 3.30 A.M. I dis-
engaged myself from one of the three double
beds with which my room in the hotel was
furnished, washed slightly, dressed completely,
and walked to the station. Calgary was
quiet at last. There had been a sound of
revelry by night. A man with a tenor voice
had been singing songs in some adjacent
room to the hotel up to 3.30. But his songs
and the vamped accompaniment to them had
ceased now, and peace prevailed. I don't

MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES.

INTO THE ROCKIES 171

remember to have passed any one on the
way to the station. There were two or three
sleepy - eyed people lounging about there ;
there always seem to be a few in Canadian
stations, no matter what the hour. I think
they must be out-of-works who keep their
spirits up by listening to the squeaking and
clash of shunting trucks, and the letting off
of steam, and the great clang of the bells
that are sounded from the engines as a trans-
continental train comes in — all those sounds
of life and hustle that are dear to the Canadian
soul.

The train I was waiting for entered slowly
with the usual peal of bells. All the blinds
were drawn in the sleeping - carriages ; and
the only sign of life from them was the pro-
truded woolly head, here and there, of a negro
car conductor. I think I was the only person
who got in.

' What a lot of people,' I said to myself as
] sat down in an empty smoking compart-
ment, and shivering lit a pipe, ' would envy
the prospects of a man about to spend days
and perhaps weeks in the heart of the Rockies.'
' What a lot of people,' myself replied to me,
' would see the Rockies further before they
got out of bed at this unholy hour.'

172 THE FAIR DOMINION

My pipe held the balance between us and
gradually soothed the rebellious part of me.
It was still too dark to see anything, and there
was nothing to be done but wait patiently
for the dawn. I could not but regret that
I was missing the scenery of the foothills, for
which those who have lived among them
seem to have a peculiar affection. But I
was consoled by the entry a little later of
two fellow - passengers, who had evidently
been disturbed in their sleep and wanted
smoke and conversation. Strange and various
types one sees in a Westbound train. The
West is still — even to the Canadian born —
the Unknown and the Happy Hunting-grounds
and Eldorado and Ultima Thule and the
Blessed Isles. West is where the farmer's
son of spirit goes to seek fresh lands, where
the prospector goes to find gold, where suc-
cessful men go because they want to be more
successful, or maybe because they want to
retire and enjoy themselves, and they have
heard that West there is a climate which hardly
includes winter, and has none at all of that
fierce break-up of winter which makes the
plains in parts trying to the toughest con-
stitution ; where the failures go because they
have tried all other places, and the last is

INTO THE ROCKIES 173

West. All sorts of other men may be seen
going West too — bank clerks and lumbermen,
commercial travellers and engineers, tourists
and politicians, trappers and amateurs of sport.
But I never saw a more strangely assorted
pair than these two men who came into the
smoking compartment where I sat as the
train mounted the foothills.

One was a very old man. I do not know
what his profession was, but his clothes and
himself were equally weather-stained and dirty.
He had the coarsest snow-white hair hanging
in cords about his neck and cheeks and mouth,
which gave him the appearance of a vicious
old billy-goat. He was, I discovered, a mode-
rately vicious old man. The other was a
lumberjack — hardly more than a boy, sturdy,
and strikingly handsome, with the clearest
blue eyes and a complexion that a woman
would give a fortune for. The old man — as
they came in together — was already engaged
in telling the young one what you might call
a, backwoods smoking-room story, and he
went on with others even thicker, over which
the young one betrayed the hugest amuse-
ment. What particularly won his laughter
and admiration was the fact that so elderly
a person should enter into such topics with

174 THE FAIR DOMINION

so much zest. I can still hear him repeating,
k There ain't many fellows as old as you,
Daddy, that 'ud be such sports. No, sir.'

And the old man would grin and chuckle
at the compliment, and become more highly
improper in the warmth of the boy's praise.
He became indeed so elevated by it — especi-
ally after the boy had got up once or twice
and executed a brief step-dance to mark the
exuberance of his delight — that, thinking to
gain even more glory by being still more
startling, he dropped the subject of women
and took up that of religion. It seemed he
was an atheist of the old three-shots-a-penny
variety, and he went for Christianity hot
and strong. He had, it must be admitted,
a perfectly skilled command of the old cheap
arguments, and marshalled them in good order.
Only, the unexpected happened. The boy,
who had not minded being boyishly wicked,
was plainly shocked by this new thing, and he
said so in language so warm that a minister
of the faith he was defending would have
felt positively faint to hear it. The old man,
surprised and still more annoyed, brought
out further iconoclastic arguments, excellently
directed. It is true any theologian could
have warded them off easily enough. Any

INTO THE ROCKIES 175

debater could have. But it was clear that
the boy had never argued in his life. That
didn't matter. He was not going to sit there
and listen to that sort of thing. He got indeed
quite hopelessly confused ; intellectually he
was tripped time and again ; he deferred
with a lamb's innocence to the old man's
boasts of having perused Persian literature,
Hebrew literature, all the books that have
to do with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (I
am afraid I did not believe any of this) ; he
allowed that so much learning and thought
must be a fine thing, but not an inch did he
yield of his creed. And the more the old
man got at him with arguments the more
sulphurous grew the boy's language. I have
never known so queer a Defender of the
Faith as that lumberjack — or in a way a more
successful one. His manner was childlike, his
words unprintable ; he made a muddle when-
ever he attempted to follow the simplest of
the old villain's inferences. Yet never the
least shake could his opponent give him, and
his dogged reiteration of the statement that

' A man by could only stick to the

faith that he had, and Daddy was a fool

to think his that - - arguments made any
difference ' — wore the old free-thinker out in

176 THE FAIR DOMINION

the end. He did not give in, but he gave up : a
wiser but, it is to be feared, not a better old man.
Meanwhile we were getting into the hills,
and my first impressions were rather of great
rocks than of mountains. Most people, I
suppose, come upon the Rockies first from the
east, and they seem tremendous if only for
the reason that one has come upon them
after days spent in those plains which, even
while they rise, rise imperceptibly. But tre-
mendous as they seem from the east, they
must be far more so from the north, and far
more beautiful from the west. On the east
the mountains have less height than on the
north. Their timber is poor by comparison
with the trees that grow further west ; their
valleys have little of the luxuriance of the
Pacific valleys. One feels a certain coldness
and hardness about them, and after a little
while there seems almost a monotony of
corrugated peaks, all thrown together and
slanting eastward. They are striking enough
even so, and the view from the train, especi-
ally when one considers that railways are
run through mountains by the easiest route
not by the finest, and that grades have to be
counted before landscapes, cannot disappoint
anybody.

INTO THE ROCKIES 177

Comparisons with the Alps and the Hima-
layas should be kept till the Rockies have
been seen at closer quarters. The finest view
I ever had of the Rockies was from a moun-
tain in the Selkirks, at a height of over ten
thousand feet, and over a hundred miles from
the nearest railway. There I forgot to make
comparisons, which after all are somewhat
useless. It is easy to say that the Alps are
softer and more pictorial — showing that deep
blue sky above their snows, which is rarely
if ever to be seen in the Rockies. The Canadian
skies are too lofty and distant ever to seem
to be resting even on the topmost snowfields.
The Himalayas again have giants unparalleled.
Kinchinjunga, leaning out of the clouds, can-
:not be matched among the Rockies. But
the Rockies — well, the Rockies are different.
As yet we are only just getting to Banff.

M

178 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XIX

A HOT BATH IN BANFF

EVERYBODY stops at Banff. The popular
places of the world are not necessarily the
most beautiful ; and even if they start beauti-
ful, they are not rendered more so by the
accretion in their midst of a large number of
even first-class hotels. Perhaps first-class
hotels increase the feeling for beauty. Indeed
the sole defence of luxury worth considera-
tion is that it has this effect. Without lux-
ury, would there exist such an appreciator of
beauty as d'Annunzio, to name but one ?
Pardon, I am getting away from Banff.

It is a very beautiful watering-place at the
foot of mountains. It is not spoilt yet, and
it will be difficult to spoil it. The air is
superb. I learnt that just as I was getting
into it on my way from the station. I seemed
to be the only person walking into it that
morning — except for a local Canadian who
was going in to his work. It was still very

A HOT BATH IN BANFF 179

early in the morning, and distinctly cold,
and I said to this Canadian workman :

' It 's pretty cold at Banff.'

' It 's the finest air in Canada,' he replied,
with that characteristic touch of resentment
of anything that might be taken as a criticism
of his native heath, which every Canadian in-
variably shows. 'Yes, sir, it's the finest air
in Canada, and they 're putting down concrete
sidewalks.'

He was, as a matter of fact, engaged in that
work himself, and after I had expressed a
proper admiration of it, he became friendly
enough and directed me to the hotel I wanted
to stay in.

I wish it had not rained at Banff while I
was there. It was an unusually cold and
early rain, and it prevented me from seeing
many of the sights of the place. The motor
boat, which as a rule runs several times a day
up the Bow River, did not run at all while
I was there, and so I did not see this lovely
valley. Nor did I take much stock of the
buffaloes of the National Park, which are
one of the greatest features of Banff, one that
tourists with cameras always make for first.
Rain was the reason of my abstention. On
the other hand, the rain was the immediate

180 THE FAIR DOMINION

cause of my spending a most delightful after-
noon in a hot sulphur swimming-bath. There
are three such baths in Banff, and I chose
the upper one, walking two miles up a wind-
ing road, whose woods were beginning to
show all the reds of autumn, to get to it. I
found that it was an open-air bath, fed by
a sulphur stream that trickles steaming down
the face of a mountain, and since no one had
been tempted there on so gloomy a day, I
had it all to myself, and swam up and down
in water that varied from 110° to 95° for an
hour or more, looking at the hilltops opposite,
and the mists that rose and sank about them.
The rain and the cold mattered nothing so
long as I swam there, wondering if luxury
could go further in this world of ours. For
there I was lapped about with all the warmth
and peace that come to the beach-comber
or the lotus-eater, and yet drinking in the
brisk mountain air and feeling the challenge
of the hills. It was to combine the emotions
of a man climbing the Alps with the emotions
of a man squatting in a Turkish bath ; and
only when the latter threatened to become
rather the stronger of the two, did I get out,
feeling weak but fresh. I had the pleasure
while dressing of reading in a printed adver-

A HOT BATH IN BANFF 181

tisement of the baths that I had been curing
myself of rheumatism, sciatica, asthma, anaemia,
insomnia and, I fancy, any other disease I
might happen to have latent. Certainly I
felt well and uncommonly drowsy when I
got back to the hotel. Indeed those who
intend to explore Banff with energy would
be well advised to postpone the baths till
their last day. There is plenty to explore.
The National Park alone is 5400 square miles
in extent, and encloses half a dozen subsidiary
ranges of the Rocky Mountains ; and if Banff
is to be regarded as the centre for mountain
climbing, fishing, and big game hunting, there
is of course no end to it. Guide-books men-
tion in a vague way that it is such a centre
— which only means that if you want to do
any of these things from a highly civilised
and comfortable hotel, you had better make
Banff your stopping place. Good climbing is
to be had quite near, but whether the same
is to be said for shooting or fishing depends
upon whether anything short of the best in
these matters is good. You cannot expect
fish and big game to remain centralised. Par-
ticularly is this the case with big game. They
avoid the centre of things, and prefer to keep
on the circumference. In these sort of matters

182 THE FAIE DOMINION

guide-books are very little use. Nowhere
do conditions change more rapidly than in
Canada, and the man who wants big-horn
or big trout will have to make for the circum-
ference too. But there he will neither expect
nor find first-class hotels.

Speaking of first-class hotels, I took part —
quite an unwilling part — in an incident that
goes to show some of the difficulties attendant
upon trying to run them in Canada. Frankly,
except for those run by the Canadian Pacific
Railway, there are practically none. It is not
to be wondered at. Cookery is an art, like
literature or music, not greatly encouraged in
a new country. Take waiters again. Though
the wages they make are good and the standard
of waiting expected from them is rarely the
highest, I believe they are a perennial difficulty
to hotel proprietors. On the trains and in the
big towns in the East one usually finds that
the waiters are Englishmen not long out ;
and they are so not because they have acquired
the science of waiting in the old country (as
one might suppose, since it is usually well
learnt there), but because they have not as yet
acquired that Canadian spirit which makes
anything savouring of domestic service — or
even of undue courtesy as from man to man —

A HOT BATH IN BANFF 183

distasteful to the Canadian born, who, in any
case, dislikes working for uncertainly long
hours. Englishmen, it has to be admitted,
are not particularly zealous for long and un-
certain hours of work either in these days ;
and therefore it generally happens that as soon
as the newcomer is the least acclimatised, he,
too, drops waiting if he has taken it up. In
the East a freshly arrived immigrant takes his
place ; but in the West there is no such constant
supply of spare white men. The result is that
Western hotels are more or less driven to em-
ploy as waiters either women or Japanese and
Chinese boys.

The hotel I stayed in at Banff had a staff of
the former. Heaven knows we have women
waiters enough in England, but in Canada I
do not think heaven can know. ... As soon as
I came in to breakfast in the morning I became
aware of a sharp-featured maiden with eye-
glasses and tight lips and stiff white cuffs —
very much the type of the Girton girl in the
older times — who was clearly in charge of the
room, and meant to let every one know it.
I shrank down at the nearest table, and in a
hushed voice requested and received my break-
fast from one of the waitresses who were theo-
retically in attendance. She was very kindly,

184 THE FAIR DOMINION

only she brought me tea instead of coffee. I
wanted coffee. I felt it was taking a risk, but
as a man at his breakfast usually prefers his
own fancy to other people's, I looked about
delicately to see if I could catch my waitress's
eye and induce her to change the pot. By bad
fortune I merely caught the eye of the sharp
young lady who, coming up and learning from
my unwilling lips that I had been given the
wrong drink, said imperiously :

' Kindly tell me which of the girls gave you
this ! '

Now I had not particularly noticed the girl
who had been good enough to help me —
an inexcusable carelessness — which the sharp
young woman evidently interpreted as a desire
to fence with her, for while I hesitated she
went on :

' I '11 tell you why I want to know. There 's
some game on this morning '

c Oh,' I said, ' yes.'

c And I 'm not going to stand it,' said the
sharp young woman fiercely. ' I fired two of
the girls yesterday, and I don't mind if I fire
the lot, so if you'll tell me which of them
brought you this I '11 see to her straight away.'

6 1 'm afraid I should not know her again,'
I said hastily. A scene of strife around my

A HOT BATH IN BANFF 185

unlucky person, while breakfast got cold and
all the other guests at the other tables looked
on, was terrible to my fancy. The sharp one
seemed most disappointed.

' I wish you could,' she said. ' I 'd fix her
right now.'

' Quite impossible,' I murmured, hoping that
I was speaking the truth. Not so far off there
was a young woman, standing chatting genially
with two men at another table, who might have
brought me that tea.

' Oh, well, of course if you can't,' said the
sharp one, and presently brought me coffee with
her own fair white-cuffed hands. I thanked
her warmly, and she went away ; after which
I was rewarded for my supposed chivalry by
the young woman who had been entertaining
those other two men coming up to me and say-
ing in a sweet voice :

' I say, I 'm awfully sorry that I brought you
that tea instead of coffee. The fact is we 're
awfully rushed this morning.'

' Not at all,' I said, ' don't think of it,' and
hoped inwardly that she would go away before
the sharp one spotted her and bore down upon
us. She did not seem so rushed as she had said.

4 Sure you won't have anything else now ? '
she persisted in the kindliest way.

186 THE FAIR DOMINION

4 No, thank you,' I said, and seeing, I suppose,
that I was not an entertaining person, she
flitted gracefully away to a third table where
another male sat, to whom I heard her whisper
in passing — on the way to further chat with
the other two men :

4 Now, mind you don't forget to meet me
outside the hotel at six sharp ! '

My sympathies almost went out to the sharp-
visaged spinster, for really there were quite
a number of guests looking about them for
food while the rushed staff chatted freely and
pleasantly with such male visitors as seemed
by their bearing to be worthy of being fascin-
ated. This at breakfast-time — breakfast-time
when an Englishman at all events wants food
and would not be put off by the conversation
of Cleopatra or Helen of Troy. Canadians may
be a more gallant race at this hour of the day,
but I am not sure of this. The preponderance
of Japanese waiters as one gets further West
seems to point to the fact that even they
prefer food — at meal-times — to sentiment. The
Japanese may demand high wages, and leave
their places suddenly if they feel like it, but at
least they do not threaten one with an emotional
scene over one's morning coffee. Nor do I
imagine that they require to be treated by their

A HOT BATH IN BANFF 187

employers with quite that reverential respect
of which I remember seeing an example in a
small hotel in the Columbia Valley. I was
stopping at the hotel over Sunday with a
friend, and as we wanted to go out for the day,
we asked the manager if we could be supplied
with some sandwiches for lunch. He was a
mild and obliging young man, but his face fell.

' I '11 — I '11 see what can be done,' he said,
and I heard him go to the young lady who
vouchsafed to wait at table occasionally in a
superior way. ' My God ! ' I heard him say
in an extremely humble voice to her, ' I 'm
most awfully sorry to ask such a thing of you,
but these chaps want to go out and take some
sandwiches. I say, do you suppose it could be
managed ? '

We got two sandwiches each as a result of
his intercession, and in that mountain air we
could have done with six times the number.
But we realised from the manager's face when
he brought them to us that the goddess who
had provided them might, instead of doing so,
have stalked straight out o^ the hotel for good.

188 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XX

CANADA AND WOMAN

FEW books are complete nowadays without a
chapter on the woman question. Man can be
treated of in between ; one would not as yet
care to write a book without mentioning man
in it. As a subsidiary agent for keeping the
world going man is still not without his im-
portance. But woman, as I have said, must
have a chapter to herself. And since I un-
wittingly arrived on the last page at the subject
of woman's work in Canada, I will pause —
even on the threshold of the mountains — and
go further into the matter.

The most noticeable thing about woman
in Western Canada is that she has not yet
arrived there. If any one wished to get an idea
of how the world would arrange itself supposing
there were no women in it at all, they would
have to go a little further north and west,
into some of the British Columbian valleys or
into the Yukon country, and look around.

CANADA AND WOMAN 189

What a simple world it seems. No clothes
question, no washing, the simplest cookery,
one man one plate (and that plate never
washed), one knife for eating with or for skin-
ning a grizzly bear, no carpets or curtains in
the houses, no dustings or spring-cleanings, no
knick-knacks to knock over or break, no flowers
without or within except such as grow wild, no
luxuries, in short, either to enjoy or to pay for,
and a terrible amount of dirt. That is the
physical aspect of the world without women.

The spiritual side of it is less easy to arrive
at. These bachelors you see in the backwoods
are a silent people, lacking in self-consciousness,
and, I daresay, in manners, but law-abiding
and amiable and peculiarly handy. All men
are handy who have not women to steal that
talent from them ; and most womenless men
are silent too. One knows, of course, that
bores may be found among men at times, but
never chatterboxes. There is something to
be said for the view that speech arose by
women putting questions so often that men
were driven, in sheer weariness, to make
answers.

Does it seem an unattractive life that these
hardy bachelors have perforce to live ? Per-
haps. But you will not find them bemoaning

190 THE FAIR DOMINION

their lot. That is not the way of bachelors.
We know they are to be pitied, but they do
not pity themselves. Seriously, the trouble
with these men is that they have none of those
inducements to consider the future which
make a man better than a machine. They take
the world as it comes, which is well enough
for themselves but not well enough for the
world. I doubt if it is well for themselves
really. True, they have nothing to worry them
so long as they are in health. They can make
big money when they choose and take holidays
when they choose, conscious that when their
money is spent they have only to set to again.
Their wages are indeed to them little more
than trinkgeld — and this means that those
splendid workers have no real reward for their
work, leave no successors to carry on the
traditions of their toil, enrich only the bar-
keepers and the rogues who live on the folly
of honest men.

Clearly the most honourable opening for
women in Canada is marriage. Only wives
are capable of putting down the drink curse,
preventing the growth of a particularly odious
plutocracy, establishing a permanent instead
of a nomad population in the West. Nor might
it be a bad thing (but for Anglo-Saxon pre-

CANADA AND WOMAN 191

judices) if provincial governments there could
start marriage offices, due attention being paid
to eugenics. Even in so small a matter as the
following, the presence of wives should make
all the difference. All down the Columbia
valley I found the cattle ranchers, who were
bachelors, drinking tinned milk, while scores
of cows ran wild and went dry. When I asked
if it wasn't worth while to keep one cow milking,
I was always told, ' No, we haven't time to
bother about it,' till I came to the shack of a
married Swede, whose wife had time to bother
about it. In his shack tinned milk was ana-
thema, as it should be everywhere.

As prejudice would undoubtedly prevent the
formation of governmental marriage offices,
marriage can only be considered as an indirect
opening for women. What are the directer
openings ? A great deal depends on what part
of Canada immigrant women make for. In the
East there is no such lack of women as in the
West. The sexes are fairly balanced. In the
big towns there is the usual demand for domestic
servants, but not many more openings for
educated Englishwomen than there are in big
towns at home. There are a few more, because
those cities are going at a faster pace than our
English cities, and because all work there is

192 THE FAIR DOMINION

more valuable than in England. Women skilled
in the arts that have to do with personal
decoration, such as millinery, dressmaking, etc.,
could make their way there.

Factory work in Canada is hardly worth going
into here, the chief point about it being that
wages are of course higher ; nor did I notice
any unusual professions engaging the attention
of women, unless it were the checking of parcels
and the playing in hotel orchestras, neither of
which requires a man's strength.

French Canada offers employment to but
very few. Western Canadians sniff at the
Habitants because they let their women work
in the fields ; haymaking and hoeing. But
the idea of using women as outdoor workers is
not so uncivilised as it looks to those unaccus-
tomed to seeing it. Ethnologists are agreed
nowadays that the tribes in which women do
the fieldwork are not the least but the most
civilised, and maintain that the position of
women among such tribes is higher than among
any others. Women began to work out-of-
doors because the primitive peoples believed
in a connection between their fertility and that
of the earth ; and where they do such work,
women are always the keepers of the grain
store — hold in their hands, that is to say, the

THE HALT. LAGGAN.

CANADA AND WOMAN 193

food upon which the life of the tribe depends.
The most honourable primitive customs are not
always the best in modern times, but there
can be no doubt of the fertility of the French
Canadians.

As one goes West, woman becomes more of
an indoor creature ; and this may be due to the
greater chivalry of their men folk. But one
has to remember that the great charm of
Canadian life, especially on the prairies, is an
outdoor charm — working in the exhilarating
air — not cooking over a hot stove indoors.
One hears of a few cases in which women have
taken up farming or vegetable-gardening and
made a success of it, but no one could honestly
say that the fortune awaiting women who take
up such work is usually a great one. The work
is too hard, especially in the winter time.
Chicken-ranching is perhaps easier ; but the
real demand in the West is for women to do that
housework which the men have not time for.
At such work capable women can earn from
three to five pounds a month with board and
lodging ; and while they are likely to find it
lather harder — certainly not less hard — than
similar work at home, it has compensations
besides the money to be made by it. For one
thing there is none of the odium that attaches

N

194 THE FAIR DOMINION

to it in the older countries. The cook is as
good as her employer, who probably did the
cook's work for years before the cook was to be
had. It is natural that the work which most
ladies have to do for themselves, because
neither love nor money can obtain them
substitutes, should lose its menial and un-
pleasant aspect, and the finest ladies in western
Canada do it unashamed. Often their guests
will help them to wash up, and even prepare
the dinner. Personally, I found myself becom-
ing quite expert at cleaning fish for a hostess
who thereafter cooked it and dished it up, and
yet appeared at table as fresh and elegant and
apparently leisured as any lady who keeps a
staff of servants in the old country. And I
found as I got on that I rather liked cleaning
fish.

It stands to reason that the lady help is not
wanted. The precise duties demanded of such
a lady are always a little misty, but I imagine
that they include a little sewing and a little
reading, the ability to chat pleasantly, to be
good-tempered (and possibly a Protestant),
to feed the canary, and, at a pinch, even to
clean out its cage. None of these talents are
needed in a new country, and I heard of forty
women who were on the books of an employment

CANADA AND WOMAN 195

office in Calgary, all wanting to be lady helps
and all likely to go on wanting it till Doomsday.

One hears a good deal of discussion (not in
Canada) of the openings in the colonies for
educated women. There is an English com-
mittee— the Committee of Colonial Intelligence
for Educated Women — which, ' recognising the
crying need of our colonies for the best type of
educated women,' undertakes to furnish them
with detailed, practical and up-to-date informa-
tion, before advising them to go out. This
committee hopes later on to found settlements
in the colonies, where training, suitable to the
needs of each colony, can be given, and centres
can be formed to which the girls can return
in the intervals of employment. There is
much sense both in the recognition of the need
for educated women in the colonies and in the
perception that the most educated woman will
be lost there unless she is prepared to be
practical. The truth is that that same ad-
aptability which is required of men in Canada
is required of women also. They must first
suit the country before they can hope to leave
their mark on it. Educated women can leave
their mark there by their inward, not by their
outward, superiority.

Centres to which the girls can go in the first

196 THE FAIR DOMINION

place, and to which they can return in the
intervals of employment, are an excellent idea,
and one which central or local government
authorities in Canada would do well to support.
Of course the Young Women's Christian Associa-
tion already gives much help in this direction,
but it cannot be expected to have branches
everywhere. New towns and settlements are
planned and put through very quickly in
Canada, and wherever they result in creating
a demand for women's work, some such centre
for girls as near the railway depot as possible
should be started. For one thing it would
facilitate the engagement of girls, for another
it would attract a better class. Probably the
best openings of all for women in Canada —
educated women, I mean — are in the big cities
of the furthest West. In Vancouver and
Victoria wealthy people reside who can afford
to pay for such luxuries as private school-
mistresses and governesses. And the supply
of women is not so great there. Women also
seem to be more employed there as hotel
manageresses and under-manageresses, and as
cashiers in hotels and offices. I never heard
of women being real estate agents, but in a
profession in which the arts of persuasion play
a leading part, there seems no reason why they

CANADA AND WOMAN 197

should not shine. Of bachelor girls, living
their own lives, I have also never heard in the
West. They could hardly have the hearts to
do it with so many bachelor men wasting their
lives around them.

On the whole, the position of woman in
Canada is one of honourable toil lightened by
the high consideration in which they are held.
They have hardly as yet obtained that dominant
super-man eminence which American women
are said to occupy. That is, perhaps, because
they have not gone in so much for that culture
and social fastidiousness by the lack of which in
themselves some American husbands are made
to feel their inferiority. On the other hand
they seem to keep their men folk contented,
and remain contented with them. Divorce is,
I believe, uncommon in Canada.

198 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXI

THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS

WHO thinks the Rockies only of a forbidding
magnificence, of a grandeur always dark and
fierce ? Let him go to Lake Louise. The
only phrase I know that fits it is that German
one — mdrchenhaft schon — lovely as a scene of
fairyland. Coming upon it suddenly, on a
moonlight night, it seems so unlooked-for, so
exquisite, that one says to oneself, ' Surely it
will vanish like a dream.'

It is quite a little lake, shut in for the most
part by hills. The hills are wooded at their
base, and wooded high up — wooded, indeed,
right into the clouds ; but higher still they turn
to bare walls of rock or snow-strewn peaks,
where the snow and the flowers grow side by
side. Up among the heights other little lakes
lie — the Lakes in the Clouds, they are called —
and sometimes they are in the clouds and
sometimes not, and they are coloured like
thick opals and moonstones, and you can see

THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS 199

the tall, slim firs growing at the bottom as if
they were real trees and not only reflections.
I think it is the colours of these lakes that are
so fairy-like. People may say of the Rockies
that they never give the contrast of white
snow-fields and deep blue sky that is so marked
in the Swiss and Italian Alps, but what of
that ? The colours they do yield are, in truth,
far more delicate and varied — perhaps because
the Canadian skies are so much loftier and
farther away — and, if you do not believe it, go
and look at the waters of Lake Louise. They
are distilled from peacocks' tails and paved
with mother-of-pearl, and into them rush those
wild blues that are only mixed in the heart of
glaciers.

Across the end of the lake stretches the hotel
garden — green turf crossed by one great border
of Iceland poppies, golden and orange, fringing
the water front. One other plant I should
have liked to see growing there — the opal
anchusa. Its colour is so exactly the colour
of the lake, in sun and in shadow. Still, more
colour is hardly needed anywhere round Lake
Louise. As I have said, the very snows are
gay when you get to them, and pied with
flowers, as old English meadows used to be
when old English poets used that word, before

200 THE FAIR DOMINION

scientific farming came in and determined that
flowers were weeds and killed them. And I
had thought of these valleys as black and frown-
ing, full of melancholy noises among the trees,
rather than windless and radiant.

The station for Lake Louise is Laggan, and
the time to arrive there is in the evening, just
before the moon rises. It does not matter if
the drive up from the station is accomplished
in the dark. The road is wooded and beautiful,
but do not wish for the moon till the last bend
of it leads you suddenly on to the lake. Then
wish for the moon hard. Or, if you want to
make sure of it, and the moon (though it seems
always magical in its uprising) follows laws
like other things and will not rise unless it is
due to, make cold calculations some time
ahead, and be sure they are right. There never
could be anything better worth timing than
moonrise on Lake Louise.

If the poppied air that was fabled to pervade
certain lovely places in the old world hung
about this region, there would be no coming
away from it. You would remain gazing
drowsily for ever at the lake like the lover on
the Greek urn that Keats described. But all
around are the mountains which distil an air
keen and exhilarating, so that before you know

THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS 201

it you are set walking, or riding or climbing—
in some way adventuring forth. Some people
adventure forth in a carriage, but that is
rather too like going out to battle in evening
clothes.

Myself, having but two days at my disposal —
which I could very well have spent looking
across the Iceland poppies at the lake — was
urged by the air and a sense of duty to take a
long walk the first day and a longish ride the
second. For this second expedition I hired a
mountain pony and decided to reach the
Moraine Lake, which lies at the end of The
Valley of the Ten Peaks. It was my first
experience of a Rocky Mountain pony, and I will
state at once that it was an unfavourable one.
There exist, no doubt, a few excellent mountain
ponies. I bestrode one or two later in different
places. But this first one was so dispiriting
that he warped my mind concerning the whole
breed. The truth is that mountain ponies,
being intended for the average tourist who
seems to be not much of a rider, are both bred
and trained to go no faster, and exhibit no
more spirit than a bath-chair man. Not theirs
to trot or canter, even if a smooth stretch of
road present itself. Enough if they move
steadily up mountain trails and along mountain

202 THE FAIR DOMINION

ledges and down precipitous tracks in a manner
designed to make the tourist feel that mules
are stumbling creatures by comparison. Enough
in one way but not in another, for to emulate
a baser creature corrupts the best-bred pony
in the world. Ponies have that much of
humanity in them. Besides, it is not worth
while to breed the best ponies for such work ;
and, further and anyway, a mountain pony is,
so to say, a contradiction in species. A pony
as much as a horse is a creature of the plains ;
place him in the mountains and he becomes
something different — scarcely a pony at all.
He is then an animal that picks up his feet
in a marvellous way, is free from mountain
sickness and the f aintness that comes from high
altitudes, and carries a pack or a person on his
back. But he is no longer the friend of man.
He is merely the tool of the tourist.

We started downhill — that pony and I —
directly after lunch. Words — words — words.
I mounted that pony directly after lunch.
The road led downhill in the first instance. I
tried to start the pony in that direction. That
is a truer description of what actually hap-
pened. But after I had got his head set
towards the Ten Peaks Valley, he slewed it
round again. We had not by any means

THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS 203

started. 'He is frightened of the hill,' I
thought to myself, and redirected his head,
encouraging him with words and reins. I
had no whip. The owners of these hired
mountain ponies seem to think whips un-
necessary, and, indeed, they are very little use.
I tried one cut from the roadside some five
minutes later. We had by that time made
about a hundred yards. I beat him also with
his own reins and my heels, and we accom-
plished about a quarter of a mile downhill,
going delicately. I said to myself, c Patience.
The descent will soon be over. The road then
rises. We shall see a different animal.'

What I saw when we came, by sideways and
prolonged efforts, to the first part of the ascent,
was that, greatly as that pony hated a down-
hill grade, far more did he loathe an uphill one.
We mounted it at what seemed to be a mile
an hour or less, and I groaned to think that we
had eight or nine to accomplish before we got
to the lake, and the same in returning. By
late afternoon I judged we had made the half
distance and were still going weakly. I had
cut two or three different sticks by now, and
encouraged the pony with different words
from those I had used at the start. He woke
up once or twice and trotted for a moment.

204 THE PAIR DOMINION

The road was not really steep for most of the
way; where it was steep I walked, dragging
the pony behind me. He did not seem to mind
whether I was on his back or off, provided no
motion was required of him. I found it was
cooler work to get off and pull him than to
propel him from the saddle. Always he stood
still for choice.

The road was good — good underfoot and
good to observe from. On our left lay a broad
valley, and on our right the hills. I should
love to have paused voluntarily and absorbed
the views, but in point of fact I only paused
in passion to cut whips ; the pony, meanwhile,
grazing. He knew the road to the Moraine
Lake better than I did, and he contested every
inch of it.

I think I was aware long before the Ten
Peaks came into sight that I should not reach
the lake that day — or perhaps ever; but I
was determined that I would at least see where
it lay, though the sun set.

We came within sight of it at last. Before
then the Ten Peaks had come into line one by
one till there they stood, ten white peaks all
in a row. At their base I thought I saw the
lake lying, very still and cold among its ice-
worn pebbles.

IN

THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS 205

If I did not see it, if it was but a mirage, I
do not greatly care. I achieved something
more that afternoon than the mere sight of a
lake. I got that pony back to the hotel almost
in time for dinner. I was pretty stiff in the
arms. It was not to be wondered at. Hauling
a pony nine miles is no light work.

206 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXII

A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY

EMERALD LAKE is beautiful, but less beautiful,
I think, than Lake Louise. It is more like a
lake among mountains, and less like a lake in
a dream. I went to it because I wanted to
get into the Yoho Valley, if only for a day,
and the trail from Emerald Lake into the
Yoho is, I had heard, the most picturesque
of all. Even superficially to see the valley
takes four days, and I had left myself with
only one, so that it was in a deprecating spirit
that I asked the manageress of the lake chalet
if I could at least get within sight of the valley
and back before dark. She said that if I
started at two o'clock punctually, on a pony,
the thing could just be done. I said that I
had tried one or two mountain ponies, and
did not care about them when I was in a
hurry.

' Oh, but I '11 give you a slicker,' said the
manageress. ' You see there 's no run on

A HIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY 207

the ponies at present, and I '11 ask the man
to give you his very best. He '11 just get
you there and back in time.'

I thanked her and said I would try the
slicker ; and, half an hour later, the slicker
and I were skirting the wooded shore of the
Emerald Lake at what was, for a mountain
pony, quite a fast trot. We were alone together.
There were a few guests at the chalet, but
the lateness of the season and the snow-clouds
that loomed on the horizon had deterred
any of them from starting on the Yoho Valley
trip that day. Earlier in the year, there
would have been quite a party riding together
with a guide in the direction I was taking,
for there are four camps in the valley, placed
at picturesque points an easy day's ride apart,
where you may rest and sleep, one night
beneath a waterfall, the next on the edge
of a glacier, with the ponies tethered round,
and the camp-fires crackling pleasantly, so
that you feel that you are pioneering, but
pioneering luxuriously.

But now, as I have said, it was late in
the season, and the snow-clouds were holding
themselves in the sky ready for further attacks,
and a keen wind was beginning to rise, so
that no one else thought the Yoho Valley

208 THE FAIR DOMINION

tempting enough, and it was certain I should
have it all to myself if I got there.

The trail was not difficult to follow. There,
at the end of the lake, was a mountain pass
visible from the chalet, and the thin white
line that screwed about among the rocks and
trees was the trail. The slicker trotted. He
trotted through the wood that borders the
lake ; he trotted through a wonderful pebbled
valley beyond it which might have been a
sea beach (only everywhere slim spruces, like
sharp, green, tenpenny nails, grew out of the
pebbles) ; and he trotted up the first stretch
of trail leading to the pass ahead of us. Then
for an hour or more the slicker climbed as
steadily as a Swiss guide. The trail was
less than a yard wide and metalled with rolling
stones, and though it wound continually, its
most generous spirals left it, to my fancy,
almost sheer. We wound with it, past boulders
and hanging trees and little cataracts that
shot through air from some invisible lips of
stone above — between shadowy crags and over
unprotected places where the sun glared. In
the end the slicker brought me to the pass
itself, and we rode into a dark wood there,
and the trees grew bigger and bigger, and
the trail grew stickier and stickier, and the

A SOLITARY RIDE INTO YOHO VALLEY 209

pass ended suddenly, and below, far, far below,
was the Yoho Valley.

The story of the boy who cried ' wolf ' when
there was no wolf is a familiar one, but much
more familiar in everyday life is the story of
the man who cries ' lion ' when there is no lion.
You know him and you don't believe him.
You know that, moved by the immoderate
enthusiasm which is the chief qualification
for the profession of writing, he is doing his
level best to make you believe that the object
he is presenting to you is a lion, for the simple
reason that if you believe it, you will be more
attracted by it and him. Canada, being a
much-advertised country at present, is full of
lions. 'The finest view in Canada. Yes, sir.'
How often I heard that remark ! How often
it turned out to be an overstatement. How
distrustfully I came to listen to it.

Was it, then, that for some months I had
imbibed the Canadian air, that when I reached
the Rockies I too was carried away, and became
as immoderately enthusiastic as any Canadian ?
I do not know. I merely have to confess that
I was carried away, that I have already cried
6 lion ' more than once, and that I must do so
once again now that I have got to the Yoho
Valley. Baedeker saves his own dignity — and

o

210 THE FAIR DOMINION

that of literature — by using an asterisk at these
critical points, or two asterisks if his emotions
are very poignant. But I, who have to fill
paper, must use words. Well, I am not afraid
of exaggerating the beauties of the Yoho.
This valley of enormous trees spiring up from
unseen gorges to weUnigh unseen heights ;
of cataracts that fall in foam a thousand
feet ; of massed innumerable glaciers ; this
valley into which it seems you could drop all
Switzerland, and still look down — is not easily
overpraised. The difficulty is to praise it
at all adequately.

It seemed to me as I rode on along the
high trail that sometimes edged out to the
gulf below and sometimes swerved back from
it, that one of the wonders of the valley was
a thing that in smaller places would have
made for disappointment, and that is that
it lies, and always has lain, outside the human
radius. It has none of those connections
with men that set us thrilling in other parts.
No Hannibal ever led his army by this route
across these mountains. No hardy tribesmen
watched the approach of an enemy among
its crags, or bred among them a race of moun-
taineers. No gods dwelt on its heights, and
no poets ever came near to sing them. History

A SOLITARY RIDE INTO YOHO VALLEY 211

has nothing to tell of it. Little hills and little
valleys have their stories and their songs,
their memories and their miracles. They are
haunted still with those forgotten mysteries
which stir men's fancies more deeply than
things remembered or discovered can. This
valley walled about with mountains has been
above and beyond men's ken from the begin-
ning of the world : and now that men have
come into it, they find nothing to discover
in it except its vastness and immunity from
the touch of men. It strikes one even now
as not only devoid of human adjuncts but
needless of them. A man no more looks for
legends there than he would look for them
in the centre of a typhoon.

I suppose that men did pass through it —
even before the valley became a known part
of the world, and even a sight for tourists.
It was not, as the phrase goes, untrodden by
the foot of man. A few prospectors must
have passed this way from time to time many
years ago. Some may have died there for
all one knows. Indian hunters, too, would
enter the valley in pursuit of game. But
no one possessed it ; no one gave it the human
air: or, if they did, the records are lost. Pro-
spectors tell us only of their finds, nothing

212 THE FAIR DOMINION

of their lives. Of the Indians, some one
someday may, perhaps, find some traces. At
present their white brothers are little troubled
by them or their history or their origin.
Canadians are content to think of them as
a primitive, decaying people who came from
God knows where to a country they never
realised was God's. It will be easier to forget
them than to understand them, these strange
men with faces no more expressive than wood,
who, if they ever came to the Yoho Valley,
must have passed through it more like trees
walking among the trees than like men that
stop and wonder, and leave a habitation and
a name.

Shadowy, disregardable creatures, then, as
uninfluential as the slicker and myself, may
have roamed the valley in times past and
left no more traces upon it. We two realising,
I trust, our minuteness and unimportance,
went on, as it turned out, far beyond the point
intended for our afternoon's excursion. In
contemplation of the valley I had given the
slicker the rein, and he, poor pony, no doubt
thought that he was bound for the first camp,
there to rest the night in the ordinary course.
Presently I found him, his two front feet
planted firmly together, sliding down the

A SOLITARY RIDE INTO YOHO VALLEY 213

slipperiest piece of trail we had yet encoun-
tered, sliding and sliding till we had got to
the very bottom of the valley — whereupon
I discovered that we had indeed attained
the first camp.

It was a queer, unexpected sight — a few
little lean-to tents and a couple of log huts,
standing side by side on a flat piece of the
valley floor, just beyond the spray of a cas-
cade that dropped from ledge to ledge of the
mountain opposite, starting so high up that
it seemed to spring from the sky. The place
seemed deserted, but while the slicker and
I paused to look about us, out of the biggest
tent there came a small, silent, yellow figure.
It did not speak to me, but only stared, and
I, having stared back for a little and having
wondered if it were some gnome peculiar to
the valley, suddenly saw that it had a pigtail,
and remembered that I had been told that
there was a Chinese cook in every camp.

' Is this the first camp ? ' I therefore asked.

' Yup ! '

' Can you give me some tea ? '

' Yup ! ' he repeated, and vanished into
the tent whence he had come.

By the time I had tethered the slicker on
the grassiest spot I could find, that boy had

214 THE FAIR DOMINION

tea ready. He stared at me while I ate it,
stared at me when I paid him for it, and stared
at me when, having offered the slicker some
bread and sugar in vain, I remounted him
and set him on the homeward trail. I had
not a watch with me. But it was evident
from the position of the sun that we had
very little daylight left for the return ride.
Dusk, indeed, came on just as we reached the
other side of the pass, with a mountain side
still to descend. Dusk and an exceedingly
cold wind — in the face of which that cork-
screw trail seemed doubly steep. It was one
of those occasions when vowing candles to
one's patron saint might have added to one's
peace of mind. But I have no patron saint
and could but give the reins to the slicker,
and he rewarded me for my trust by not fall-
ing down till we had actually accomplished
the descent and were on the pebbled beach.
Then, in the pitch-dark night, we both rolled
over together. A match, lighted with diffi-
culty, revealed the fact that neither of us was
injured ; and so, very steadily and cautiously,
we moved on to the chalet, where we arrived
to find dinner finished. But we had seen
splendid things, the slicker and I.

FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE 215

CHAPTER XXIII

THE FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE

IT would have been harder to leave the Rockies
if I had not been bound for the Selkirks, which
have this advantage over the Rockies, that
they are perhaps less known. That part I
was bound for is, indeed, not known at all to
tourists, and very little known to anybody.
The known part of the range lies round Glacier
House, and includes Mount Abbott, the Great
Illecillewaet Glacier, Mount Sir Donald, etc.,
which high places the railway has now made
accessible for tourists who can climb. The
part I was to see lies to the south-east, at
the head of the Columbia Valley, and is at
present a hundred miles from the nearest
railway station.

First of all I took train to Golden. If you
take a map of Canada and follow the trans-
continental line westward, you will see that
it emerges from the Rockies at Golden. Golden
is a little mining town lying in the Columbia

216 THE FAIR DOMINION

Valley, with the Rockies on one side of it and
the Selkirks on the other. It was chiefly to
see this valley — one of the most fertile in
British Columbia, but at present unopened
— that I got out at Golden with a friend. An
excursion into the Selkirks was to depend
upon the time at our disposal. We had been
told that near Lake Windermere, at a place
called Wilmer, there was a great irrigation
scheme in progress, which would shortly result
jn 60,000 acres of dry belt-land being ready
for fruit-farming. This, when the rail from
Kamloops to Golden was completed, would
make the Columbia Valley as famous for its
fruit as the Okanagan. We both wanted to
see it. My friend wanted to buy land. The
problem was how to get up the valley.

There were, we found, five different ways of
doing the eighty miles from Golden to Wilmer.

1. The first was to wait for that day of the
week on which the stage-coach ran. It took
two days to do the distance, and was very
convenient if we did not mind waiting in
Golden a few days first. But we were in a
hurry.

2. This way was by* river-boat — a delight-
ful trip. But there were one or two objections
to it. The water of the Columbia was very

THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE 217

low at this time of the year, the sand-banks
were numerous, and the boat had gone up
some days before and nobody knew when
it would get down again. We gave up the
boat.

3. The third way, which we decided should
be ours, was to go up in the only motor which
Golden possessed. This would cost fifty dollars,
but the journey there would only take about
seven hours. When we had decided upon
this, we went to the proprietor of the motor
and found that the car was already out for
an indefinite number of days.

4. This way was to walk the eighty miles
— a plan I favoured and tried on the way
back, as I shall describe. But my friend
could not fancy it. Statelier than myself,
he had to carry five more stones with him.

5. This was the way we took. We hired
a two-horse rig which undertook to do the
journey in the same time as the stage — but
for twenty dollars apiece instead of five.

We started from Golden on a Monday
morning in the two-horse rig, driven by a
young American. He had been in the United
States navy, and also in Alberta, farming, but
he had had no luck with his farm, having
started with too small a capital to tide over

218 THE FAIR DOMINION

the two bad seasons which he had met there.
He told us that he found Canada very similar
to the States — neither much better nor worse ;
and he took his own luck there philosophically.
He seemed to me altogether a capable man,
whose fortune might have been all the other
way. Anyway he drove excellently and was
not a grumbler, like the American ex-sailor I
met at Regina.

Nothing could have been more beautiful
than the late September morning when we
started out of Golden. A spreading village of
pretty poplar-lined avenues and pleasant bunga-
lows, Golden explained its own name as we
went. The wooded hills on either side were all
splashed with autumn yellows, and the sun,
striking down through a grove of silver poplars
which shuts off the south end of the village,
made it all seem shot with gold. It is a mining
village, but compared with the usual mining
village of Great Britain it seemed as Eden to
the Inferno.

Coming out of it we struck what is the
dominant scenery of the valley — the blue
Columbia winding in and out, sometimes wooded
to its brim, sometimes sweeping over into open
marshland, but always with the hills lightly
wooded, facing one another across it, and behind

FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE 219

them the white peaks hung with snow. At
every mile or two a silvery creek, sometimes a
mere ribbon of water, sometimes almost a river,
rushed down to join the Columbia below ;
by the side of these creeks mostly would be
the cleared land which small ranchers had
settled, and where they had gone on living
presumably on what they could grow off their
own places, since the chances of reaching a
market became obviously more difficult at
every mile. Every wind of the road — and it
mostly follows the river — gave views that were
always changing and beautiful.

It was on the second day of our driving that
the appearance of the valley grew different.
The creeks became rarer ; the soil drier.
Instead of silver poplars rising among a tangled
underbush, there were now jack-pines growing
out of a burnt-up sward. We might have
been going through some English park in the
south country, and some one had evidently
thought this before, for a man we met driving
told us that this part of the valley was known
as the Park. Passing through it we came at
last to the real dry belt. Those who know the
Okanagan would no doubt find it less strange,
but it amazed me to find a country among these
mountains almost Egyptian in its colouring and

220 THE FAIR DOMINION

texture. Drier and drier became the soil ;
the trees became sparser and sparser ; there
was now no underwood at all. The straight
firs rose clear out of sandy hills and hollows.
Sandy they might appear, but this was not
sand in the vulgar sense. It was glacial silt —
bottomless drifts of powdered clay that has
slipped down from the mountains and piled
and sloped itself into ' benches ' above the
river.

We had to cross the river to get to Wilmer,
which is the headquarters of the irrigation.
Headquarters sounds imposing ; and in a few
years, doubtless, Wilmer will be imposing, but
at present it consists of a few shacks, two
small stores, a dirty little hotel (in the bar of
which a man was shot the day after we left),
and one presiding genius who has made Wilmer
what it is and also what it will be shortly.
Need I say that it was a Scot who years ago
saw the far-reaching value of this land, conceived
the idea of irrigating it, and personally super-
intended the carrying out of his conception ?
I don't know that I need. I came to the con-
clusion before I left Canada that Scots, more
than any other race, were at the bottom, and
generally also at the top, of most of the enter-
prises that were being carried out there. No

FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE 221

one talks of the Scotticisation of Canada.
Perhaps Scots do not proselytise. Perhaps
they do not find any other people worthy of
being taken into their community. They prefer
to remain an international oligarchy, managing
others but not admitting them to equal rights.
They effect their intentions by usually working
alone and always sticking together. A para-
doxical people. It is amazing to think that at
the beginning of the eighteenth century the
Scottish Highlander was regarded by the average
Englishman in much the same light as we now
regard the Hottentot or the Andaman Islander,
a hopelessly idle and uncouthly impossible
person, destined to remain a barbarian for ever.
Dis aliter visum. The Highlander now directs
the Empire, distinguishing himself in that
respect even more than his Lowland brother.
Yet only two hundred years have passed since
he was outside the pale.

My friend knew Mr. Randolph Bruce, the
Highlander who presides over the Columbia
Valley Irrigation Works, and will, it seems to
me, rank as one of the many makers of Canada,
and Mr. Bruce most hospitably put us up while
we were in Wilmer, and showed us what he has
done and what he means to do. What he
means to do is to create a town on the shores

222 THE FAIR DOMINION

of Lake Windermere, and he drove us down
there to show us the lake, which is not the
least like its English original, but very beautiful
nevertheless, lying as it does clear and still
among the sand-hills, a belt of autumn-tinted
trees around it, and, above, the hills and the
snows. It looked like some African lake
stretched at the feet of the Mountains of the
Moon. It looked as if it might lie thus for
centuries, silent and untouched by the hands
of men. But it was a Canadian lake, and
though it might seem to be at the very back of
the world, it was shortly to have a town built
on its shores. Mr. Bruce showed us the town
site, the hotel site, the site of the bowling-
green and the polo ground. I rather think
he showed us the race-course that was going
to be. I saw it all the more clearly because
Mr. Bruce also showed us the work already
actually accomplished — the canals and ditches
that brought the upper mountain lakes down
on to the benches of friable clay that were to
grow the apples we shall eat in England a few
years hence. It is all extraordinarily interesting,
seeing this town of the future and these fruit-
lands of the future — of which my friend bought
twenty acres, which were to be named after
him. The Columbia River ran just below the

FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE 223

bench-land he bought, and I wished I had some
capital handy that I might buy the adjoining
plot, that I might also grow fruit there and have
a portion of the fair Dominion named after me.
If the Windermere race-course had already been
in existence, and a race being run, I should have
backed one of the horses against all my
principles, and laid out the proceeds in a fruit-
farm.

224 THE PAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SELKIRKS — A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY

BEHIND Wilmer lies a part of the Selkirks which
is known only to a few ranchers in the neigh-
bourhood, and is scarcely accessible except from
this point. We had spent two days in the
neighbourhood of Lake Windermere, and on the
third, though each of us was booked to be
hundreds of miles further on our way by the
end of the week, and heaven only knew how we
were even going to reach Golden again, for we
had let the rig go back and the boat was re-
ported stuck somewhere on the Columbia
River, we neither of us could resist an offer that
was made us of an opportunity to climb Iron
Top Mountain, which was somewhere at the
back of this alluring country.

The offer came from a Mr. Starboard. In
Canada you will sometimes find, several hundreds
of miles from civilisation, some strenuous and
capable man whom you would think civilisation
needed and would require. But the wilds in

THE SELKIRKS 225

Canada are more important. Mr. Starboard
had come to these parts originally as a prospec-
tor and miner, but the mine he had come to had
shut down — not for lack of silver and lead in it,
but for lack of transport facilities ; whereupon
Mr. Starboard, fascinated by one of these
valleys, had started horse-breeding there, oc-
cupying what time was left from clearing his
land in making roads through the mountains
and hunting big game. Dropping in at Mr.
Bruce' s casually one morning, he asked us if we
should like to see the best view he knew of in
the Selkirks. We said we should ; and each,
equipped with a toothbrush and a comb, was
driven out to Starboard's ranch for lunch.

Travelling in the remoter parts of Canada
gives you strange table companions. You
never know quite what company you will meet,
though you can generally count upon its being
interesting. While we were being driven up
the Columbia Valley a few days before, we had
heard from various homesteaders that there was
c a big German bug ' staying up in the moun-
tains with his friends, trying for bear. ' They
call him the Land Crab,' our informant would
usually add for further elucidation of the big
bug's official position. On arriving at Mr.
Starboard's ranch we found that the big bug

226 THE FAIR DOMINION

in question was, in the commoner prose of
Europe, the Landgraf of Hesse with two
equerries and a small retinue. For a motley
collection, the party that sat down to lunch
that day in the chief room of Starboard's
ranch would be difficult to beat. There was
the Landgraf himself and his German com-
panions, a well-known Canadian official, three
valets — these all neatly dressed — Mrs. Star-
board quite wonderfully frocked, as the fashion
papers say, Mr. Starboard in ranching costume,
and ourselves who had slept in our clothes for
several days. The waiters were a Japanese
and a Chinese. We fed off bear, shot by one
of the Germans, who had been most successful
in their hunting both of bear and goat.

Bear, by the way, was only one among other
delicacies. Its taste is rather like that of
Christmas beef stewed in the gravy of a goose.
Vegetarians would not care about it ; but after
living on little else for two days I can answer
for its being both appetising and sustaining,
particularly in high altitudes. After lunch,
four of us, Mr. Starboard, the railway man,
my friend, and myself started for Iron Top
Mountain, which lay seventeen miles off along
a trail that rose steeply most of the way. The
ponies were excellent ones, better even than

THE SELKIEKS 227

the slicker. Mr. Starboard had specially picked
them, because he wanted to see if they could be
got to carry us to the top of the mountain, a
little over ten thousand feet. He had never
taken ponies as high before, and doubted if the
test had ever been made in Canada, though I
fancy ponies have done as much or more in the
Himalayas.

We did fourteen miles that afternoon, follow-
ing at first the bank of a blue foaming stream,
then turning eastward up a steeper valley
through which a smaller stream flowed. The
trail was far better than many roads in French
Canada or on the prairie, and had been con-
structed by Mr. Starboard himself to provide
access to a silver and lead mine which had been
shut down for some time. It seemed extra-
ordinary that in a country so wild and remote
there should be any trail at all, but miners go
anywhere. A man who has to find his way
into the earth makes no difficulty about finding
his way across it.

It was a day, half sunshine and half mist,
and the mountains would sometimes be shut
entirely in shrouds of vapour, sometimes would
reveal slanted white tops cut off in mid-air by
the fog below, sometimes would clear altogether,
so that one could see everything on them,

228 THE FAIR DOMINION

from the snowslides down which the grizzlies
travel to the narrow tracks of the goats. As
we mounted, the valley grew steeper and steeper,
and the trail wound more and more. We passed
one place where, earlier in the year, there had
been a terrific slide of snow half a mile in width.
The huge firs still lay where they had fallen,
shattered and splintered before it. Half-way
down, the avalanche had met a great pinnacle
of rock that had stood the shock unmoved, and
caused the snow to part to left and to right,
where it had hewn two lanes of almost equal
breadth through the trees. It was just near
here that Mr. Starboard showed me a grizzly's
track, and told me that he had seen no less than
seventeen of these bears in the last fortnight.
He said that their numbers were increasing
yearly in that neighbourhood. A little later a
porcupine crossed the trail ahead of us, and
lurched unwieldily into the undergrowth. The
trees grew close together all the way, except
where we passed a great stretch of mountain-
side where a forest fire had raged, and even
there the scorched trunks still stood, gibbeted
skeletons of trees.

We put up for the night in a deserted mining
camp, almost a village it was, with wooden
shacks likely to be used again when the Kam-

THE SELKIRKS 229

loops to Golden Railway is completed and it is
worth while getting the stuff out of the mine.

Up there it had begun to freeze hard, but a
big fire and much bear, which the railway man
fried over it with skill, kept us warm enough
till we went to bed under many blankets in one
of the shacks.

It was bitterly chill — the start in the early
morning — after a breakfast of cold bear ; and
very soon after we set out we got into snow,
and the trees ceased, and the ponies' flanks
began to heave steadily. The morning was as
bright as it was cold, however, and Mount
Farnham, shaped like a chimney-pot, glittered
right over us on the left. I remarked to Mr.
Starboard what a nasty mountain it looked for
climbing purposes, whereupon he astonished
me by saying he had been up it.

' You went up to see if it could be done ? '
I said, thinking I had struck a keen climber in
the European sense of the word.

'No,' said Mr. Starboard simply; 'you
would not catch me going up a place like that
for the climb. I went there because I thought
there was silver and lead there.'

The ponies were now beginning to show their
respective stamina, two of them going right
ahead, and the one that carried my friend

230 THE FAIR DOMINION

getting slower and slower. We had got by this
time into a sort of rocky amphitheatre where
the snow lay thicker, and just as I passed
under a little cascade congealed into fantastic
icicles as it spouted from a cleft, I heard a noise
in my rear, and turned to see my friend and his
pony doing Catherine wheels in the snow
together. Luckily they fell — and rolled — softly
and rose uninjured ; but very soon after that
the ponies had to be left. We turned them
loose on a platform of rock which was, Mr.
Starboard said, just short of ten thousand feet
up. Only a few hundred more remained to be
done, which we accomplished on foot through
knee-deep snow, gaining the summit just in
time.

For the first time I got a view of the Rockies.
We looked down a long, narrow, purple valley
that ran at right angles to the Columbia River,
over the first hills beyond Wilmer, into a sea of
mountains. I had heard that phrase — a sea
of mountains — applied to the Rockies before,
but I had not realised its fitness before.

There it was, a sea of white caps frozen
eternally in the very moment when they had
stormed the sky.

For just five minutes we gazed, and then a
mist settled down on them, and, where we were,

A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES.

THE SELKIRKS 231

immediately a bitter wind began to blow and
caused us to make for the ponies hurriedly. As
we rode down the frozen trail we startled some
ptarmigan, which rose and fluttered above the
snow like big white butterflies.

232 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXV

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK THROUGH THE COLUMBIA
VALLEY

WE got back to Wilmer the following morning,
and the problem then was — how to reach
Golden again. The boat was due up the
river some time in the day, but sandbanks
do not encourage punctuality. I had my
suspicions of that boat, and in any case, even
if it arrived that day, it would certainly not
start back again till the morning following.
I did not want to wait for it at Wilmer, and
decided instead that I would start walking
down the valley at once and pick the boat
up at Spellamacheen, forty miles downstream,
some time next day. My friend was as sus-
picious of the walk as I was of the boat ; and
since he had heard that some men were likely
to turn up that day in a motor from Golden
who might give him a lift back in case the
boat failed, he decided to wait for them.

So we parted, and rather late in the day —

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK 233

at noon, to be exact — I set out on my walk.
Forty miles is not much of a walk. It can
be done in ten hours very easily — in eight
if you make up your mind to it. I decided
I would take nine hours over it and waste
no time. I did not stop for lunch in Athelmer
— where one crosses the Columbia — but merely
bought some chocolate and a pound of apples,
and hurried on.

About a mile out of Athelmer I ate the
apples, because they were a nuisance to carry,
and wished I could as easily get rid of my
heavy overcoat, which had its pockets stuffed
with toilet and sleeping accessories just like
a suit-case. I also wished that I had on boots
that I had ever tried walking in. Still I did
six or seven miles in the first hour and a half,
and then I realised that two things destruc-
tive to fast walking were about to happen.
One was footsoreness and the other was rain.
Both came upon me a few minutes later, and
both increased steadily hour after hour. The
valley which had looked so beautiful in all
the reds of autumn, as we drove through it
in the sunlight, was now filled with a clammy
mist ; and the road which had seemed a fine
road for the horses in fine weather now struck
me as offensively sticky, and my pace declined

234 THE FAIR DOMINION

to something under three miles an hour. I
consoled myself for a little with the thought
that I was getting an experience of autumn
in the Columbia Valley. Afterwards I decided
that I would gladly do without it. I could
have imagined it just as well. The road was
like glue and my coat had increased in weight
several pounds. To balance this as far as
possible, I sat on a wet spruce tree that had
fallen by the side of the road and ate my
packet of chocolate ; after which I moved
on at a very sober pace. I began to doubt
if I should get to Spellamacheen that night ;
and the doubt soon increased to a certainty
that I should not. Then I remembered that
on the drive out we had passed a place called
Dolans, only twenty-eight miles from Wilmer.
I did some mental arithmetic which seemed
to prove that even Dolans was a terrible dis-
tance off, and I tried a little running, but it
was not of a kind to win a Marathon race.
Running through glue when you are footsore
is trying work. Nevertheless by six o'clock
I calculated I was only about three miles
from Dolans, which rejoiced me, until the
horrid thought cropped up — if I got in after
the supper hour, should I get any supper ?
It was by no means certain in that valley.

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK 235

Providence a few minutes later sent a buggy,
driven by a small, glum-looking man up behind
me, and the glum-looking man said ' Care
to drive ? ' I said ' Yes,' and found he was
bound for Dolans like myself. We got there
about seven o'clock. The rancher and his wife
were in ; also another wayfarer like ourselves,
who had arrived a few minutes before us. He
was an elderly man, with a great shock of
iron-grey hair, who was driving into Golden
in a farm-cart from some place several days
distant. He had the strangest pair in his
cart — a little brown mare of about fourteen
hands, and a great lanky horse the height of
a giraffe.

We were all given a good meal, and ate
it in silence, and sat in silence to digest it.
Canadians in these valleys are often that
way ; it is due not to unsociability but to dis-
use of their tongues. Possibly to ruminate is
the better way, but silence can be oppressive,
and if you start a conversation and the other
people only reflect upon your words, they
may be weighing them as if they were gold,
but you are not sure enough of this to be elated.
I was rather glad to be shown to my bed,
which was in a barn (but the blankets were
clean, Mr. Dolans said), pretty early. Mr.

236 THE FAIR DOMINION

Dolans sat on the bed for a bit, and advised
me to buy the ranch. I promised to think
the matter over, and went to sleep instead
in a nice atmosphere of hay, and got up for
six o'clock breakfast. The other two had
already driven off ; but the rain had ceased,
and though the road was a mud slide, I started
for Spellamacheen in high hopes of catching
the boat in spite of being footsore.

I need not have worried myself, for when
I got there at 12.30, I learnt that the boat had
just passed on its way up to Wilmer, and was
not likely to be down again for two or three
days.

Spellamacheen consists of a rest-house ranch
in full view of a semicircle of snowclad moun-
tains, but I was a little disheartened in spite
of the view. I particularly wanted to catch
the midnight train from Golden to Vancouver,
and now I realised that to do this I should
have to walk the rest of the way — another
forty miles. From two o'clock to twelve is
ten hours. If I did four miles an hour, I
should catch the train to a nicety.

When I am resting on a walk I am always
singularly optimistic. I was stiff after lunch
— partly from the unusual exercise, partly
from sleeping in wet clothes, and my feet

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK 237

were sorer than ever, but I set out for Golden,
confident that I should catch that train. A
young man with a bundle on his back, who
had got into Spellamacheen just ahead of
me, offered to hike with me. He also was for
Golden, but thought twenty miles more that
day would satisfy him.

He was a pleasant and conversational young
man, and told me that he was from New
Brunswick, but had for the last eight months
been at work digging the ditches for the
Columbia Valley Irrigation Company. He
had had enough of it, he said ; in fact too
much. Compared with New Brunswick, British
Columbia was no catch at all, and he meant
to go back home. Frenchmen are not fonder
of their ' patrie ' than are the Canadian-born.
He brimmed over, did that young man, with
praises of New Brunswick — brimmed over very
intelligently, telling me about the Reversible
Falls of St. John and the conditions of farm-
ing in the province with a clearness which
few Englishmen of his class could emulate.
He said that he would only get one and a half
dollars a day instead of two and a half, but
then one and a half would go much further
inhere than two and a half in British Columbia.
You could live better^on it, and life was easier

238 THE FAIR DOMINION

there. British Columbia was too rough : he
allowed there was no pioneer about him. He
had got tired of the Columbia Valley months
before, and had started to come out of it in
July, but had only got as far as Athelmer.
There he had gone to a hotel for the night, and
had got drinking, and somehow before he knew
it all the money he had saved during his months
of digging had been drunk. So he had gone
back to the ditches. But he meant to get
out of the valley this time. I gathered that
even this time it had been a near shave, for
having again got as far as the hotel, he had
found a lot of fellows drinking what he called
' Schlampagne.' He supposed there must have
been a hundred bottles of schlampagne drunk
last night, and whisky afterwards, but he
himself had been very careful and had taken
gin instead. You never knew, he said, what
the whisky would be made of, but if you
drank from a bottle of gin marked English,
it was all right. He felt a bit funny inside
to-day, but seemed quite cheerful about it
because he had won away from the hotel,
and was pretty sure now to get back to New
Brunswick, after which he would not go pioneer-
ing again. He doubted, however, if we were
likely to get to Golden that day. There was

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK 239

a place called M'Kie's we could put up at
eighteen miles on, or if we felt like it, another
called Petersen's — eight miles further. I said
I wanted to catch the midnight train from
Golden, and was going to walk on by night :
at which he said he would do the same. He
repeated that he was funny inside and foot-
sore, but he thought he could do it. We
would get to M'Kie's for supper, or rather
get M'Kie to make us up a supper, which
we would eat upon the road, and we should
thus get into Golden in good time. He was
sure we were going at least four miles an hour.

I was sure we were scarcely doing three,
and by the time we did get to M'Kie's, just
before dark, we were both so sure that a rest
would do us good that we thought we would
(; at our supper there after all.

M'Kie's was a shack just off the road, with
a huge puma -skin nailed to the verandah.
Inside was a very old woman, who said that
we could get our tea all right, but M'Kie wasn't
in yet, and we 'd better wait for him. So
\ve sat down in the road, and I paddled in an
icy creek that went foaming by the house
door. Then the old woman asked us in
,'ind chatted to us while she cooked the
meal. M'Kie turning up, we fell to, and

240 THE FAIR DOMINION

M'Kie entertained us with trapping stories.
It seemed he was half-trapper, half-rancher,
and the big skin we had seen outside he had
got only a few days before. The mountain
lion had come down right into the sheepfold,
and his two dogs had treed it, and a single
bullet had brought it down. It was the biggest
skin that he had ever seen, and measured
ten feet six from tip to tail. It certainly
was a large skin, but a puma's tail counts
for a good deal. M'Kie had also shot a bear
in the sheepfold the week before, and he talked
so much about cinnamons and grizzlies, which
seemed very plentiful round there, that the
New Brunswicker insisted on our having his
opinion as to whether they ever attacked un-
armed men walking by night. M'Kie thought
not. So we started on again, somewhat re-
assured, along what promised to be an un-
commonly dark road.

The sky was all clouded over, and it was
now 8.30, and there was no chance whatever
of my catching the midnight train, since
twenty miles still remained to be accomplished,
and our limp condition made even three miles
an hour hard. But we walked on, mostly
because I now wanted to get the morning
train at eleven o'clock, and I felt that if we

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK 241

went back to M'Kie's and stopped the night,
I should be so stiff that I could not walk at
all next day. The New Brunswicker sport-
ingly said that he would go on for as long
as he could anyhow, though he wasn't bent
on any particular train ; and for some four
mortal hours we splashed along through mud
and water in what was the next thing to pitch
darkness. To add to the discomfort, a high,
cold, and very wet wind began to blow, and
there was every prospect of rain soon descend-
ing in torrents. It was at this point, I think,
that our thoughts began to turn to Petersen's.
The New Brunswicker remarked that if we
had passed Petersen's there was nowhere
to stop at between where we were and Golden ;
but if we had not passed Petersen's, we might
rest there a few minutes and perhaps get
some milk to drink. Soon after this we felt
sure that we had passed Petersen's in the
dark ; and though neither of us admitted
it, I think our respective hearts sank. We
decided to rest a little, which we did, and
we rested again a few minutes later without
deciding to do it. As we got up from a brief
smoke on a fallen log the rain began to pelt
down, and we saw a light just off the road.
I own I should have wanted to stop at

242 THE FAIR DOMINION

Peterson's anyhow, even if the New Bruns-
wicker had not confessed that he could not
go any further : but I don't know that I
should have had his perseverance in knock-
ing Petersen's up. There certainly was a
light there. But I was convinced that every-
body inside was deep in sleep. The New Bruns-
wicker thought somebody might be up, and
after knocking vainly for ten minutes at the
front door of the house he went round to
the back, while I sat on the doorstep, wonder-
ing what fifteen miles in that black rain would
be like.

A couple of minutes later, the New Bruns-
wicker appeared triumphant. The Petersens,
he said, were up — in their kitchen — and thither
we limped, much relieved. They were the
kindest people — Swedes, both of them, and
kept a milk cow, and gave us milk and butter-
milk. They said they were sorry they hadn't
a bed to offer us, but we could have the kitchen.
Fastidious travellers might have thought the
kitchen untidy and stuffy, and even the New
Brunswicker before he went to sleep on the
floor on his blankets, with some old clothes
that we found hanging on the walls over our
legs — even he got a broom (after the Peter-
sens had gone to bed) and swept a clean space

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK 243

for us to lie on. But at least it was warm,
and a haven of luxury compared with the road.

Personally, I know that I was very sorry
to have to get up off that floor at 4 A.M., when
that industrious old lady, Mrs. Petersen, came
in again to relight the stove and to prepare
breakfast. She was followed presently by her
husband and son and a hired man, while from
the barn there issued forth not only that
shock-headed old man with the queer rig whom
I had seen at Dolans, but no less than five
other men who had been working in different
parts of the valley, and were hiking out before
the winter should come. These had all spent
their night in the barn, which seems to be a
privileged resting-place for travellers in this
part of the country.

Mrs. Petersen had to get breakfast for some
dozen people, and an odd company we were,
all unkempt and unshaven, and most of us
looking, truthfully enough, as if we had slept
for some months in our clothes. We all
did a wash before breakfast, however. Two of
the men at table were socialists, and we had
a desultory conversation on that subject
while we were not occupied in eating Mrs.
Petersen's bacon and eggs. Nobody seemed
much to dispute the socialist position, but

244 THE FAIR DOMINION

this might have been because nobody was
greatly interested in it. I remember that
the socialists thought that capital ought to
be done away with, but Mr. Petersen, who
no doubt had a small amount himself and
kept a hired man, thought it was a useful
thing, and should be retained. Everybody
went off directly the meal was finished, except
ourselves, who lingered because the New Bruns-
wicker had boldly requested the shock-headed
old man to drive us in to Golden in his farm-
cart, and we went to help harness the 'little
mare and the big giraffe.

It was still raining heavily when we started,
and it rained just as heavily all the way into
Golden. I never was so damped in my life,
and this was due not merely to the rain, but
because the farm-cart was so full of the old
man's things (he seemed to be moving his
house in it) that the only place available
in it for me was a sack of hay. The cart
had stood out all night in the rain, and the
sack of hay was wet through, which made
it like a sponge, so that the more I dried off
the top of it the more moisture I seemed to
absorb from the under part. The little mare
and the big horse made about two and a half
miles an hour, and if I could have walked,

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK 245

I should have done so, for now again the
eleven o'clock train seemed in danger of get-
ting off from Golden without me. Indeed it
was half -past eleven before we got to Golden,
and, resigned to despair, I accompanied the
New Brunswicker into an inn, where I thought
I should have to wait again for the midnight
train. We ordered beer in the bar, and as
I was explaining to the proprietor what a
nuisance it was to have missed the train,
he put down his glass and said, ' Wait a
minute,' and went to the telephone. He came
back to inform me that the train had just
been signalled, being very late. He thought
I should just have time to catch it if I rushed.

246 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXVI

FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST

I MANAGED to get that train, and also a half
bottle of rye whisky on the way to it, and sank
into a seat in the smoking compartment, where
I sat all soaked and miserable, supping my
rye whisky at intervals and half dozing until
two grizzly-bear hunters got in a few stations
down the line. They were very wonderfully
arrayed in moccasins and Arctic socks and
turned-up overalls and sweaters and cartridge
belts ; and though they were modest enough
in their bearing, and did not talk about their
exploits until they were asked questions, the
whole compartment was soon eagerly chatting
of nothing but grizzly bears. The two hunters,
who were amateurs of the sport, had been up
in the mountains alone, a three days' portage
from the railroad, and had got three grizzlies,
and would have got more, they said, but that
heavy falls of snow had forced them to decamp.
They spoke like good shots — which does not

FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST 247

mean that they said they were good shots —
and they seemed very keen on their sport,
which they claimed to be the most dangerous
and exacting in the world ; nor would they
listen to my meek suggestion that the Ben-
gal tiger would compare favourably with the
grizzly.

' It 's a cat,' one of them said sniffily ; c you
shoot it off elephants.5

I said that I knew Anglo-Indians who went
after tigers on foot, and I also argued that even
in the case of shooting from elephants the
combination of a charging tiger and a restive
elephant offered opportunity of showing one's
nerve to be in order such as is not to be despised,
especially if the howdah happens to have been
inexpertly fixed and slides at the critical
moment. They allowed that there might be
something in this, but persisted that in any
case tiger-hunting was done at ease, with
natives to do all the portering, whereas grizzly-
bear hunters like themselves had to carry
everything with them, and camp in the snow,
and shoot on mountain-sides, down which a
grizzly bear would charge at a man quicker
than a racehorse. They gave graphic descrip-
tions of charges of grizzly bears, with their back
legs flying ahead of their front ones. The

248 THE FAIR DOMINION

last bear they had bagged had dropped, they
said, within twenty paces of them, after being
rolled over three times.

I fancy they spoke reasonably enough, and
that the pursuit of the grizzly — certainly if
done without a guide — is as good a test of a
man's nerve as any other. As to the merits
of the grizzly considered as a brute likely to do
for you if you do not previously do for it,
and compared with such others as the tiger,
the buffalo, the rhinoceros, the elephant, or
the lion, there is no arriving at any final con-
clusion. African hunters never seem agreed
about the comparative merits of the last three ;
while one Indian sportsman supports the buffalo,
another will support the tiger. Not having any
experience of the grizzly bear myself, I can only
say that, judging from what I have heard, he
must be accounted big enough game for any-
body. There is no doubt that most of the old
trappers have a wholesome respect for him,
and the longer they are after him, the greater,
as a rule, their respect grows. His pace,
when charging, is said to be something terrific,
and, downhill, it always charges as soon as hit,
its back legs flying out before it at a nightmare
speed. Add that it seems less easy to drop
finally than any other animal, that your fingers

FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST 249

may be frozen to the trigger in the intervals
of shooting, and that a single blow from one
of its front paws is strong enough to claw the
face out of an ox, and it will be seen that it is
no contemptible foe. On the other hand,
experts seem agreed that it rarely if ever charges
uphill, and if shot from above is therefore
comparatively harmless. If a man could always
pick his position for shooting, this would reduce
the value of the grizzly bear as a sporting
animal ; but obviously the hunter cannot
always choose. Any one who has been on a
snowslide will realise that. From the point of
view of an unarmed person, the grizzly bear
would seem to be rather less dangerous than
he is sometimes made out to be. You will
often hear that grizzly bears will attack a
man at sight. The truth seems to be that
— as is the case with any other bears — attacks
are only to be feared either from female grizzlies
with cubs, or from a grizzly of either sex, if
the intruder is so placed as to appear to the
grizzly's eyes to be cutting off its retreat to
its lair. Of course no unarmed man would
elect to put himself in either of these positions,
and equally naturally he might unwittingly
do so — in which case it would be better not to
be that man, though I believe there is an

250 THE FAIR DOMINION

authentic story of a lumberman who, return-
ing alone from his work, was suddenly attacked
by two grizzlies, and managed to kill both of
them with his axe, though the second mauled
him badly. Authentic or not, and one grizzly
or two, it is pretty certain that few people
would care to try a similar encounter.

Afterwards the conversation shifted to timber-
wolves and the Yukon. One of the passengers
scoffed at the notion of a dog being able to
kill a timber-wolf, as happens in one of Mr.
Jack London's novels. A northern timber- wolf,
according to this critic, is at least twice the
size of the European wolf, with a disproportion-
ately large and powerful jaw — a single snap
from which would polish off any dog. Two or
three of the biggest dogs known could hardly
even hold a timber-wolf much less kill it. I
dare say there was more in this criticism than
in one I heard later, anent Mr. Maurice Hewlett.
A very solemn fruit - rancher was ploughing
wearily through one of Mr. Hewlett's earlier
romances, and he looked up presently to say
it was funny the sort of yarns these writing
chaps seemed to believe in. There was a girl
in the book who milked a wild deer. He had
seen plenty of deer in his time, but none of them
had seemed to fancy coming close enough to

FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST 251

be milked. If a chap wanted to write about
i3he country he ought to know it right through
like Mr. Service. Had we read Service's
poems ? Several of the men in the compart-
ment evidently had read them ; and, indeed,
Mr. Service's poems concerning the Yukon
seemed to have reached the heights of popu-
larity. I think it is due in part to the fascina-
tion which the north exercises on all sorts and
conditions of Canadians, not only because it
stands for romance and mystery, but because
a sort of idea is gaining ground that these
inhospitable and well-nigh polar regions only
await a sufficiently hardy type of colonist to
have as great a boom almost as some of the
more southern districts. The idea exists not
only among business-like estate - agents, who
see themselves in fancy selling Arctic blocks
to this expected race, but among quite dis-
interested and patriotic people, who talk of it,
as Mr. Service himself does, as a strong man's
land. A few peculiarly strong men may survive
there ; and it is excusable for a poet to regard
them as super-men — Canada's noblest type.
As a matter of fact it is at least as romantic
to weave halos about the heads of the crowd
that seeks the Yukon country as it is to make
one's heroine milk a wild deer. A certain praise

252 THE FAIR DOMINION

is always due to pioneers, and the struggle with
nature at its cruellest and most wild is not a
bad test of an individual's character ; but for
respectable ranchers and fruit-growers (who
have never been to the Yukon themselves, but
have struggled with nature quite as valiantly
elsewhere) to talk enthusiastically about the
great lone land as the country for breeding men
is absurd. Canadians may be able to colonise
further north than they have done at present,
and their descendants will, no doubt, be a
fine and hardy race. But there is a point in
the north just as there is a point in the south
beyond which no white man's country lies.
If any strong men are going to perpetuate
their families beyond that northern point, they
are going to be strong Esquimaux — not strong
Canadians. Esquimaux already do quite a
lot of grappling with nature in lone lands, but
they are not the heroes of Mr. Service's poems.
I don't wish to labour the point, but this
northern strong man business seems to me
entirely overdone. There is always going to
be romance attached to the uninhabitable
country, and adventurous young men will
get there ; but the theory that these are the
people of whom Canada has peculiarly to be
proud will not do. Adam Gordon's bush-

FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST 253

riders had a certain merit ; so had Mr. Kipling's
gentlemen-rankers ; so have Mr. Service's pro-
spectors ; but none of them ever forwarded
civilisation very greatly. The fact is, there are
true and admirable pioneers, men like Hud-
son and Thompson, of whom Canada has had
plenty ; and there are pioneers of doubtful
value like those in Mr. Service's poems. These
latter are picturesque enough in verse, especi-
ally in Mr. Service's verse, which catches the
fascination of the north at times admirably,
but the others are the men worth boasting
about.

The rain persisted while we sat talking of all
these matters, and the mountains were hung about
with a clammy vapour which spoilt the view
from the train. I should like to have stopped
at Glacier, which is the usual centre for the
better-known Selkirks, of which many of the
giants have been climbed only within the last
six or seven years, but I had not time, and
they all swam by in the mist, which changed
into dusk as we reached Revelstoke. There a
number of lumberjacks filled up the carriage,
and were very cheery and conversational all
night. Having slept only two hours the night
before, I should not have minded being able
to get a sleeper, but they were all taken ; and

254 THE FAIR DOMINION

indeed there were not even seats enough to go
all round, though it was a first-class carriage.
In any case the lumberjacks in my part of the
carriage would have prevented sleep. Some-
times they would sit down for a few minutes
and tell stories, then they would dart off to
have a look at a carriage-load of Doukhobors
who were on in front and seemed rather better
than a show to judge by the lumbermen's
guffaws when they came back from these trips.
Canadian trains may not always be restful,
but they are generally entertaining. The
distances traversed are so great that people
cannot afford to sit in them in hunched silence.
They have to unbend, and some of them
unbend thoroughly. That is why, though the
ordinary traveller has to pass through great
tracts of land in the train, he is not losing
local colour to quite the extent one loses it in
an European train. Some one in the carriage
is sure to know something about the district
one is passing through and to be ready to talk
about it. The smoking compartment becomes
an animated club-room in which conversation
becomes general on any subject. There is
no better place for a discussion of political
problems, and I fancy a great many Cana-
dians reserve their consideration of these for

I

i\\

IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT.

FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST 255

the time they have to spend in the train. Cer-
tainly they grow very keen in the train, and I
have heard the warmest arguments and the
most libellous denunciations of leading Cana-
dian statesmen hurled freely about among men
who had never set eyes on one another before.
And there are plenty of other arguments with
which to pass the time. As we got to Sicamous
Junction, for example, we took on board two
fruit-growers, one of whom was a ' wet ' grower
and the other a ' dry.' A wet fruit-grower is
a man who does not irrigate his fruit -land,
and a dry fruit-grower is one who, having
settled in the dry belt, has to irrigate. As
iierce a debate was started between these two
as ever you heard between exponents of wet
and dry fly-fishing.

As far as fruit-raising is concerned, the * dry '
men appear to have the advantage. Their
contention is that they can turn off the water
so as to leave their trees dry for the winter
when frost at wet roots is so fatal ; while they
can turn the water on whenever it is wanted
for swelling the fruit. In addition, the dry
belt country gets a longer season of sunshine,
which is more favourable for the growth of
the earlier and finer dessert apples. It seems
curious that none of our finest-flavoured apples,

256 THE FAIR DOMINION

such as Cox's Orange Pippin or Ribston Pippin,
seem to come to perfection in Canada ; and I
found British Columbian fruit-growers very
anxious that English people should appreciate
this fact, and also get to know which are the
British Columbian apples most worth asking
for in England, as though some of the older
orchards are still growing comparatively worth-
less apples, the new ones are being planted
only with a few best kinds, which are as wine to
water. One of these best kinds, by the way,
is called Wine-sap ; two of the other selectest
varieties being Jonathan and Winter Banana.
The latter is said to have a strong banana
flavour. It is worth the English public's while,
if it is going in largely for British Columbian
apples, to encourage only the growing of the
best, and that is to be done by demanding only
the best from our own greengrocers by name.
It is just as simple to plant a good apple tree
as it is to plant a bad one, and there is no
reason why the world in general should not
eat only the best apples. So long as people
are contented to look only at the colour of
the fruit, which is no criterion whatever, and
to pay their greengrocers' price for an un-
named sort, the best apples will not be for
sale, and one will go on being provided with

FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST 257

highly-coloured samples that taste like inferior
turnips.

The weather picked up in the morning, and
I was able to see some of the beauties of the
great Eraser River, though I somehow missed
the Chinamen washing for gold, Indians spear-
ing salmon, bright red, split salmon drying on
frames, Chinese cabins and Indian villages
with their beflagged graveyards, which are said
to be visible from the car windows. Perhaps
I was talking too much.

258 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXVII

A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY

A DIMINUTIVE Japanese who picked up my
fairly heavy trunk, slung it over his shoulder
and walked down the platform with it as
though it were nothing but a shawl, was the
first person I met in Vancouver, reminding
me that that land-locked sea below was the
Pacific, which white men do not own but
only share with the brown and yellow
Orientals. I wonder — will the day come when
the latter want an ocean all to themselves ?
And are there, in view of this contingency,
plans of this intricate coast among the Japanese
naval archives ? They knew the other side
pretty well before the war began with Russia,
and they are not a people to leave things
to chance. The yellow men have known the
Pacific coast from San Francisco to Van-
couver as long as the white men, and put
in a great deal of work there and eaten much
humble pie, and also realised by the constant

A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY 259

rise in their wages — ten times anything their
own country offers — that the white man is
strangely lost without them. They had no
flair for colonising half a century ago, when
the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but
they have it now.

Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The
ground sloping to the shut sea, girt with those
huge, straight trees that give a sense of luxuri-
ance to this northern Pacific coast which no
tropic country can excel, is a perfect situa-
tion for a big city. Vancouver is a big city.
It is so big that many people are afraid for
its immediate future. They say that it is
already far bigger than it has any right to
be, and that by the dubiously beneficent
aid of innumerable real estate men, it is in-
creasing at a pace that is bound to end in
disaster. The slump had been expected in
1909, it was expected last year, it is expected
this year. Some year it will come ; and if
I were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant
of Vancouver, I should then head a deputa-
tion which had for its purpose the dump-
ing in the sea of a large number of the real
estate agents who swarm hungrily in the
place. There is a big street entirely filled
with their offices, and the mark of them is

260 THE FAIR DOMINION

everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that
encyclopaedic work Canada in the Twentieth
Century, jeers at the English for their distrust
of the real estate man, who, he thinks, serves
a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to
the real estate man, says Mr. Bradley, if you
want to buy land, than to the bar loafer.
There is a great deal in that. In individual
cases they are excellent men. But, collected
together in vast numbers, as in Vancouver,
they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer
never can, and that is by so magnifying the
importance of the buying and selling of land,
that people take to it in exchange for work,
and falsely imagine that enormous prosperity
is coming to a place which is in reality doing
nothing but changing its land at fancy and
speculative prices, expecting the prosperity
somehow and some day to follow of itself.

I suppose Seattle, with less justification,
is in very much the same case. Both, besides
being ports with great expectations, happen
to be the last place, so to speak, in their respec-
tive countries ; and there is something mag-
netic in the attraction of a last place. Thither
drifts that very considerable population which,
by getting on geographically, almost persuades
itself that it is getting on materially. Having

A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY 261

attained the limit, it stays there and does
as little as it can. Such people give a city
a false air of greatness, and are, in fact, a sur-
plus population with nothing to do but bid
up land against one another.

Of course there are plenty of genuine citizens
in Vancouver, with all the enterprise and
intelligence that help to make cities great.
Practically, too, the greatness of Vancouver
is in the end assured. It is already a magni-
ficent port, having a big trade with the East,
but nothing to what it will have. The Panama
Canal will make it the centre, by sea, of the
world. Again, it is the terminus of the
Canadian Pacific Railway, and is destined,
every one says, to become the terminus of the
Grand Trunk, and any other railroad that
wants to outlet on the Pacific. Wheat has
begun to come through it from the prairie
that used to go west to Montreal. The new
reciprocity treaty will divert some of this
freight to the south, no doubt, but that
remains to be seen. In any case, besides
being a port, Vancouver will remain the busi-
ness capital of a province endlessly rich in
minerals and timber, and increasingly rich
in fruit- and farm-land. Some day, therefore,
Vancouver will extend to those remote spots

262 THE FAIR DOMINION

where already town lots are being disposed
of. Some day. Only, a big city should not
live upon its future ; and the sale of such
lots miles off in the backwoods to people
who, having bought them, cannot pay for
them or cannot put up houses on them, or
cannot afford to live in those houses even
if they put them up, because there is nothing
for them to do there and their money has
run out — this sort of sale, while it enriches
the real estate man, does not enrich anybody
else. Moreover, it creates a restless spirit
among those genuine farmers out in the country
who would honestly be farming their land,
if real estate agents would leave them alone,
and not persuade them that it is just as profit-
able a game to hang about waiting for oppor-
tunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course
they, like most other people who get as far
as Vancouver, are not mere innocents. Sellers
and buyers are probably equally aware of
the risks they run ; but where a tide of
speculation sets in, the shrewdest people seem
ready to take the most absurd risks. And
the slump has taken so long in coming, and
the possibilities of Vancouver seem so im-
mense, that speculation in land has become
a perfect fascination.

A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY 263

6 What will it be worth next year ? '
That is the formula you constantly see
at the end of an advertisement of some town
lot — five miles, perhaps, from anywhere. The
correct answer varies. If the slump does
not come off next year, the lot may be worth
double what is being asked for it now. If
the slump does come off it will be worth a
twentieth, perhaps, of what was given for
it. Slump or no slump, this method of build-
ing up a city is unsatisfactory. Montreal,
Toronto, Winnipeg — these have become great
as the centres of comparatively populous pro-
vinces, in which wealth has been gradually
and carefully created by agricultural and in-
dustrial enterprises established on a firm basis.
The jobs have been waiting for the men.
In Vancouver alone, of all big Canadian cities,
the men are waiting for the jobs, or, what
is worse, waiting in the belief that money
comes anyhow, and that jobs are not the
prerequisite of money-making. I do not wish
to give the impression that Vancouver is
full of unemployed people, still less of un-
employable ones ; merely that many of the
people there employed are not engaged in
the undertakings that ensure the continuity
of a city's prosperity.

264 THE FAIR DOMINION

Certainly any picture of Vancouver that
made it out gloomy would be a mistake. No-
thing could be livelier than its streets and its
people ; and if the slump does not come, and
the Jeremiahs are wrong, Vancouver citizens
will be justified of any amount of exultation.
Already they have most of the things that make
citizens pleased and proud — a beautiful site,
fine streets, the most splendid of public parks,
water-ways innumerable in front, and, behind,
a country good to look at and rich in poten-
tialities. Vancouver's industries, even if they
do not justify the size of the place, are im-
portant and prosperous ; and its propinquity
to the salmon fisheries and vast timber tracts
of British Columbia is something which alone
would make a great town. In tone it is new
world compared with Victoria, but old world
compared with Seattle. There are many
English people there. Living is high. No
coin under five cents is, of course, in use, and
when you start the day by paying that sum
for a newspaper marked one cent, you find
it difficult to beat down prices during the
rest of the day. Apropos of newspapers,
I was told of a very successful strike among
the paper - boys of Vancouver some little
time ago. Many people must have heard

A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY 265

of it, but it is worth retelling. The strike
was headed by a youthful organiser, popu-
larly known as Reddy, from the colour of his
hair. Reddy was alleged to be thirteen years
of age at the time, but Pitt was not so much
older when he became Prime Minister of Great
Britain. Holding the firm conviction that he
and his fellow - workers were entitled to at
least two cents out of the five for every paper
sold (I am not sure of my figures), Reddy
proclaimed a strike, and conducted it so suc-
cessfully that the newspaper proprietors of
Vancouver were compelled to wait upon him
humbly, and yield in every particular to
his demands. Among historic strikes this
seems worthy of a place.

266 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE HAPPY FARMERS OP THE ISLAND

THERE are no lotus-lands attached to the
Dominion, and will not be, unless we make
over to it at some date the West Indies.
But because Vancouver Island has a climate
excelling that of any other part of Canada,
and a beauty of scenery not surpassed any-
where ; because also the men who have settled
there have reckoned these possessions dearer
than other things, such as the fat soil of the
prairie and the chance of growing quickly
rich, Canadians of the mainland are given
at times to lay a charge of lotus-eating against
them. I think the charge is an unfair one.
Life may be less strenuous on the island,
and there are men there, no doubt, who take
their work there over easily. Against this has
to be set the fact that the work that does go
on in Vancouver Island goes on all the year
round, that the colonists are men with an
eye to the far future as well as to the imme-

THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND 267

diate one (they have, that is to say, an English
ideal of permanent residence instead of the
notion of getting what they can from the
place and decamping), and that in their hands,
if the island is not being developed as fast as
it might be, it is at least safe from spoliation
and waste. Some day, when the mainland
Canadians have time to consider the amenities
of a country life as well as the necessities, they
will find themselves going to the island for hints.
As one crosses from Vancouver, the beauty of
the straits prepares one a little for the beauty
of the island which, so far as I saw it, has no
bare or ugly places. Its coast-line has the con-
tour of the Scandinavian fiords, but its charm
is greater, owing to the luxuriant growth
of the tall and splendid trees. Right to the
edge of these rock - bound sea - water lakes
the forest grows — Douglas firs, surely the
finest of all straight - growing trees, cedar
and maple, jack -pine and arbutus, and at
their feet, flowers and mosses and saxifrages.
Arriving at Victoria, I went straight through
to Duncans, and, looking from the train, was
reminded by the greenness of the land, freshened
by the delicate rain that was falling, of the
mountainous parts of Ceylon — which impres-
sion was strengthened by the fact of the smoking-

268 THE FAIR DOMINION

compartment being crowded with Orientals of
all sorts, mostly Chinese, but Japanese too
and some Indians, all seeming very much
at their ease among the white men. It was
a harmonious sight ; but what, I wondered,
would an Anglo-Indian say if he found him-
self condemned to sit with his cheroot among
this riff - raff of natives ? and what chance
of any agreement on questions affecting our
Indian Empire between the officials of India
and these Westerners who admit the Oriental
to an equality with themselves ?

I was bound on a visit to friends who had
a farm on Quamichan Lake, and found a buggy
waiting for me at Duncans station, driven by
an elderly man who had all the Canadian
optimism, in spite of the fact that he had,
in 1882, sold for a song the whole of Edmonton,
then in his possession. Another of the missed
millionaires of Canada. He brought me in the
dark to my friends' farm, and when I looked
out of my window next morning, I almost
believed myself to be back in England. A
little lake lay two fields below — a fresh-water
lake still and reedy, with woods or orchards
sloping to its edge, and in the distance a ring
of hills. It might be Grasmere transported
to some warmer county such as Devonshire;

THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND 269

but Devonshire never grew such stately trees,
nor has England anywhere mountains wooded
like these to their peaks. A heat -mist lay
on the water, and the apples in the orchard
seemed the reddest I had ever seen. Only
the grass was not English grass, though it
was greener than most of the grass of the
new world. All round the lake were farms,
belonging largely to Englishmen, dairy -farm-
ing or f ruit - farming, making use of science
and co-operation, but not sacrificing beauty
to utility. Perhaps they could not spoil the
island if they tried. The trees are so dominant
and stately that every piece of cleared land
seems to look at once like a part of an old
English park.

It should have been called New England,
this beautiful country which has so many
English people in it, which carries on so much
of the English tradition and sentiment, and
which has even the English pheasant. I saw
thousands of pheasants during the days I spent
there. They were put down on the island not
so very many years ago, and they have in-
creased enormously. The deer were already
there, and you may see them in the orchards,
unless they are very high-fenced, at almost
any time in the early morning. And there are

270 THE FAIR DOMINION

grouse and partridges in plenty too, and beasts
that England no longer possesses — the coon
and the puma, and the bear and the wolverine.
To see the salmon leaping all across Cowichan
Bay, on a bright October morning, is a sight
for sore eyes, if they happen to be an angler's.
To drive along the roads is to realise instantly
that they are the best roads in the Dominion.
Duncans is particularly English, even for
Vancouver Island. I think it is vanity and
a certain cause of vexation to expect in the
new world a conformity to the ways of the
old, which necessary differences of living —
the indispensable growth of new habits, some
of them better than the old — render in time
impossible. Those who expect such a con-
formity are usually the first to forget that the
old country changes too, and that it is we,
as often as those across the sea, who have
forgotten the ancient order and taken on the
new, generally without thought, and often
without reason. Though it is absurd to expect
to find Canada a replica in ideas and habits
of the old world, it is nevertheless pleasant
to come upon a community there which, with-
out holding itself too much apart from its
neighbours or standing out against what is
progressive, does represent some peculiarly

THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND 271

English qualities at their best. That is, perhaps,
why the island makes a particular appeal to
the man newly out from home. I certainly
do not think its inhabitants are to be charged
with stiffness and unadaptability. Men who
have taken on the new life, and work in a spirit
of optimism not less than that shown else-
where, are rather to be admired than otherwise
if they have retained, and even insist on,
what is good in the old. And a love of sport
and beauty and sociability, and even of leisure,
is a good thing, especially when it is found
among men who do their own work as these
men do, and more especially when found
among women who work as the women of
the island do. The work is the best of all,
but all work and no play turns many people —
and not a few Canadians — not merely into
dull folk, but into narrow-minded and back-
ward ones, who will some day have all the
unpleasantness of being rudely awakened to
the fact.

No doubt there are some ne'er-do-weels
on the island, but the great majority of those
I met seemed to me to be capable men, likely
to do well by what is the most beautiful,
and will some day be, perhaps, the most valu-
able part of the Empire.

272 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXIX

A CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF BRITISH
COLUMBIA AND A BIG FIRE AT VICTORIA

As everybody knows who has been in Canada,
there are two hotel systems in vogue there.
By the one system you pay for your room and
board separately, and this is called the European
plan. By the other you take your meals and
lodging at a fixed price, and that is called the
American plan.

In much the same way one might say there are
two systems of life in Canada, and indeed else-
where. By the one you distinguish between
your work and your play, and treat each as a
separate item. By the other you mix the two
up, and are apt to consider yourself a stren-
uous person. I don't know that it is fair to
describe these respectively as the American and
the European system of life ; but I am pretty
certain that whether you apply the systems
to life or to a hotel, the results produced by
them are not on the whole very different.

CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER 273

Applying them to life, the main distinction
seems to be that the exponents of the strenuous
or American method — those who get their fun
out of their work and their holidays out of their
forced travel, or their compulsory rest by
doctor's orders — are frequently led to confuse
the appearance of work with the reality, and
to be disentitled to wear that air of superiority
which, in the presence of confessed believers
of leisure, they too frequently assume. For,
when all is said and done, leisure is as necessary
to man as work, and everybody takes it, what-
ever he may think.

Vancouver laughs at Victoria for its dead-
aliveness and want of hustle. Victoria smiles
at Vancouver for its restlessness and super-
fluity of energy.

Now you see the point of my aphorism. I
do not propose to hold the balance between
these distinguished cities. Both have their
peculiar merits ; and if Vancouver is likely in
years to come to leave Victoria far behind in
the race for industrial supremacy, Victoria is
none the less likely to remain ahead of Van-
couver in culture and the arts. At present I
should judge that Victoria is distinctly the
steadier city of the two. Speculation in land
is the exception rather than the rule ; prices go

274 THE FAIR DOMINION

up steadily, and the land is bought by intending
residents. At which point I will abandon
comparisons, which are the more absurd because
the destinies of the two towns are so widely
different. Vancouver is a great port on the
mainland of Canada, connecting it with Asia,
the western States, South America, and what-
ever countries will henceforth export merchand-
ise via the Panama Canal. Victoria is the
political capital of British Columbia, with all
the prestige that attaches to such a position and
the finest climate in the Dominion. Not that
it is only that. Some of its inhabitants con-
sider that its prospects are immeasurably
superior to those of Seattle, ' since the riches
of Vancouver Island ' (I quote from a local
pamphlet), ' in their entirety incomparably
more valuable than the gold-mines of Alaska,
are directly tributary to the British Columbia
capital.'

There is a great deal in this, though one has
to remember that those riches will take many
years to develop. The drawback to the im-
mediate development of Vancouver Island is
that it is covered with enormous timber.
Reciprocity with the States is likely to give
a fillip to the lumber industry, and the clear-
ing of the land will then go on far quicker than

CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER 275

hitherto. True, lumbermen do not actually
clear the land ; they leave the stumps behind
them, and all the poorer trees. But they
undoubtedly open the land up. Moreover, the
revival of Esquimalt as a naval base will
revive the prestige of Victoria, and create
more work, besides inducing railwaymen to
press on into the island.

I stopped there on my way back, partly to
see the town itself, partly because I wished
to see Mr. Richard M'Bride. The town dis-
appointed me just a little. It commands a
magnificent view of the mountains on the
mainland, and the country all round is beauti-
ful. But the villas and gardens, which one
hears so much praised, struck me as a little
commonplace. Perhaps it is that I like a
town to be a town and a garden to be a garden ;
whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city, grate-
ful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed
to the utilitarian towns of the West, but
altogether lacking in architectural fineness.
The Parliament Buildings are good, and would
be very good if those responsible for their
maintenance would remove the inscription
' Canada ' from across the front of them. In its
coloured lettering it looks like the icing-sugar
mottoes you see inscribed on birthday cakes.

276 THE FAIR DOMINION

But let a more enthusiastic pen than mine
(again I fall back on that local pamphlet)
describe Victoria as it appears to Victorians.

c If there are sights more beautiful than the
Olympian Mountains from Beacon Hill, or the
windings of the Gorge as the waters come
in from the sea between waving battlements of
plumy firs, then eyes have not seen them.
If there is a sweeter song than the skylark's
matin melodies high up from Cadboro Bay,
then ears have not heard it. If there be more
bewildering loveliness than clusters about the
shaded and flower-gemmed gardens of Victorian
homes looking seaward, then poets have not
written it in imperishable numbers, nor minstrels
celebrated it in well-remembered song. If
there be a city of dreams, even the fabled
Atlantis of antiquity, or vision of Babylonian
towers set in hanging gardens, and redolent
of strange odours of musk and myrrh, or fairy
casements opening out to perilous seas forlorn,
then never one approached in splendour this
jewel of all time, ringed by the azure seas and
sentinelled by everlasting hills. ... A bird's
song drops like the sudden peal of a bell.
Outside are broad boulevards, grey with
powdery macadam, stretching towards the
bustling city ; highways of progress and

CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER 277

modernity, now scrolled by the flight of a
whizzing automobile, now echoing with the
staccato sound of hurrying hoof-beats. Inside
are flowers and brooding hedges, the sheen of
close-cropped grasses and sun-lacquered tree-
trunks — rest, peace, and sweet seclusion.'

After this it comes almost as a relief to know
from the same pamphlet that ' the climate of
Victoria is best expressed in figures.' There is
a great deal to be said for figures.

There is a very good, small, natural-history
museum in a wing attached to the Parliament
Buildings, but it is absurdly small. The collec-
tion of Indian curios is remarkably inadequate,
and merely tempts the visitor to ask when
Canadians are going to devote some of the
money they are undoubtedly making to a
genuine study and collection of the remains
of their predecessors in the land. Indians
are not dying out as fast as some people sup-
pose ; but their crafts are, and so are their
creeds and all that appertains to them. It
would be easy even now to create a magni-
ficent Indian museum, but it will become
less and less easy as the years go by. Relics
of Indian times are constantly being picked
up by men travelling in out-of-the-way parts,
or unearthed during railroad and other excava-

278 THE FAIR DOMINION

tions, and if it were known that the authorities
would be glad to receive them and would
perhaps pay the cost of their carriage to some
centre, there is no doubt that many valuable
finds would be forwarded to them. The
making of museums, just like the building
of ships, is a branch of empire work which
should not be neglected ; and Victorians are
eminently the people to recognise this.

It was in his rooms in Parliament Build-
ings that Mr. M'Bride conversed with me
on the subject of British Columbia. You
hear people say in Canada, that if ever that
astutest of party leaders, Sir Wilfrid Laurier,
goes out of office with his Liberals, Mr. M'Bride
will shortly after become Prime Minister of
the Dominion — as Conservative leader, be it
understood. He is not a great orator, and
he has no scheme even for a party millennium.
That, however, in Canada is a strength rather
than a weakness. Politicians are not expected in
Canada to bring about the millennium : indeed,
so far as I could make out, the average Canadian
is of opinion that when the millennium comes,
it will be noticeable for an absence of politi-
cians. They have not our reverence for these
great men. But on the other hand, they
require from them evidence of qualities which

CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER 279

may or may not be present in our ministers.
One is a readiness to seize opportunity as
it comes. Another is, to have a practical
understanding of the ways of finance. Yet
a third is, to be in touch with men and things
— the sort of quality we mean, however
vaguely, when we raise the cry of a Cabinet
of Business Men. All these qualities Mr.
M'Bride possesses, together with that readi-
ness to seem agreeable which is almost a
necessity to a public man.

Mr. M'Bride confined his conversation with
me to British Columbia — a big enough subject
for a short interview. I wished to know if
the survey of the province was being carried
out as quickly as possible. In a vast country
like British Columbia, it seems one of the
most important things. The right to acquire
land must be made simple and certain. Mr.
M'Bride declared that surveying was going
on as fast as men and money could do it,
and referred me to the surveyor-general for
details. I wish I could go further into the
subject, but there is no space for it here. Then
we got on to education, and Mr. M'Bride
asked me to assure the working men of England
that the education facilities of British Columbia
were as fine as any to be got anywhere. Per-

280 THE FAIR DOMINION

haps this is so, though I heard some criticism
of the public schools from another eminent
Victorian. It is easier, perhaps, to be enthusi-
astic than to be unanimous about any given
system of education. To take but one small
point, the co-education of boys and girls is
a thing upon which people are not agreed
even in British Columbia.

I was on the steamboat, ready to start
for Vancouver, when the great fire of 1910
broke out in the town. With a considerable
wind blowing it seemed to me not improbable
that the whole of Victoria would be burnt
down that night, and I had sufficient of the
journalistic instinct to leave my things to
go on by the boat and to go back myself to
watch the blaze. Luckily the wind dropped
and the fire was kept to one quarter, and I
rather regretted my haste when I found
myself stranded in Victoria at three o'clock in
the morning. Still, it was worth while to have
been there, if only to observe the working
of the Canadian mind in a crisis of this sort.
In England you would have heard ejacula-
tions of horror and much sympathy expressed
with those who were bound to suffer by the
fire. The Victorian crowd took it quite differ-
ently. ' This '11 create more work,' said one

CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER 281

man fervidly. ' Just what the town needed,'
said another enthusiast. ' We '11 be able to
have a better-looking street there after this.
Those shops weren't good enough.' I even
heard some of the men who had rushed out
of their burning offices talking keenly and
proudly of the sort of buildings they 'd have
to start putting up next day — much better
buildings. Presumably they were insured, but
even so men in the old country would have
been a little shocked and perturbed, and
regretful of the old rooms they were accus-
tomed to. I fell asleep, when I had found a
hotel, almost oppressed by the optimism of
Canada.

282 THE FAIR DOMINION

CHAPTER XXX

BACK THROUGH OTTAWA

IT was just before sunrise that I first saw
Ottawa. I was on my way back from Van-
couver, and had spent four successive days
in the train, getting out only for minutes
at a time to stamp about platforms where
the train waited long enough to permit of
such exercise.

Such days, varied only by meals for which
one is always looking, but never hungry,
tend to become monotonous, even though
one spends them mostly in the observation
car. The fact is, observation pure and simple
is one of the most difficult things possible
to a member of the human tribe — as hard
as doing compulsory jig-saws ; and reading
humorous American magazines, one after the
other, is an alternative that also requires
the strong mind. If I must travel long dis-
tances by train, I want to be the engine-driver.

The country, I thought, looked less attrac-

BACK THROUGH OTTAWA 283

tive as I repassed it now than it looked before,
and I put this down to the freeze-up, which
had come unusually early, people kept saying,
and gave to the land a black and ruffled look,
like a sick bird's. Later it would be beautiful
again in snow, and the life and work of the
season of snow would begin. Meanwhile,
people in the little northerly stations we passed
had the appearance of having stopped work.
You saw them standing about — always with
their backs to buildings to get out of the
shrivelling wind. I suppose in most of these
places there is a between-time in which nobody
can work.

Nothing much was doing in Ottawa when
I got out there, but that of course was due to
the earliness of the hour. It was so early
that when I reached a hotel they told me
breakfast was not to be had for some time
yet, and so, since I was too wide-awake to
go to sleep again, I thought I would spend
the hour looking at the Dominion Parliament
Buildings. Perhaps it was the too early hour,
perhaps it was the coldness of the wind blow-
ing round that bluff above the river on which
the famous buildings stand — but I could feel
none of that satisfaction, when I looked at
them, which great architecture gives. The

284 THE FAIR DOMINION

situation is fine, but not the buildings. Anthony
Trollope has written of them : — 'As regards
purity of art and manliness of conception, the
work is entitled to the very highest praise. . . .
I know no modern Gothic purer of its kind or
less sullied with fictitious ornamentation ' — but
I think he must have breakfasted handsomely
first. Some one else, but I forget who, and
it does not matter, has described the build-
ings as ' a noble pile,' which seems to hit the
mark, if, as I fancy, that mid- Victorian expres-
sion suggests something on so large a scale,
which has obviously cost such a lot of money,
that vague admiration is the least of the
emotions which should be produced by a
sight of it. ' A noble pile,' then, let them re-
main, especially since, seen from some dis-
tance, with the beautiful river below and a
spacious country stretched before them, they
possess a certain imposing appearance. Closer
up, one is less impressed. There is a long-
backed unmeaning set to the buildings, as
though the architects had found concentra-
tion a vexation, and had decided to extend
instead. Still, they might have elaborated
painfully, and they did not — except for those
little turrets on the side-buildings, surmounted
by railings which one associates chiefly with

BACK THROUGH OTTAWA 285

the London area. Area railings are meant,
I suppose, to prevent errand-boys from falling
into the areas, but there can be few errands
to the roof of the Parliament Buildings. In
passing, I did not like those hundreds of silly
little windows that peep all round : one, as it
were, for every official to peep from.

Reflection should serve to temper criti-
cism, however. The year 1867, in which the
Dominion Parliament required its Houses, was
not one of brilliant achievement in the archi-
tectural world ; and when it is remembered
that Canada itself was also a new country,
the wonder is that nothing worse was built.
Only a few years before, we in England had
been transfixed with admiration of the Crystal
Palace ; Royal Academicians were above
criticism, and e almost too great to live ' ;
bright in the sun gleamed the Albert Memorial.
We ruled the waves, but not the arts ; and
c our daughter of the snows ' took over our
large ideas and our little taste in building.

Whether she took over our political ideas is
another matter, upon which I pondered as
I contemplated those Parliament Buildings.
There stood the House in which Sir John
Macdonald evolved that east-and-west policy
which seemed such an empire-cementing thing ;

286 THE FAIR DOMINION

where Sir Wilfrid Laurier teaches the world
how to lead a party ; where not as yet had
been ratified that Reciprocity Agreement with
America which has been agitating our states-
men so much this year, though, even as I
gazed, it must have been in course of construc-
tion. Would an Imperial Parliament sit there
some day, I wondered, and direct the affairs
of the British Empire from what would be,
not so long hence, a far more central and im-
portant spot than Westminster ? I could not
quite imagine it. I could not even like the
idea, as some Imperialists at any price can.
Home Rule for England is one of the policies
I shall always stand for, I believe ; even when
Canadians have that grasp of Imperial affairs
which we in England impute to them — by
comparison, we generally mean, with our own
English political opponents — that grasp which,
as a matter of fact, is much less common among
them at present than it is among us, whether
we be Liberals or Conservatives.

I wish our party political system allowed
of our minimising the zeal and intelligence
of the side opposed to us without magnify-
ing those qualities in a third party which, in
strict reality, it scarcely possesses. I wish, for
example, that Tariff Reformers could deride

BACK THROUGH OTTAWA 287

the Imperialistic attitude of Free Traders (and
vice versa) without declaring that Canadians
could in this matter teach us all lessons. For
the truth is that Canadians could not give
lessons to either in this matter. They have
an Imperial sentiment all right, but they do
not worry over it as we do. Take that ques-
tion of Preference which has been making us
all so hot for several years now. It never
troubled Canadians at all. They thought that
there was a good deal in it from a business
point of view, and they were prepared to try
it — and did so. But they never for a moment
fancied or perturbed themselves with think-
ing that, either with or without it, the Empire
would totter to its fall. Our fervours left
them entirely cool ; and in that business-like
state of coolness, after duly granting us Pre-
ference, they have, equally duly in their opinion,
set out to establish reciprocity with the States.
The only thing likely to make them hot in
this matter is the suggestion that they have
been lacking in Imperial spirit. Of course
they had been lacking in that early, romantic,
self-immolating and fantastically quaint, Im-
perial spirit which we attributed to them —
just to make our own Little Englanders try
and feel ashamed ; but, equally again, they

288 THE FAIR DOMINION

never had it, and would not dream of claiming
it even if they could be made to understand
what our devotees meant by it. To forgo
trade in order to uphold the flag would not
appeal to a Canadian — mainly for the reason
that the idea would strike him as grotesque.

In the matter of this Reciprocity Agreement,
then, I think it is we who are wrong if we
make it a reproach to the Canadians. It
may or may not be a sound economic pro-
ceeding, but it is entered upon without pre-
judice to Imperial sentiment. Only if we
first assume that all Canadians have been
burning for years past with the same zeal
for an Imperial Zollverein that has animated
our own Tariff Reformers, can we now credit
them with cooling off and backsliding. But
such an assumption would be a very great
mistake. All assumptions that Canadians view
our political problems from our point of view
are great mistakes. They no more do so
than we view theirs from their point of view.
We do not. Nothing struck me more forcibly
than the fact that what causes us political
turmoil in Great Britain is viewed with com-
plete coolness in Canada, and that what
Canadians are keen after remains unknown
to us. While I was there, I kept seeing letters

BACK THROUGH OTTAWA 289

in English papers (reproduced sometimes —
but very briefly — in Canadian papers) saying
that Canada was whole-hearted for Tariff
Reform, or that Canadian Free Traders were
sweeping the country ; whereas the fact was
and is, that these two terms (whatever might
in reality be the state of Canadian parties)
never conveyed in the least in Canada what
we mean by them, and therefore conveyed
no truth that could be understood of both
peoples equally..

Does this inter-Imperial lack of comprehen-
sion threaten the future of the Empire ? It
might seem so at first. Lack of understand-
ing between fellow-citizens cannot be a good
thing in itself. But it has this merit, that
it makes real interference on either side a
rare thing. If we understood — or believed we
understood — what was for the future welfare
of Canada, it is doubtful if we could refrain
from pointing it out, even if we could refrain
from insisting upon it. If the Canadians
thought themselves capable of directing us in
the right way — say in the management of India
— they would feel urged to give their opinion,
and Anglo-Indian officials, having this last straw
added to their backs, would strike en masse.
As it is, we let each other's real problems

T

290 THE FAIR DOMINION

alone, and are satisfied with our own solu-
tions of them. Imperial Conferences are neces-
sary because in some matters the Empire
must work together, having the same interests.
Cables and Dreadnoughts are cases in point.
That Great Britain still bears the main ex-
penditure in all such matters is proof, if proof
be needed, that what American papers some-
what unkindly call ' British Island Politics '
are, still, more Imperial than the politics
of any other part of the Empire. We pay
and we ask for little in return, and the Empire
will go on, even now that Canada has become
a nation. Only some mistake could, I think,
part us — a mistake as big as that which parted
us from the United States — and we are not
likely to make it ; nor is Canada likely to
wish for it, however great she may picture
and make her own destiny. But that she
will want to rule entirely in her own house
is certain. Canadians themselves — the voters
I mean — are not likely for a long time to wish
for much more than they have in the way
of national liberty. I do not think they would
much worry as to whether their ambassador
at Washington, for example, was appointed
from Ottawa or from London. The results
in either case would be likely to be very similar,

BACK THROUGH OTTAWA 291

and in any case, as I have said, Canadians
are not obsessed at present with politics. But
it has to be remembered that besides Canadian
voters, there are Canadian politicians, and
since it is in the nature of politicians to be
at least as ambitious as other people, it is
natural that Canadian politicians should want
in their own hands all the important posts
that are to be had. Just at present Canadians
take such a disrespectful view of politicians in
general — which is unfair no doubt to their
own political representatives, but natural per-
haps in a new country which has not too
much time to reflect upon the real bene-
factions politicians may confer, and rather
fancies, from isolated examples, that ' graft '
is what they are usually after — that they are
not likely to demand of their own accord
more power to the hand of their own states-
men. But the accord of voters depends in
due course upon the persuasive powers of
candidates, and I foresee the candidates per-
suading pretty hard in the near future : all
of which will make work for Imperial Confer-
ences of the near future, but not, it is to be
hoped, impossible work.

I find that having represented myself as
reflecting upon Canadian politics outside the

292 THE FAIR DOMINION

Dominion Parliament Buildings, I have alto-
gether omitted Canadian politics in favour
of Imperial considerations. Beyond showing,
or rather trying to show, that Canadian
politics — the things that really interest Cana-
dians— are not in the least what we are accus-
tomed to think them, I have got no further
at all. Still, that — if I have shown it — is
something, for it may suggest to some gentle
reader that an Empire is not a simple, extended
Great Britain, in which every one thinks
precisely the same things to be of the same
immediate importance; of which all the emo-
tions and reflections may be realised in full by a
perusal, let us say, of the Standard of Empire.

And so I remove myself from that bluff
above the river at Ottawa to my hotel, and
thence to divers parts of that charming town,
which looked then — for Parliament was not
sitting — something like Oxford out of term ;
and thence to the train carrying me back to
Montreal and Quebec.

Afterwards came the return across the
Atlantic to a country smaller than Canada —
(less than a week of steaming, my friends),
in company with Canadians who were return-
ing to see what the old place was like after
many years. I think they would not be

BACK THROUGH OTTAWA 293

ill-pleased with it, small as it is by comparison.
I hope they found behind it some of the qualities
which, as it seems to me, are to be found
also in THE FAIR DOMINION, making it to my
eyes yet more fair.

INDEX

ABBOTT, MOUNT, 215.

Alaska, 274.

Alberta, 13, 138, 141, 142, 143,

164, 165, 217.
Alps, the, 177, 180, 199.
Angell, Norman, 68.
Anmmzio, Gabriel d', 178.
Anticosti, 16.
Archangel, 13.
.Athelmer, 233, 238.

BAIE ST. PAUL, 40.

Banff, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181,

183.

Beacon Hill, 276.
Beaupre, 47, 48, 49, 50.
Beaupr6, Ste. Anne de, 48, 51,

53.

Bears, Grizzly, 246-50.
Belle Isle, 16.
Birmingham, 156.
Blondin, 90.

Bourassa, Mr., 30, 31, 33, 85, 86.
Bourne, Archbishop, 17.
Bow River, 141, 144, 179.
Bradley, A. G., 31.
British Columbia, 188, 216, 237,

238, 256, 274, 279.
Bruce, Randolph, 221, 222, 225.
Brussels, 88.

CADBOBO' BAY, 276.

Calgary, 141, 143, 144, 145,

163, 164, 170, 195.
Canadian Pacific Railway, 18,

141, 142, 152, 162, 182, 261.
Cartier, 40.
Ceylon, 267.
Champlain, 35, 42.
294

Chicago, 159.

Chicoutimi, 39, 43.

Chuzzlewit, Martin, 128.

Colonial Intelligence for Edu-
cated Women, Committee of,
195.

Columbia River, 218, 219, 222,
224, 230, 233.

Columbia Valley, 215, 216, 225,
234, 238.

Cooper, Fenimore, 92.

Covent Garden, 117.

DICKENS, CHARLES, 29, 90.
Dufferin Terrace, 26, 27, 28.
Duncans, 267, 268, 270.

EDEN CITY, 129.
Edmonton, 268.
Eliott, Professor, 163.
Emerald Lake, 206.
Empress of Britain, S.S., 1.
Eucharistic Congress, the, 17,
77, 78, 79.

FARNHAM, MOUNT, 229.
Fort William, 114.
Fraser River, 257.
Free Trade, 29, 149, 287.
French River, 92, 93, 94, 95,
96, 97, 99, 101, 102.

GLACIER HOUSE, 215.
Glasgow, 73.

Golden, 215, 216, 217, 218, 224,
232, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 244.
Gordon, Adam, 252.
Grand Trunk Railway, 261.
Grasmere, 268.

INDEX

295

HAMMERSMITH, 94.
Hampstead Heath, 117.
Heights of Abraham, 34.
Hennepin, Father Louis, 89.
Hesse, Landgraf of, 226.
Hewlett, Maurice, 250.
Higgsville, 128.
Himalayas, the, 177, 227.
Home Rule, 31.
Hoogly, the, 44.
Howells, W. D., 90.
Hudson Bay Company, 115.

IMPERIALISM, 33, 36, 287, 290.
Illecillewaet Glacier, the Great,

215.

Iron Top Mountain, 224.
Irrigation Company, Columbia

Valley, 237.
Irrigation Works, Columbia

Valley, 221.

KAMLOOPS, 216, 229.
Keats, John, 200.
Kildonan, 123, 124.
Kinchinjunga, 177.
Kipling, Rudyard, 105, 106,
253.

LACHINE RAPIDS, 77.
Laggan, 200.

Laurentian Mountains, 27.
Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 278, 286.
Liverpool, 1.

LONDON CHAMBER OF COM-
MERCE, 152.

London, 73, 86, 117, 118, 119,
285.

Loti, Pierre, 110, 111.

Louise, Lake, 198, 199, 200, 206.

Lourdes, 47.

MACDONALD, SIR JOHN, 285.
Manchester, 156.
Manitoba, 114, 144.
Marseilles, 77.
Maskinonge, 93, 96, 99, 100.

M'Bride, Richard, 275, 278, 279.

Meredith, George, 130.

Montmorency Falls, 38, 39, 49.
50.

Montreal, 17, 34, 45, 56, 64, 66,
67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 292.

Moosejaw, 126, 156.

Moraine Lake, 201, 204.

Murray Bay, 40.

Muskoka Lakes, 92.

NAPOLEON, 120.

National Park, 179, 181.

New Brunswick, 32, 237, 238,

242.

New York, 39, 51, 154, 159.
Niagara Falls, 38, 89, 90.
Nightingale, 163, 165, 166.
North Pole, 136.
Nottingham, 28.
Nova Scotia, 32.

O JIB WAY, AN, 96, 97, 99, 100.
Okanagan, 216, 219.
Olympian Mountains, 276.
Ontario, 8, 13, 32, 33, 45, 85,

109, 111, 112, 113, 141, 151.
Orleans, He d', 40.
Ottawa, 84, 282, 283, 292.
Oxford, 77, 292.

PANAMA CANAL, 261, 274.
Paris, 77, 117, 158.
Parkman, Francis, 41, 42.
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 31.
Peterborough, 8, 81.
Pickerel, 95, 98.
Pitt, William, 265.
Police, North-West Mounted,

132, 133, 134, 135, 136.
Port Arthur, 114.

QUAMICHAN LAKE, 268.

Quebec, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 31,
32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 45, 49, 50,
53, 56, 60, 61, 64, 111, 112,
292.

296

THE FAIR DOMINION

RAVELSTOKE, 253.

Red River, 123, 144.

'Reddy,' 265.

Regina, 82, 126, 131, 132, 136,

156, 218.

Remittance Men, 161.
Rockefeller, 23.
Rockies, the, 170, 171, 177, 181,

198, 209, 215, 216, 230.
Rome, 34, 79.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 45.
Russia, 135.

SAGTJENAY, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44,

46.

San Francisco, 258.
St. Irenee, 40.
St. John, Reversible Falls of,

237.

St. Laurent, 67, 68.
St. Lawrence, 16, 26, 34, 39, 40,

44, 57.
St. Malo, 41.
Saskatchewan, 144.
Seattle, 260, 264, 274.
Selkirk, Lord, 123.
Selkirks, the, 215, 216, 224, 225,

253.

Siegfried, Andre, 18, 147.
Sir Donald, Mount, 215.
Spain, 156.

Spillamacheen, 232, 234, 237.
Strathmore, 163, 164.
Sudbury, 102, 107.
Superior, Lake, 114.

TADOUSAC, 40, 41, 42, 44.
Tariff Reform, 149, 286, 288.
Thames, 94.

Thebes, 127, 128, 129.
Toronto, 29, 65, 81, 82, 83, 84,

85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93.
Town Planning BUI, 140.
Trachoma, 3.
Trinite, Cap, 43, 44.
Trollope, Anthony, 284.

ULSTER, 33.

VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS, 201,

202, 204.
Vancouver, 196, 236, 258, 259,

261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267,

273, 274, 282.

Vancouver Island, 266-71, 274.
Vannutelli, Cardinal, 78.
Victoria, 196, 267, 273, 275, 277,

280.

WALKER, BRUCE, 119, 120.

Webb, Captain, 90.

Wilmer, 216, 220, 221, 224,

232, 236.

Windermere, Lake, 222, 223.
Winnipeg, 8, 84, 115, 116, 117,

118, 119, 123, 124, 127, 128,

130, 144.

Wolfe, General, 34, 35, 39.
Wood, Major, 34.
World's Fair, the, 82, 83, 87,

88.

YOHO VALLEY, 206, 207, 209,
210.

Young Women's Christian As-
sociation, 196.

Yukon, 188, 250, 251, 252.

Printed by T. aud A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

FC 74 ,V5 1911 SMC

Vernede, R. E (Robert
Ernest), 1875-1917.

The fair Dominion : a
record of Canadian

AFB-7995 (sk)