It is easy to look over another land and diagnose its ills. Any Canadian will acknowledge that Ireland's population dropped from 8,500,000 in 1850 to 4,400,000 in 1908 solely owing to mismanagement, if not gross misgovernment; but he will not acknowledge that his own country lost a million and a half people from the same cause. Ireland lost her population at the rate of one hundred thousand a year for forty years, and that lost population helped to build up some of the greatest cities in the United States. The Irish vote is to-day a dominant power solely owing to that population lost to Ireland. It is no exaggeration to say that from 1880 to 1890 Canada lost her population to the United States at a higher rate than one hundred thousand a year. Why?

Go back a little in history! The most pugnacious United Empire Loyalist that ever trekked from the American colonies to Ontario and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would hardly deny that Canada was grossly misgoverned under the French regime. Laborers were forced to work unpaid on fortifications, on roads, on governors' palaces. The farmer was taxed to death in tithes to the seignior. Shipping was confined to French vessels owned by royal favorites. Fishing was permitted only under a license. The fur trade was a corrupt monopoly held by a closed ring round the Royal Intendant. New France was so mis-governed that the sons of the best families took to the woods and the Pays d'en Haut—to which fact we owe the exploration of three-quarters of the continent.

And the most pugnacious Loyalist will hardly deny that under the British regime from 1759 to Durham's Report in 1840 the mismanagement was almost as gross as the misgovernment under the French. If any one entertain doubts on that score, let him look up the record on grants of thousands of acres to favorites of the Family Compact; on peculations of public funds in Quebec by irresponsible executives; on mistrials of disorders in the Fur Country, when North-Wester and Hudson's Bay traders cut each other's throats; on the constant bicker and bark between Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec, which kept the country rent by religious dissensions when men should have been empire-building.

Set down the cause of Canada's slow progress up to 1840 to misgovernment. Durham's Report remedied all that; and confederation followed in 1867. Was Canada's progress as swift after 1867 as it ought to have been? Examine a few figures:

In 1790 the United States population was four millions.

In 1800 the United States population was five millions.

In 1914 the United States population was ninety-eight millions.

In 1891 Canada's population was five millions.

In 1900 Canada's population was five million three hundred thousand.

In 1914 Canada's population was seven million eight hundred thousand.

In point of population Canada is just one hundred years behind the United States. Why? Granted her foreign trade is one-fourth as great as that of the United States. How is it that a people with such a genius for success in foreign trade have been so dilatory in their work of nation-building? Slow progress can no longer be ascribed to misgovernment. Her system of justice is one of the most perfect in the world. Her parliamentary representation could hardly be more complete. No people has stricter bit and rein on executive ministers. Through an anguish of travail Canada has worked out an excellent system of self-government. Why is her progress still slow?

Of course one reason for her slow progress in the past was the impression that long prevailed regarding Canada's climate and agricultural possibilities. The officials of the Hudson's Bay Company contended that the Northwest was unfit for settlement, and it was only within recent times that the contrary view gained a hearing and proved to be true. With vast tracts of unoccupied land in the milder climate of the United States still open to settlement and with Canadians themselves denying that the great Northwest could be cultivated, it is not strange that most immigrants passed Canada by. Furthermore in those days the glamour of democracy fascinated dissatisfied Europeans who swarmed to the New World. Canada was practically as free as the United States, but she was a possession of the British Crown, and many emigrants, especially from the Emerald Isle, preferred to try the experiment of living in a republic.

But there are other reasons. It was after the Civil War that the American high tariff struck Canada an unintended but nevertheless staggering blow. She had no market. She had to build up transportation system and trade routes, but this was well under way by 1890. Has her progress since 1890 kept pace with the United States? One has but to compare the population between the Mississippi and Seattle with the population between Red River and Vancouver to have the answer to this question.

Is it something in the soul; a habit of discouragement; of marking time; of fighting shy on the defensive instead of jumping into the aggressive; of self-derogation; of criticism instead of construction; of foreshortened vision? A diagnosis can be made from symptoms. I set down a few of the symptoms. There may be many more, and the thinker must trace up—a surgeon would "guess"—his own diagnosis.

IV

If it were not such a tiresome task, it could be shown from actual quotations that there is not a paper published in Canada that at some time during the year does not deliver itself of sentiments regarding the United States which may be paraphrased thus: "We thank God we are not as Thou art!" Now the point may be well taken; and Canada should be thankful to God (and keep her powder dry) that crimes are punished, that innocence is protected, that vice is not a factor in civic government; but it is a dangerous attitude for any people to assume toward another nation. It does not turn the soul-searchings in on self. It does not get down beneath the skin of things; down, for instance, beneath a hide of self-righteousness to meanness or nobility of motive. A big ship always has barnacles; the United States is a big ship, and she keeps her engine going and her speed up and in the main her prow headed to a big destiny. It ill becomes a little ship to bark out—but let it be left unsaid!

While this curious assumption of superiority exists internationally, there is the most contradictory depreciation nationally. "We," they say, "are only a little people." So was Switzerland. So was Greece. So was Belgium. So, indeed, were the Jews.

You never mention a Jim Hill, a Doctor Osler, a Schurman, a Graham Bell—or a host of similar famous expatriates—in a Canadian gathering but some one utters with a pride of gratulation that fairly beams from the face: "They are Canadians." Canada is proud these famous men are Canadians. It has always struck me as curious that she wasn't ashamed—ashamed that she lost their services from her own nation-building. To my personal knowledge three of these men had to borrow the money to leave Canada. Their services were worth untold wealth to other lands. Their services did not give them a living in Canada.

At time of writing—with only three exceptions—Canada imports the presidents of her great universities; though she exports some of the greatest presidents and deans who have ever graced Princeton, Cornell, Oxford. She thinks she can not afford to keep these men. Is it a matter of money, at all; or of appreciative intelligence? No matter what the cost, can Canada afford to lose them from her young nationals?

It is a truism that to my knowledge has not a single exception that Canada has never given the imprimatur of her approval to a writer, to an inventor, to a scholar, to an artist, till he has gone abroad and received the stamp of approval outside his own land. By the time Paul Peel was acclaimed in Paris and Horatio Walker in New York each was lost to his own land. It is an even wager nine Canadians out of ten do not know who these men were or for what they were acclaimed. Try it as an experiment on your first train acquaintance.

You can not read early records of Congress without the most astounding realization that Washington, Monroe, Jefferson, Adams, big statesmen and little politicians, voicing solemn convictions or playing to the gallery—all were deadly in earnest and serious about the business of building up a nation. They never lost sight of the idea of conserving, up-building, protecting, extending their country. The national idea is in Canada so recent that most men have not grasped it. "Build a navy?" Canada hooted and made the vote a party football. "Canada should have her own shipyards?" Men look at you! What for? "Panama will reverse the world conduits of trade." Bah! Hot-air! I have heard these and similar comments not once but a thousand times.

Americans say of opportunity—"How much can we make of it?" Canadians say—"How little can we pay for it?" And each takes out of opportunity exactly the amount of optimism put into it.

So one could go down the list enumerating symptoms, but beneath them all, it is plain, lies a cause psychological, not physical. It may be a psychology of discouragement and disparagement from long years of hardship, but whatever it is, if Canada is to be as big nationally as she is latitudinally, as great in soul as in area, she must get rid of this negative thing in her attitude to herself and life. It makes for solidity, but it also makes for stolidity. Nations do not grow great by what they leave undone. Psychologists say all mentality divides itself into two great classes: those giving off negative response to stimulus; those giving off positive. One class of people stands for carping criticism; the other, for constructive attempts. One is safe, to be sure, and sane; and the other is distinctively rash and dangerous; but of rashness and danger is valor made. "I know thy works," said the Voice to the Laodiceans, "that thou art neither hot nor cold: I would thou wert hot or cold . . . because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue thee out of my mouth."

And the Voice is the verdict of destiny to every nation that has taken its place at the world's council board.



CHAPTER XVI

DEFENSE

Having spent a hundred years working out a system of government almost perfect in its democracy, and having spent fifty more years working out a system of trade and transportation that gives Canada sixth rank in the gross foreign trade of the world nations—one would think the Dominion entitled to lie back resting on her laurels reaping the reward that is undoubtedly hers.

But nations can no more rest in their development than men. To stop means to go back. To rest means to rust, and Canada to-day must face one of the most serious problems in her national history. What is worth having is worth holding, and what is worth holding must always be defended. The strong man does not go out challenging a fight. The very fact that he is strong prevents other men challenging him to a fight, and Canada must face the need of national defense.

So remote did the need of national defense seem to Canada that as late as May of 1913 the Senate rejected Premier Borden's plan for Canada to contribute her quota in cost to the British navy. The Laurier government had proposed building a small navy for the Dominion. This was hooted by the French Nationalists, and when the Borden government came into power, the policy was modified from building a small navy to bearing a quota of the cost of a navy built and equipped by Imperial power. In the rejection of this policy, the composition of the Senate and Commons should be observed. The Commons were Conservative, or supporters of Premier Borden, and the Government Navy Bill passed the Commons by one hundred and one to sixty-eight. The Nationalists voted with the opposition or the Liberals. The Nationalists are the small French party pledged against Canada's intervention in European affairs. Laurier having been in power for almost two decades, the Senate was, of course, tinged with the Liberal policy. They could not completely reject a naval policy without repudiating Laurier's former policy; so they rejected the Borden Naval Bill on the ground that it ought to have been submitted to the electorate. The vote in the Senate was fifty-one to twenty-seven. In the Senate were fifty-four Liberals—or supporters of Laurier—and thirty-two Conservatives, or supporters of Borden. In other words, so remote did the possible need of defense seem that both parties played politics with it.

For a hundred years Canada had been at peace. The Rebellion of 1837 can hardly be called a war. In 1870 the Indian unrest known as the First Riel Rebellion had occurred, but this amounted to little more than a joy jaunt for the troops under Lord Wolseley to Red River. The Riel Uprising of 1885 was more serious; but every Canadian who gave the matter any thought at all knew there had been genuine cause for grievance among the half-breeds; and fewer lives were lost in this rebellion than in many a train or mine accident. Canada sent to the South African War troops who distinguished themselves to such an extent as to give a feeling of almost false security to the Dominion. On every frontier are men born to the rifle and the saddle—ready-made troopers; but as the frontier shrinks, this class deteriorates and softens.

For a hundred years Canada has been at peace with the outside world. For three thousand miles along her southern border dwells a neighbor who has often been a rival in trade and with whom Canada has had many a dispute as to fisheries and boundaries and tariff, but along this borderland of three thousand miles exists not a single fort, points not a single gun, watches not a single soldier. It is a question if another such example of international friendship without international pact exists in the history of the world. Where international boundaries in Europe bristle with forts and cannon, international boundaries in America are a shuttle of traffic back and forth of great migrations of population, of great waves of friendship and good feeling which all the trade rivalries and hostile tariffs of a half century have failed to stem. The pot shot of some fishery patrol across the nets of a poacher on the wrong side of the international line fails to excite anybody. Even if some flag lunatic full of whisky climbs a flagstaff and tears down the other country's national emblem—the boundary does not go on fire. The authorities cool such alcoholic patriotism with a water hose, or ten days in the lock-up. The papers run a half column, and that is all there is about it.

So why should Canada become excited over national defense? On the south is a boundary without a fort, without a gun, guarded by a powerful nation with a Monroe Doctrine challenging the world neither to seize nor colonize in the Western Hemisphere. On the east for three thousand miles washes the Atlantic, on the west for five thousand miles the Pacific—what has Canada to fear? "Why," asked the Conservatives, "should we support the Laurier policy of building a tin-pot navy?" "Why," retorted the Liberals when Laurier went out and Borden went in, "should we support the Borden Navy Bill to contribute good Canadian cash to a British navy?"

Besides, in the back of Canada's collective head—as it were—in a sort of unspoken consciousness was the almost religious conviction that the Dominion had contributed her share toward Imperial defense in her transportation system. Had she not granted fifty-five million acres of land for the different transcontinentals and spent far over a billion in loans and subsidies and guarantees? Value that land at ten dollars an acre. That was tantamount to an expenditure of two hundred dollars per capita for a transportation system of use to the empire in Imperial defense. Seventy trainloads of Hindu troops were rushed across Canada in cars with drawn blinds and transported to Europe before the enemy knew such a movement was contemplated. Should Turkey ever cut off Suez, Canada and Panama would be England's route to India. In addition, Canada considers herself the granary of the empire. Should Suez ever cut off the path to India and Australia, what colony could feed England but Canada?

You will note that Canada's thought concerned the empire, not herself. The reason for the navy bills proposed by both parties has been Imperial defense. That Canada might some day be compelled to fight for her own existence—and fight to the death for it—never dawned on her legislators; and their unconsciousness of national peril is the profoundest testimony to the pacific intentions of the United States that could be given. It seems almost treason at this era of world war to call Canada's attention to the fact that the greatest danger is not to Imperial defense. It is to Canada's national defense. Uncle Sam has been Canada's big brother, but what if when the danger came, his arms were tied in a conflict of his own? Whatever comes to menace the United States will menace the safety of Canada; and with swift cruisers, Europe and Asia are nearer Canada to-day than Halifax is near Vancouver. Either city could be attacked by foreign powers before military aid could be transported across the width of Canada. We are nearer Europe to-day than the North was near the South in the Civil War. It takes a shorter time to transport troops across Atlantic or Pacific than it formerly took to send a Minnesota regiment to Maryland. Including Quebec, Montreal, old Port Royal, Annapolis, Louisburg and the forts on Hudson Bay, Canada's chief strongholds of defense have been taken and retaken seven times by European enemies in one hundred and sixty years—between 1629 and 1789. Day was when Quebec fortifications cost so much that the King of France wanted to know if they were laid in gold. Before the fall of Quebec in 1759, Louisburg—a forgotten fortress of Cape Breton—was considered one of France's strongholds. Have Canadians forgotten the frightful wreck of the British fleet in the St. Lawrence in 1711 under Sir Havender Walker; or the defeat of the admiralty ships manned by the Hudson's Bay fur-traders up off Port Nelson in 1697 by Lemoyne d' Iberville? Before La Perouse reduced Churchill it was regarded as a second Gibraltar. Yet Churchill and Nelson and Quebec and Louisburg all fell before a foreign foe, and Europe is nearer to-day than she was in those eras of terrible defeat. What additional fortifications or defenses has Canada to be so cocksure that history can never repeat itself? She is not resting under the Monroe Doctrine. It is a safe wager that many Canadians have never heard of the Monroe Doctrine. Besides, the minute Canada voluntarily enters a European war, does she forfeit American "protection" under that Monroe Doctrine? The idea of being "protected" by any power but her own—and Britain's—right arm Canada would scout to derision. Yet what are her own national defenses?

Her regular forces ordinarily consist of less than three thousand men; her volunteer forces of forty-five to sixty thousand. By law it is provided that the Dominion militia consist of all male inhabitants of the age of eighteen and under sixty, divided into four classes: from eighteen to thirty years of age unmarried or widowers; from thirty to forty-five unmarried or widowers; from eighteen to forty-five married or widowers; men of all classes between forty-five and sixty. In emergency, those liable to service would be called in this order. The period of service is three years. Up to the present service has been voluntary, and the period of drill lasts sixteen days. Except for fishing patrols and insignificant cruisers, Canada has no marine force, absolutely none, though she can requisition the big merchant liners which she subsidizes. Canada has an excellent military school in Kingston and a course of instruction at Quebec, but the majority of graduates from these centers go into service in the British army simply because there is no scope for them in their own land. At Esquimalt off Victoria, British Columbia, and at Halifax, Nova Scotia, before the outbreak of the present war, were Imperial naval stations; but these were being reduced to a minimum. Perhaps to these defenders should be added some thirty thousand juvenile cadets trained in the public schools, but if one is to set down facts not fictions, much of the training of the volunteers resolves itself into a yearly picnic. One wonders on what Canada is pinning her faith in security from attack in case disaster should come to the British navy. Whether Canada is conscious of it or not, her greatest defense is in the virility of her manhood. Her men are neither professorial nor an office type. They are big outdoor men who shoot well because they have shot from boyhood and lived a life in the open. All this, however, is not national defense. It is unused but splendid material for national defense.

Up to the outbreak of the present war Canada has not spent ten million a year on national defense. That is—for the security of peace for a century, she has spent less than one dollar and fifty cents per head a year. A year ago naval bills were rejected. To-day there are few people in Canada who would not acknowledge that Canada is spending too little on defense. Stirred profoundly but, as is the British way, saying little, the Dominion is setting herself in earnest to the big new problem. To the European War, Canada has sent sixty thousand men; and she has promised one hundred thousand more. A nation that can unpreparedly deliver on such promises to the drop of the hat can take care of her defense, and that may be Canada's next national job.

Would any power have an object in crippling Canada? The question is answered best by another. If Suez were cut off and Canada were cut off, where would England look for her food supply? And if it were to the advantage of a hostile power to cripple Canada, could she be conquered? Any one familiar with Canada will answer without a moment's hesitation. She could be attacked. Her coastal cities could be laid waste as the cities of Belgium. To reach the interior of Canada, an enemy must do one of three things, all next to impossible: penetrate the St. Lawrence—a treacherous current—for a thousand miles exposed to submarine and mine and attack from each side; cross the United States and so violate American sovereignty, cross the Rockies to reach inland. Any one of these feats is as impossible as the conquest of Switzerland or the Scottish Highlands. Canada could be attacked and laid waste; she could be financially ruined by attack and set back fifty years in her progress; but she could no more be conquered than Napoleon conquered Russia. The conquest would be at a cost to destroy the conqueror, and the conqueror could no more stay than Napoleon stayed in Moscow. Canada has a vast, an illimitable back country—the area of all Russia; and to the lakes and wild rivers and mountain passes of that country her people are born and bred. To her climate her people are born and bred. The climate would take care of the rest. You can't exactly despatch motors and motor guns down swamps for a hundred miles and over cataracts and through mountain passes on the perpendicular. Canada's back country is her perpetual city of refuge. Nevertheless, the day of dependence on false security is past. National status implies national defense, and at time of writing the indications are that the whole military system of the Dominion will be put on a new basis, training to patriotism and defense and service from the public school up through the university.

"Then what becomes of your co-eds and woman movement?" a militarist asked.

The question can be answered in the words of a great doctor—more men die on the field of battle from lack of women nurses than ever die from the bullet of the enemy. The time seems to have come for woman's place on the firing line. That womanhood which gives of life to create life now claims the right to go out on the field of danger to conserve and protect life; and in the embodiment of military training in public education that, too, may be part of Canada's new national defense.

When an admiral's fleet is sunk within ten days' sail of Victoria and Vancouver, Laurier's naval policy to build war vessels, and Borden's to contribute to their purchase for service in the British Navy take on different aspect to Canada; and the Dominion enters a new era in her development, as one of the dominant powers in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific. That is—she must prepare to enter; or sit back the helpless Korea of America. A country with a billion dollars of commerce a year to defend cuts economy down to the danger line when she spends not one per cent. of the value of her foreign commerce to protect it. Like the United States, Canada has been inclined to sit back detached from world entanglements and perplexities. That day has passed for Canada. She must take her place and defend her place or lose her identity as a nation. The awakening has gone over Canada in a wave. One awaits to see what will come of it.

Much, of course, depends upon the outcome of the great war. If Britain and her allies triumph—and particularly if peace brings partial disarmament—the urgency of preparation on Canada's part will be lessened. But should Germany win or the duel be a draw, then may Canada well gird up her loins and look to her safety.



CHAPTER XVII

THE DOMAIN OF THE NORTH

I

Canada does not like any reference to her fur trade as a national occupation. Of course, it is no longer a national occupation. It occupies, perhaps, two thousand whites and it may be twenty or thirty thousand Indians. More Indians in Canada earn their living farming the reserves than catching fur, but the Indians north of Athabasca and Churchill and in Labrador must always earn their living fur hunting. Of them there is no census, but they hardly exceed thirty thousand all told. The treaty Indians on reserves now number a hundred thousand. Yet, though only two thousand whites are fur-trading in Canada, no interpretation of Canadian life is complete without reference to that far domain of the North, where the hunter roams in loneliness, and the night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the call of the wolf pack. It will be recalled that Canada's first settlers came in two main currents from two idealistic motives. The French came to convert the Indians, not to found empire, and the English Loyalists came from the promptings of their convictions. Both streams of settlers came from idealistic motives, but both had to live, and they did it at first by fur hunting. Jean Ba'tiste, the Frenchman, who might have been a courtier when he came, promptly doffed court trappings and donned moccasins and exchanged a soldier's saber for a camp frying-pan and kept pointing his canoe up the St. Lawrence till he had threaded every river and lake from Tadousac to Hudson Bay and the Rockies. It was the pursuit of the little beaver that paid the piper for all the discovering and exploring of Canada. When John Bull came—also in pursuit of ideals—he, too, in a more prosperous way promptly exchanged the pursuit of ideals for the pursuit of the little beaver. It was the little beaver that led the way for Radisson, for La Salle, for La Verandrye, for MacKenzie, for Fraser, for Peter Skene Ogden, from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia, from the Athabasca to the Sacramento.

While all this is of the past, the heritage of a fur-hunting ancestry has entered into the very blood and brawn and brain of Canada in a kind of iron dauntlessness that makes for manhood. Some of her greatest leaders—like Strathcona and MacKenzie—have been known as "Men of the North"; and whether they have fur-traded or not, nearly all those "Men of the North" who have made their mark have had the iron dauntlessness of the hunter in their blood. It is a sort of tonic from the out-of-doors, like the ozone you breathe, which fills body and soul with zest. Canada is sensitive to any reference to her fur trade for fear the world regard her as a perpetual fur domain. Her northern zones are a perpetual fur domain—we may as well acknowledge that—they can never be anything else; and Canada should serve notice on the softer races of the world that she does not want them. They can stand up neither to her climate nor to her measure of a man, but far from cause of regret, this is a thing for gratulation. Canada can never be an overcrowded land, where soft races crowd for room, like slugs under a board. She will always have her spacious domain of the North—a perpetual fur preserve, a perpetual hunting ground, where dauntless spirits will venture to match themselves against the powers of death; and from that North will ever emerge the type of man who masters life.

II

The last chapter of the fur trade has not been written—as many assert. The oldest industry of mankind, the most heroic and protective against the elements—against Fenris and Loki and all those Spirits of Evil with which northern myth has personified Cold—fur hunting, fur-trading, will last long as man lasts. We are entering, not on the extermination of fur, but on a new cycle of smaller furs. In the days when mink went begging at eighty cents, mink was not fashionable. Mink is fashionable to-day; hence the absurd and fabulous prices. Long ago, when ermine as miniver—the garb of nobility—was fashionable and exclusive, it commanded fabulous prices. Radicalism abolished the exclusive garb of royalty, and ermine fell to four cents a pelt, advanced to twenty-five cents and has sold at one dollar. To-day, mink is the fashion, and the little mink is pursued; but to-morrow fashion will veer with the caprices of the wind. Some other fur will come into favor, and the little mink will have a chance to multiply as the ermine has multiplied.

In spite of the cry of the end of fur, more furs are marketed in the world than ever before in the history of the race—forty million dollars' worth; twenty millions of which are handled in New York and Chicago and St. Louis and St. Paul; some five millions passing through Edmonton and Winnipeg and Montreal and Quebec; three millions for home consumption, two millions plus for export. Some years ago I went through all the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company in London from 1670 to 1824 and have transcripts of those Minutes now in my library. In not a single year did the fur record exceed half a million dollars' worth. Compare that to the American traffic to-day of twenty millions, or to the three and four hundred thousand dollar cargoes that each of the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillons' ships bears to Europe from Canada yearly.

"How much can a good Indian hunter make in a season?" I asked a fur-trader of the Northwest, because in nearly all accounts written about furs, you read a wail of reproach at milady for wearing furs when trapping entails such hardship and poverty on the part of the hunter.

"A good hunter easily earns six hundred dollars or seven hundred dollars a winter if he will go out and not hang around the minute he gets a little ahead. It takes from three thousand dollars to four thousand dollars to outfit a small free-trader to go up North on his own account. This stock he will turn over three or four times at a profit of one hundred per cent. on the supplies. For example, ten dollars cash will buy a good black otter up North. In trade, it will cost from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars. On the articles of trade, the profit will be fifty per cent. The otter will sell down at Edmonton for from twenty dollars to thirty dollars. It's the same of muskrat. At the beginning of the season when the kits are plentiful and small, the trader pays nine cents for them up North. Down at the fur market he will get from twenty-five to sixty cents for them, according to size. There were one hundred and thirty-two thousand muskrat came to one firm of traders alone in Edmonton one year, which they will sell at an advance of fifty per cent."

"How much fur comes yearly to Edmonton?" I asked an Edmonton trader. If you look at the map you will see that Edmonton is the jumping off place to three of the greatest fur fields of North America—down MacKenzie River to the Arctic, up Peace River to the mountain hinterland between the Columbia and the Yukon, east through Athabasca Lake to the wild barren land inland from Churchill and Hudson Bay.

"Well, we can easily calculate that. I know about how much is brought in to each of the traders there."

I took pencil while he gave me the names. It totaled up to six hundred thousand dollars' worth for 1908. When you consider that in its palmiest old days of exclusive monopoly the Hudson's Bay Company never sold more than half a million dollars' worth of furs a year, this total for Edmonton alone does not sound like a scarcity of furs.

III

The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the hunting to extinction of fur-bearing animals? I do not think so.

Take a map of the northern fur country. Take a good look at it—not just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian government has again and again advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of square miles of free land. Latitudinally, that is perfectly true. Wheat-wise, it isn't. When you go one hundred miles north of Saskatchewan River (barring Peace River in sections) you are in a climate that will grow wheat all right—splendid wheat, the hardest and finest in the world. That is, twenty hours of sunlight—not daylight but sunlight—force growth rapidly enough to escape late spring and early fall frosts; but the plain fact of the matter is, wheat land does not exist far north of the Saskatchewan except in sections along Peace River. What does exist? Cataracts countless—Churchill River is one succession of cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs—areas of amber stagnant water full of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and sand overgrown with coarse goose grass and "the reed that grows like a tree," muskrat reed, a tasseled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet high—areas of such muskeg mile upon mile. I traversed one such region above Cumberland Lake seventy miles wide by three hundred long where you could not find solid camping ground the size of your foot. What did we do? That is where the uses of a really expert guide came in; we moored our canoe among the willows, cut willows enough to keep feet from sinking, spread oilcloth and rugs over this, erected the tents over all, tying the guy ropes to the canoe thwarts and willows, as the ground would not hold the tent pegs.

It doesn't sound as if such regions would ever be overrun by settlement—does it? Now look at your map, seventy miles north of Saskatchewan! From the northwest corner up by Klondike to the southeast corner down in Labrador is a distance of more than three thousand miles. From the south to north is a distance of almost two thousand miles. I once asked a guide with a truly city air—it might almost have been a Harvard air—if these distances were "as the crow flies." He gave me a look that I would not like to have a guide give me too often—he might maroon a fool on one of those swamp areas.

"There ain't no distances as the crow flies in this country," he answered. "You got to travel 'cording as the waters collect or the ice goes out."

Well, here is your country, three thousand by two thousand miles, a great fur preserve. What exists in it? Very little wood, and that small. Undoubtedly some minerals. What else exists? A very sparse population of Indians, whose census no man knows, for it has never been taken; but it is a pretty safe guess to say there are not thirty thousand Indians all told in the north fur country. I put this guess tentatively and should be glad of information from any one in a position to guess closer. I have asked the Hudson's Bay Company and I have asked Revillons how many white hunters and traders they think are in the fur country of the North. I have never met any one who placed the number in the North at more than two thousand. Spread two thousand white hunters with ten thousand Indians—for of the total Indian population two-thirds are women and children—over an area the size of two-thirds of Europe—I ask you frankly, do you think they are going to exterminate the game very fast? Remember the climate of the North takes care of her own. White men can stand only so many years of that lonely cold, and then they have "to come out" or they dwarf mentally and degenerate.

Take a single section of this great northern fur preserve—Labrador, which I visited some years ago. In area Labrador is 530,000 square miles, two and a half times the size of France, twice the size of Germany, twice the size of Austria-Hungary. Statistical books set the population down at four thousand; but the Moravian missionaries there told me that including the Eskimo who come down the coast in summer and the fishermen who come up the coast in summer the total population was probably seventeen thousand. Now Labrador is one of the finest game preserves in the world. On its rocky hills and watery upper barrens where settlement can never come are to be found silver fox—the finest in the world, so fine that the Revillons have established a fur-breeding post for silver fox on one of the islands—cross fox almost as fine as silver, black and red fox, the best otter in the world, the finest marten in America, bear, very fine Norway lynx, fine ermine, rabbit or hare galore, very fine wolverine, fisher, muskrat, coarse harp seal, wolf, caribou, beaver, a few mink. Is it common sense to think the population of a few thousands can hunt out a fur empire here the size of two Germanies? Remember it was not the hunter who exterminated the buffalo and the beaver and the seal and the otter! The poacher destroyed one group of sea furs; the railway and the farm supplanted the other. West of Mackenzie River and north of British Columbia is a game region almost similar to Labrador in its furred habitat, with the exception that the western preserve is warmer and more wooded. Northward from Ontario is another hinterland which from its very nature must always be a great hunting ground. Minerals exist—as the old French traders well knew and the latter-day discoveries of Cobalt prove—and there is also heavy timber; but north of the Great Clay Belt, between the Clay Belt and the Bay, lies the impenetrable and—I think—indestructible game ground. Swamp and rock will prevent agricultural settlement but will provide an ideal fur preserve similar in climate to Labrador.

Traveling with Indian guides, it is always a matter of marvel and admiration to me how the fur companies have bred into the very blood for generations the careful nurture of all game. At one place canoeing on Saskatchewan we heard of a huge black bear that had been molesting some new ranches. "No take now," said the Indian. "Him fur no good now." Though we might camp on bare rocks and the fire lay dead ash, it was the extra Indian paddler who invariably went back to spatter it out. You know the white's innate love for a roaring log fire in front of the camp at night? The Indian calls that "a-no-good-whitemen-fire-scare-away-game."

Now take another look at the map. Where the Saskatchewan makes a great bend three hundred miles northeast of Prince Albert, it is no longer a river—it is a vast muskeg of countless still amber water channels not twice the width of your canoe and quaking silt islands of sand and goose grass—ideal, hidden and almost impenetrable for small game. Always muskeg marks the limit of big game and the beginning of the ground of the little fellows—waupoos, the rabbit; and musquash, the muskrat; and sakwasew, the mink; and nukik, the otter; and wuchak or pekan, the fisher. It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions upon millions of little pelts—hundreds of thousands of muskrat are taken out of this muskeg alone—exceed by a hundredfold the profits on the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross fox and marten.

Look at the map again! North of Cumberland Lake to the next fur post is a trifling run of two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles by dog-train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake—more muskeg cut by limestone and granite ridges. Here you can measure four hundred miles east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on the west and Hudson's Bay on the east. North of Lac du Brochet is a straight stretch of one thousand miles—nothing but rocks and cataracts and stunted woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them—and sky-colored waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking muskeg goose grass and muskrat reed, cut and chiseled and trenched by the amber water ways.

IV

If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south end of this field.

We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran. Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds, brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains—such a tangle as I have never seen in any swamp of the South—the skeleton of a moose, come to its death by a jump among the windfall, marked the eastern limit of big game; and presently the river was lost—not in a lake—but in a swamp. A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile, evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," sixteen feet high on each side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple of our canoe. Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie. We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed. MacKenzie, the half-breed rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it—leg it" plain as a quack could speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run, the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.

"You old fool," said our head man, "your wing is no more broken than mine is. We're not going to hurt your babies. Shut up there and stop that lying."

Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl. When we drew in for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by the butt of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose grass, kindled fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get footing ashore. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter. The cold water hardened it, and that repair carried them along to the first birch tree affording a new strip of bark.

Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp we could hear the laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing "wild goose" among the trembling black poplars and whispering birches, and where we landed at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters. In fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with the Indian families to prevent lapses to barbarism.

Again and again we passed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks above the reach of animal marauders—testimony to the honesty of the passing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized eastern city can not boast of its denizens.

"I've gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times," declared the head of one of the big fur companies, "and left five hundred dollars' worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our way out, and when we came that same way six months afterward we never found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians who were passing and repassing under the food in those trees were starving owing to the rabbit famine."

In winter this region is traversed by dog-train along the ice—a matter of five hundred miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or six hundred to Prince Albert and back. "Oh, no, we're not far," said a lonely-faced Cambridge graduate fur-trader to me. "When my little boy took sick last winter, I had to go only fifty-five miles. There happened to be a doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge."

But even winter travel is not all easy in a fifty-below-zero climate where you can't find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night fire, I know the story of one fur-trader who was running along behind his dog sleigh in this section. He had become overheated running and had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel shirt, fur gauntlets, corduroy trousers and moccasins. At a bend in the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes. Before he had thought he had sicked the dogs on them. With a yell they were off out of sight amid the goose grass and reeds with the sleigh and his garments. Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet. To make matters worse, a heavy snowstorm came on. The wind was against the direction the dogs had taken and the man hallooed himself hoarse without an answering sound. It was two o'clock in the morning before the wind sank and the trader found his dogs, and by that time between sweat and cold his shirt had frozen to a board.

Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it—make offerings of tobacco to the Granny Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter and life to the slow keel.

One channel but opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color intoxications. There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese against a flaming sky—a far honk—then stillness. Then the flackering quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and ripple of the dead waters among the reeds. Suddenly there lifted against the lonely red sunset sky—a lob stick—a dark evergreen stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or sacred memory. We steered for it. A little flutter of leaves like a clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba'tiste Buck—eighty years old he was—squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than an emperor—the first living being we had seen for a week in the muskegs. We camped together that night on the sandbars—trading Sam Ba'tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks. He had been storm-stead camping in the goose grass for three days. Do you think he was to be pitied? Don't! Three days' hunting will lay up enough meat for Sam for the winter. In the winter he will snare some small game, while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther north—more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter's free tobacco. In town Sam would be poverty-stricken, hungry, a beggar. Here he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and care-free than you are—peace to his aged bones!

Another night coming through the muskegs we lost ourselves. We had left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest two hundred miles to the next fur post by the sun, but there was no sun, only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks. If there was any current, it was reversed by the wind. We should have thwarted the main muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow the main river by taking the broadest opening. It led us into a lake seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun'l of a canoe to the broadside of a big wave. We scattered our dunnage and all three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe. Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.

Nightfall found us back in the channel again scudding before thunder and a hurricane wind looking for a camping place. It had been a back-breaking pace all day. We had tried to find relief by the Indian's choppy strokes changing every third dip from side to side; we had tried the white man's deep long pulling strokes; and by seven in the evening with the thunder rolling behind and not a spot of dry land visible the size of one's foot, backs began to feel as if they might break in the middle. Our canoe and dunnage weighed close on seven hundred pounds. Suddenly we shot out of the amber channel into a shallow lagoon lined on each side by the high tufted reeds, but the reeds were so thin we could see through them to lakes on each side. A whirr above our heads and a flock of teal almost touched us with their wings. Simultaneously all three dropped paddles—all three were speechless. The air was full of voices. You could not hear yourself think. We lapped the canoe close in hiding to the thin lining of reeds. I asked, "Have those little sticks drifted down fifteen hundred miles to this lagoon of dead water?"

"Sticks," my guide repeated, "it isn't sticks—it isn't drift—it's birds—it's duck and geese—I have never seen anything like it—I have lived west more than twenty years and I never heard tell of anything—of anything like it."

Anything like it? I had lived all my life in the West and I had never heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as I have never seen classified or named in any book on birds. We sat very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult nests where the duck had congregated before their long flight south. That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oilcloth on top; and all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the thwarts of the canoe. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe—the big, white banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch craft—with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake.

That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of all the little furs, mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit and ermine, the furs that clothe—not princes and millionaire, who buy silver fox and sea otter—but you and me and the rest of us whose object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that one muskeg hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since 1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, came the first of the fur-traders inland from the Bay. And the game—save in the year of the unexplained rabbit pest—shows no sign of diminishing.

Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game preserves.

To be sure, if you ask a fur-trader, "How are furs?" he will answer, "Poor—poorer every year." So would you if you were a fur-trader and wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur-trader who did not make that answer.

To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost exterminated; but even to-day if the governments of the world, especially Canada and the United States, would pass and enforce laws prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea otter for fifty years, these species would replenish themselves.

"The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts.

V

I read also that "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written." That is the point of view of the man who spends fifty weeks in town and two weeks in the wilds. It is not the point of view of the man who spends two weeks in town and fifty in the wilds; of the man who goes out beyond the reach of law into strange realms the size of Russia with no law but his own right arm, no defense but his own wit. Though I have written history of the Hudson's Bay Company straight from their own Minutes in Hudson's Bay House, London, I could write more of the romance of the fur trade right in the present year than has ever been penned of the company since it was established away back in the year 1670.

Space permits only two examples. You recall the Cambridge man who thought it a short distance to go only fifty-five miles by dog-train for a doctor. A more cultured, scholarly, perfect gentleman I have never met in London or New York. Yet when I met his wife, I found her a shy little, part-Indian girl, who had almost to be dragged in to meet us. That spiritual face—such a face as you might see among the preachers of Westminster or Oxford—and the little shy Indian girl-wife and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the story of heartache and tragedy—I asked myself, as we stood in our tent door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has no end.

I did not learn the story till I had come on down to civilization and town again. That Cambridge man had come out from England flush with the zeal of the saint to work among the Indians. In the Indian school where he taught he had met his Fate—the thing he probably scouted—that fragile type of Indian beauty almost fawn-like in its elusiveness, pure spirit from the very prosaic fact that the seeds of mortal disease are already snapping the ties to life. It is a type you never see near the fur posts. You have to go to the far outer encampments, where white vices have not polluted the very air. He fell in love. What was he to do? If he left her to her fate, she would go back to the inclement roughness of tepee life mated to some Indian hunter, or fall victim to the brutal admiration of some of those white sots who ever seek hiding in the very wilderness. He married her and had of course to resign his position as teacher in the school. He took a position with the company and lived no doubt in such happiness as only such a spiritual nature could know; but the seeds of the disease which gave her such unearthly beauty ripened. She died. What was to become of the children? If he sent them back to England, they would be wretched and their presence would be misunderstood. If he left them with her relatives, they would grow up Indians. If he kept them he must have a mother for them, so he married another trader's daughter—the little half-breed girl—and chained himself to his rock of Fate as fast as ever martyr was bound in Grecian myth; and there he lives to-day. The mail comes in only once in three months in summer; only once in six in winter. He is the only white man on a watery island two hundred miles from anywhere except when the lumbermen come to the Ridge, or the Indian agent arrives with the treaty money once a year.

And "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written"?

"The last chapter of the fur romance" will not have been written as long as frost and muskeg provide a habitat for furtive game, and strong men set forth to traverse lone places with no defense but their own valiant spirit.

The other example is of a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and Chicago and St. Paul—Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words—in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia—a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal scale. He had been sent eastward with a party to bring some furs across from MacLeod Lake in the most heavily wooded mountains. It was mid-winter. Fort MacLeod was short of provisions. On their way back travel proved very heavy and slow. Snow buried the beaten trail, and travel off it plunged men and horses through snow crust into a criss-cross tangle of underbrush and windfall. The party ran out of food. It was thought if Hall, the youngest and lightest, could push ahead on snowshoes to Stuart Lake, he could bring out a rescue party with food.

He set off without horse or gun and with only a lump of tallow in his pocket as food. The distance was seventy-five miles. At first he ran on winged feet—feet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches sticking up through the drifts. By the time you have run half a day beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail—you are hungry. Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to snatch handfuls of snow to quench his thirst. At night he kindled a roaring big white-man fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness off, heard the muffled echo come back to him in smothered voice, and at first streak of dawn ran on, and on, and on.

By the second night Hall had eaten all his tallow. He had also reefed in his belt so that his stomach and spine seemed to be camping together. The snow continued to fall. The trees swam past him as he ran. And the snowdrifts lifted and fell as he jogged heavily forward. Of course, he declared to himself, he was not dizzy. It was the snow blindness or the drifts. He was well aware the second night that if he would have let himself he would have dug a sleeping hole in the snow and wrapped himself in a snow blanket and slept and slept; but he thrashed himself awake, and set out again, dead heavy with sleep, weak from fatigue, staggering from hunger; and the wings on his feet had become weighted with lead.

He knew it was all up with him when he fell. He knew if he could get only a half hour's sleep, it would freshen him up so he could go on. Lots of winter travelers have known that in the North; and they have taken the half hour's sleep; and another half hour's; and have never wakened. Anyway, something wakened Hall. He heard the crackle of a branch. That was nothing. Branches break to every storm, but this was like branches breaking under a moccasin. It was unbelievable; there was not the slightest odor of smoke, unless the dream odor of his own delirious hunger; but not twenty paces ahead crackled an Indian fire, surrounded by buckskin tepees, Indians warming themselves by the fire.

With an unspeakable revulsion of hope and hunger, Hall flung to his feet and dashed into the middle of the encampment. Then a tingling went over his body like the wakening from death, of frost to life—blind stabbing terror obsessed his body and soul; for the fire was smokeless, the figures were speechless, transparent, unaware of his presence, very terribly still. His first thought was that he had come on some camp hopeless from the disaster of massacre or starvation. Then he knew this was no earthly camp. He could not tell how the figures were clothed or what they were. Only he knew they were not men. He did not even think of ghosts. All he knew was it was a death fire, a death silence, death tepees, death figures. He fled through the woods knowing only death was behind him—running and running, and never stopping till he dropped exhausted across the fort doorstep at two in the morning. He blurted out why he had come. Then he lapsed unconscious. They filled him with rum. It was twenty-four hours before he could speak.

"I don't know these modern theories about hallucination and delusions and things," concluded Mr. Hall, gazing reflectively on the memories of that night. "I'm not much on romance and that kind of thing! I don't believe in ghosts. I don't know what it was. All I know is it scared me so it saved my life, and it saved the lives of the rest, too; for the relief party got out in time, though they didn't see a sign of any Indian camp. I don't know what to make of it, unless years ago some Indian camp had been starved or massacred there, and owing to my unusual condition I got into some clairvoyant connection with that past. However, there it is; and it would take a pretty strong argument to persuade me I didn't see anything. All the other things I thought I saw on that trip certainly existed, and it would be a queer thing if the one thing which saved my life did not exist. That's all I know, and you can make anything you like of it."

So while Canada resents being regarded as a fur land, her domain of the North sends down something more than roaring winds—though winds are good things to shake dead leaves off the soul as well as off trees. Her domain of the North rears more than fur-bearing animals. It rears a race with hardihood, with dauntlessness, with quiet dogged unspeaking courage; and that is something to go into the blood of a nation. A man who will run on snowshoes eighteen hundred miles behind a dog-train as a Senator I know did in his youth, and a woman of middle life, who will "come out"—as they say in the North—and study medicine at her own expense that she may minister to the Indians where she lives—are not types of a race to lie down whipped under Fate. Canada will do things in the world of nations shortly. She may do them rough-handed; but what she does will depend on the national ideals she nurtures to-day; and into those ideals has entered the spirit of the Domain of the North.



CHAPTER XVIII

FINDING HERSELF

I

One of the questions which an outsider always asks of Canada and of which the Canadian never thinks is—Why is Newfoundland not a part of Canada? Why has the lonely little Island never entered confederation? On the map Newfoundland looks no larger than the area of Manitoba before the provincial boundaries were extended to Hudson Bay. In reality, area has little to do with Newfoundland's importance to England's possessions in North America. It is that part of America nearest to Europe. If you measure it north to south and east to west it seems about two hundred and fifty by three hundred and fifty miles; but distance north and south, east and west, has little to do with Newfoundland's importance to the empire. Newfoundland's importance to the empire consists in three fundamental facts: Newfoundland is the radiating center for the fisheries on the Grand Banks, that submarine plateau of six hundred by one hundred and fifty miles, where are the richest deep-sea fisheries in the world; Newfoundland lies gardant at the very entrance to Canada's great waterways; and Newfoundland's coast line is the most broken coast line in the whole world affording countless land-locked, rock-ribbed deep-sea harbors to shelter all the fighting ships of the world.

What have the deep-sea fisheries of the Grand Banks to do with a Greater Britain Overseas? You would not ask that question if you could see the sealing fleets set out in spring; or the whaling crews drive after a great fin-back up north of Tilt Cove; or the schooners go out with their dories in tow for the Grand Banks fisheries. Asked what impressed him most in the royal tour of the present King of England across Canada and Newfoundland several years ago, a prominent official with the Prince answered: "Newfoundland and the prairie provinces." "Why?" he was asked. "Men for the navy and food for the Empire." That answer tells in a line why Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a Greater Britain Overseas. You can't take landlubbers, put them on a boat and have seamen. Sailors are bred to the sea, cradled in it, salted with it for generations before they become such mariners as hold England's ascendency on the seas of the world. They love the sea and its roll and its dangers more than all the rewards of the land. Of such men, and of such only, are navies made that win battles. Come out to Kitty Vitty, a rock-ribbed cove behind St. John's, and listen to some old mother in Israel, with the bloom of the sea still in her wilted cheeks, tell of losing her sons in the seal fisheries of the spring, when men go out in crews of two and three hundred hunting the hairy seal over the ice floes, and the floes break loose, and the blizzard comes down! It isn't the twenty or thirty or fifty dollar bonus a head in the seal hunt that lures them to death, in darkness and storm. It is the call, the dare, the risk, the romance of the sea born in their own blood. Or else watch the fishing fleets up off the North Shore, down on the Grand Banks! The schooner rocks to the silver swell of the sea with bare mast poles. A furtive woman comes up the hatchway and gazes with shaded eyes at passing steamers; but the men are out in the clumsy black dories that rock like a cradle to the swell of the sea, drawing in—drawing in—the line; or singing their sailor chanties—"Come all ye Newfoundlanders"—as meal of pork and cod simmers in a pot above a chip fire cooking on stones in the bottom of the boat. It isn't the one or two hundred dollars these fishermen clear in a year—and it may be said that one hundred dollars cleared in a year is opulence—that holds them to the wild, free, perilous life. It is the call of the sea in their blood. Of such men are victorious navies made, and if Canada is to be anything more than the hanger-on to the tail of the kite of the British Empire, she, too, must have her navy, her men of the sea, born and cradled and crooned and nursed by the sea. That is Newfoundland's first importance to a Greater Britain Overseas.

Perhaps, if the present war had not broken out, Canada would never have realized Newfoundland's second importance to a Greater Britain Overseas as the outpost sentinel guarding entrance to her waterways. It would require shorter time to transport troops to Newfoundland than to Suez. Should Canada ever be attacked, Newfoundland would be a more important basis than Suez. Two centuries ago, in fact, for two whole centuries, St. John's Harbor rang to the conflict of warring nations. If ever war demanded the bottling up and blockading of Canada, the basis for that embargo would be Newfoundland.

It may as well be acknowledged that Canada's east coast affords few good land-locked harbors. Newfoundland's deep-sea land-locked harbors are so numerous you can not count them. Your ship will be coasting what seems to be a rampart wall of sheer black iron towering up three, four, six hundred feet flat as if planed, planed by the ice-grind and storms of a million years beating down from the Pole riding thunderous and angry seas. You wonder what would happen if a storm caught your ship between those iron walls and a landward hurricane; and the captain tells you, when the wind sheers nor'-east, he always beats for open sea. It isn't the sea he fears. It is these rock ramparts and saw-tooth reefs sticking up through the lace fret. Suddenly you twist round a sharp angle of rock like the half closed leaf of a book. You slip in behind the leaf of rock, and wriggle behind another angle—"follow the tickles o' water" is, I believe, the term—and there opens before you a harbor cove, land-locked, rock-walled from sea to sky, with the fishermen's dories awash on a silver sea, with women in brightly colored kirtles and top-boots and sunbonnets busy over the fishing stages drying cod. Dogs and hogs are the only domestic animals visible. The shore is so rocky that fences are usually little sticks anchored in stones. There are not even many children; for the children are off to sea soon as they can don top-boots and handle a line. There is the store of "the planter" or outfitter—a local merchant, who supplies schooners on shares for the season and too often holds whole hamlets in his debt. There is the church. The priest or parson comes poling out to meet your ship and get his monthly or half-yearly mail, and there are the little whitewashed cots of the fisher folk. It is a simpler life than the existence of the habitant of Quebec. It is more remote from modern stress than the days of the Tudors. On the north and west shore and in that sea strip of Labrador under Newfoundland's jurisdiction and known in contradiction to Labrador as The Labrodor—are whole hamlets of people that have never seen a railroad, a cow, a horse. They are Devon people, who speak the dialect of Devon men in Queen Elizabeth's day. You hear such expressions as "enow," "forninst," "forby"; and the mental attitude to life is two or three centuries old.

"Why should we pay for railroads?" the people asked late as 1898. "Our fathers used boats and their own legs." And one hamlet came out and stoned a passing train. "Checks—none of your checks for me," roared an out-port fisherman taking the train for the first time and lugging behind him a huge canvas bag of clothes. "Checks—not for me! I know checks! When the banks busted, I had your checks; and much good they were." This was late as '98, and back from the pulp mills of the interior and the railroad you will find conditions as antiquated to-day.

If Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a Greater Britain Overseas, why is she not part of Canada? Because Canada refused to take her in. Because Canada had not big enough vision to see her need of this smallest of the American colonies. For the same reason that reciprocity failed between Canada and the United States—because when Newfoundland would have come in, Canada was lethargic. Nobody was big enough politically to seize and swing the opportunity. Because when Canada was ready, Newfoundland was no longer in the mood to come in; and nobody in Newfoundland was big enough to seize and swing an opportunity for the empire.

It was in the nineties. Fish had fallen to a ruinous price and for some temporary reason the fishing was poor. There had been bank kiting in Newfoundland's financial system. She had no railroads and few steamships. Her mines had not been exploited, and she did not know her own wealth in the pulp-wood areas of the interior. In fact, there are sections of Northern Newfoundland not yet explored inland. Every bank in the colony had collapsed. Newfoundland emissaries came to Ottawa to feel the pulse for federation. The population at that time was something under two hundred thousand.

Now Canada has one very bad British characteristic. She has the John Bull trick of drawing herself up to every new proposal with an air of "What is that to us?" At this time Canada herself was in bad way. She had just completed her first big transcontinental. Times were dull. The Crown Colony of Newfoundland did not come begging admission to confederation. No political party could do that and live; for politics in Newfoundland are a fanatical religion. I have heard the warden of the penitentiary say that if it were not for politics he would never have any inmates. It is a fact that out-port prisons have been closed for lack of inmates, but long as elections recur, come broken heads. So the Crown Colony did not seek admission. It came feeling the Ottawa pulse, and the Ottawa pulse was slow and cold. "What's Newfoundland to us?" said Canada. One of the commissioners told me the real hitch was the terms on which the Dominion should assume the Crown Colony's small public debt; so the chance passed unseized. Newfoundland set herself to do what Canada had done, when the United States refused reciprocity. She built national railways. She launched a system of national ships. She nearly bankrupted her public treasury with public works and ultimately handed her transportation system over to semi-private management. Outside interests began buying the pulp-wood areas. Pulp became one of the great industries. The mines of the east shore picked up. There was a boom in whaling. World conditions in trade improved. By the time that the Dominion had awakened to the value of Newfoundland no party in Newfoundland would have dared to mention confederation, and that is the status to-day. One can hardly imagine this status continuing long. The present war, or the lessons of the present war, may awaken both sides to the advantages of union. Sooner or later, for her own sake solely, Canada must have Newfoundland; and it is up to Canada to offer terms to win the most ancient of British colonies in America. British settlement in Newfoundland dates a century prior to settlement in Acadia and Virginia. Devon men came to fish before the British government had set up any proprietary claim.

II

And now eliminate the details of Canada's status among the nations and consider only the salient undisputed facts:

Her population has come to her along four main lines of motive; seeking to realize religious ideals; seeking to realize political ideals; seeking the free adventurous life of the hunter; seeking—in modern day—freehold of land. One main current runs through all these motives—religious freedom, political freedom, outdoor vocations in freedom, and freehold of land. This is a good flavor for the ingredients of nationality.

Conditioning these movements of population have been Canada's climate, her backwoods and prairie and frontier hardship—challenging the weakling, strengthening the strong. No country affords more opportunity to the fit man and none is crueler to the unfit than Canada. I like this fact that Canada is hard at first. It is the flaming sword guarding the Paradise of effort from the vices of inert softened races. Diamonds are hard. Charcoals are soft, though both are the very same thing.

Canada affords the shortest safest route to the Orient.

Canada has natural resources of mine, forest, fishery, land to supply an empire of a hundred million; to supply Europe, if need arose.

She must some day become one of the umpires of fate on the Pacific.

She yearly interweaves tighter commercial bonds with the United States, yet refuses to come under American government. It may be predicted both these conditions will remain permanent.

Panama will quicken her west coast to a second Japan.

Yearly the West will exert greater political power, and the East less; for the preponderance of immigration settles West not East.

As long as she has free land Canada will be free of labor unrest, but the dangers of industrialism menace her in a transfer of population from farm to factory.

In twenty years Canada will have as many British born within her borders as there were Englishmen in England in the days of Queen Elizabeth.

In twenty years Canada will have more foreign-born than there are native-born Canadians.

Her pressing problems to-day are the amalgamation of the foreigner through her schools; a working arrangement with the Oriental fair to him as to her; the development of her natural resources; the anchoring of the people to the land; and the building of a system of powerful national defense by sea and land.

Her constitution is elastic and pliable to every new emergency—it may be, too pliable; and her system of justice stands high.

She has a fanatical patriotism; but it is not yet vocal in art, or literature; and it is—do not mistake it—loyalty to an ideal, not to a dynasty, nor to a country. She loves Britain because Britain stands for that ideal.

Stand back from all these facts! They may be slow-moving ponderous facts. They may be contradictory and inconsistent. What that moves ever is consistent? But like a fleet tacking to sea, though the course shift and veer, it is ever forward. Forward whither—do you ask of Canada?

There is no man with an open free mind can ponder these facts and not answer forthwith and without faltering—to a democratised edition of a Greater Britain Overseas. Only a world cataclysm or national upheaval displacing every nation from its foundations can shake Canada from that destiny.

Will she grow closer to Britain or farther off? Will she grow closer to the United States or farther off? Will she fight Japan or league with her? Will she rig up a working arrangement with the Hindu?

Every one of these questions is aside from the main fact—England will not interfere with her destiny. The United States will not interfere with her destiny. Canada has her destiny in her own hands, and what she works out both England and the United States will bless; but with as many British born in her boundaries anchored to freehold of land as made England great in the days of Queen Elizabeth, unless history reverse itself and fate make of facts dice tossed to ruin by malignant furies, then Canada's destiny can be only one—a Greater Britain Overseas.



THE END



INDEX

ALBERTA: size of, 16, 39; coal deposits of, 38; investment of British capital in, 104; distance from seaboard, 180; rate from on wheat to Fort William, 187-188; distance from Montreal, 195; from Great Lakes, 199.

"AMERICANIZING OF CANADA," discussion of, 61-79.

AMERICANS: emigration of to Canada, 65, 72, 273; investments of in Canada, 66, 80, 92; as pioneers, 74, 76; sell ranches as rawnches, 105; trade of with Canada, 128; attitude of Americans in Canadian Northwest to Monroe Doctrine, 244; view of opportunity, 280. See also UNITED STATES.

ARBITRATION ACT, defects of, 220.

BELL, GRAHAM, a Canadian, 278.

BIG BUSINESS, does not dominate government in Canada, 212, 223.

BORDEN, ROBERT: social prestige of, 4; a self-made man, 53; new premier, 91; one of Canada's great men, 109; naval policy of, 283, 285.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: demands self-government, 11; railway to planned, 14; larger than two Germanies, 16; climate of, 22; coal deposits of, 38; description of, 40-41; investment of British capital in, 104; opposes Oriental immigration, 129-133; coming of Hindus into and problem of, 141 et seq.

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA ACT: the Canadian Constitution, 11; mentioned, 42, 111, 245; elasticity of, 51; constitution of Canada, 223; provisions of, 228.

BROWN, GEORGE, favors reciprocity, 82.

CABINET, how chosen and to whom responsible, 229.

CANADA NORTHERN: builds repair shops at Port Mann, 179; uses electric power in tunnels, 182; aided by government, 193.

CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY: builds repair shops at Coquitlam, 179; tunnel of through Mount Stephen, 182; aided by government, 193.

CANADIAN SOO CANAL; tonnage passing through, 14; influence of in reducing freight rates, 38.

CHINA, an awakened giant, 168.

CHINESE: agitation against on West Coast, 129; head tax upon, 130,164; a separate problem from that of the Hindu, 138; in British Columbia, 159-167.

CHURCHES, well attended in Canada, 252-255.

COBALT: discovery of silver at, 34; boom in, 67.

"COBDEN-BRIGHT SCHOOL," mentioned, 82, 84.

COCKNEYS, Canadian hostility toward, 52.

CONNAUGHT, DUKE OF, rebukes lip-loyalist, 48.

CONSERVATIVES: tariff views of, 81-86; and appointment of judges, 234; support Family Compact, 242; principles of, 242-244; support Navy Bill, 283; oppose Laurier's naval program, 285.

DAWSON, GEORGE, on coal deposits of Alberta and British Columbia, 38.

"DIRECT PASSAGE" LAW: enacted, 130, 142; attempt to evade, 143, 153.

DIVORCE, low rate of, 264.

DOUKHOBORS: are accumulating wealth, 117; law-abiding, 118; influence of priests upon, 124.

DURHAM, LORD: work of in Canada, 226-228; report of, 274.

ENGLAND, see GREAT BRITAIN.

"FAMILY COMPACT": a governing clique, 9; mentioned, 14, 226, 242.

FRANCHISE, in Canada, 232-233.

FUR TRADE, account of, 294-322.

GEORGE, LLOYD: mentioned, 56, 57; Canada not interested in theories of, 58; effects of tax system of upon investment in Canada, 104.

GEORGIAN BAY SHIP CANAL, proposed, 194.

GLADSTONE, EDWARD E., attitude of toward colonies, 42.

GORDON, CHARLES, investigates mining strike, 117.

GOVERNOR-GENERAL: appointment and powers of, 43-44, 228-230; appoints provincial judges, 236.

GRAND BANKS, mentioned, 323.

GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC: has dock in Seattle, 173, 174; its low mountain grade, 182.

GREAT BRITAIN: withholds self-government from Oregon region, 11; food requirements of, 36; grants no trade favors to her colonies, 43; dependence of Canada upon, 43-45; trade of with the United States, 62-63; her dependencies, 95; immigration from, 95-110; allied with Japan, 127, 132; as a world policeman, 137; shipyards of, 171; need of shortest wheat route to, 197; eighty per cent. of Canada's agricultural products go to, 202; acquires Canada, 224; secret of her success as a colonial power, 269; overplus of women in, 265; rise of as a world power, 269; her navy Canada's chief defense, 289; what defeat of her navy would mean to Canada, 292-293; importance of Newfoundland to her possessions in America, 323; will not interfere with Canada's destiny, 333.

GREAT CLAY BELT; described, 33; mentioned, 303.

HENDRY, ANTHONY, first white fur-trader in Saskatchewan country, 314.

HILL, JAMES: he and associates buy large coal areas, 66; predicts bread famine in United States, 88; on rights of the public, 175; on western fruit crop, 181; wheat empire of, 198, 208; a Canadian, 278.

HINDUS: agitation against in British Columbia, 129; problem of in Canada, 138-167; possible effects on constitution of unlimited immigration of, 245; troops rushed across Canada, 286.

HOPKINSON: murder of, 144; had secret information regarding Hindus, 144, 153.

HUDSON BAY RAILROAD, account of, 191-209.

HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY; monopoly of, 11; journals of mention mineral deposits, 35; governor of testifies that farming can not succeed in Rupert's Land, 271; effect of contentions regarding Northwest, 276; trade of, 297-298; former monopoly of, 299; mentioned, 302.

HUDSON STRAITS, the crux of the Hudson Bay route, 206-209.

HUNTERS' LODGES, raids of, 8.

ICELANDERS, story of in Manitoba, 122-123.

IMMIGRATION: increase in ten years, 20; from Great Britain, 51, 95-110; American immigration into Canada, 61-79; from continental Europe, 111-126; from the Orient, 127-167; probable effect of Panama Canal upon, 176.

IMPERIAL FEDERATION, a dead issue in Canada, 47.

INDIANS: number of in the fur trade, 294; rights of Indian wives married to white men, 266.

INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD: in Canada, 219; program of, 221.

JAPAN: dominates fishing industry of the Pacific, 24; alliance of with Great Britain, 127; attitude of on equality question, 130-132; activity of on West Coast, 134-136; controls seventy-two per cent. of the shipping of the Pacific, 136, 178; future influence of, 137; attempt to draw into Hindu quarrel, 146; demands room to expand, 168; becomes a world power, 269; future relations of with Canada, 333.

JAPANESE: inrush of into British Columbia, 129; limitations on immigration of, 130; exclusion of becomes party shibboleth, 133; a separate problem from that of the Hindu, 138.

JUDGES, position and powers of, 233-236.

KOOTENAY, mining boom in, 66-67.

LABRADOR, as a fur country, 302-304.

LABRODOR, THE, under jurisdiction of Newfoundland, 327

LAURIER, SIR WILFRED: social prestige of, 4; helps allay racial antagonisms, 7; prediction of as to Canada's future, 17; supports Boer War, 31-32; a self-made man, 53; a free-trader, 82; and reciprocity, 89-91; one of Canada's great men, 109; and a Dominion navy, 283, 285; mentioned, 243.

LESSER GREAT LAKES, fisheries of, 39.

LIBERALS: favor free trade, 82; seek reciprocity agreement, 83-85; launch two more transcontinentals, 86; and appointment of judges, 234; organize to oust Family Compact, 242; principles of, 242-244; oppose Naval Bill, 283, 285.

LITERATURE: no great national in Canada, 262; Canadians slow to recognize writers, 279; most Canadian books first published out of Canada, 79.

LORD SELKIRK'S SETTLERS, come to Canada, 6.

LOYALISTS, see UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS.

MACDONALD, SIR JOHN: influence of upon Canadian constitution, 11-12; comes up from penury, 53; seeks tariff concessions from the United States, 81; tariff views of, 83; launches Canadian Pacific Railway, 86; one of Canada's great men, 109; mentioned, 243.

MACKENZIE, ALEXANDER: comes up from penury, 53; mentioned, 81; a free-trader, 82; a man of the North, 295.

MACKENZIE, WILLIAM LYON, a leader in rebellion of 1837-8, 226.

MANITOBA: almost as large as British Isles, 16, 39; coal deposits in, 38; distance of from Montreal and Hudson Bay, 195.

MANITOBA SCHOOL CASE, mentioned 44, 83.

MANN, DAN, comes up from penury, 53,

MARITIME PROVINCES, described, 221.

MONROE DOCTRINE: mentioned, 32, 45, 285; Canadian opinion of, 169, 288; attitude of French Nationalists toward, 244.

MOUNTED POLICE: say crime in Northwest is increasing, 118; efficiency of, 238-240.

MUNRO, DOCTOR, quoted regarding Oriental immigration, 162-163.

NATIONALISTS; oppose Navy Bill, 283, 285; and outside entanglements, 244.

NAVY BILL: defeated, 284.

NEW BRUNSWICK, mentioned, 22.

NEWFOUNDLAND; mentioned, 195; description of, 323-328; why not a part of Canada, 323-330.

NEW FRANCE, conquest of, 6.

NORTH AMERICA ACT, see BRITISH NORTH AMERICA ACT.

NOVA SCOTIA, mentioned, 22.

ONTARIO: first settlement of, 3; more ultra-English than England, 4; description of, 33-35.

OSLER, WILLIAM, a Canadian, 278.

PANAMA CANAL; mentioned, 14; influence of upon commerce, 27; turns Pacific into a front door, 41; what it means to Canada, 168-190; will reverse conduits of trade, 280.

PAPINEAU, LOUIS, a leader in the rebellion of 1837-8, 226.

PARLIAMENT: composition and powers of, 230-233; a session every year, 234.

PEACE RIVER COUNTRY: mentioned, 16; wheat grown in, 271; wheat lands of, 300.

PEEL, PAUL: lost to Canada, 279.

PRAIRIE PROVINCES: resources of, 350; probable wheat production of in twenty years, 183.

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, mentioned, 22.

QUEBEC, PROVINCE OF: more Catholic than the Pope, 4; size of, 16; description of, 27-32.

QUEBEC ACT, first constitution of Canada, 225.

RAILWAY COMMISSION, 192.

REBELLION OF 1837: significance of, 8.

RECIPROCITY: Canadians seek, 15; why rejected, 80-94.

RED RIVER, demands self-government, 11.

RELIGION, influence of in Canada, 252-259.

REVILLONS: yearly fur trade of, 298; inquiry made of as to number of white hunters, 302.

RIEL REBELLION, mentioned, 227, 284.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE, sends fleet round the world, 128.

ROYAL NORTHWEST MOUNTED POLICE, absence of flunkeyism among, 49.

SASKATCHEWAN: area of, 16, 39; coal deposits in, 38.

SCHURMAN, JACOB G., a Canadian, 278.

SIFTON, CLIFFORD: a self-made man, 53; campaign for immigrants, 70-74, 87.

SMITH, GOLDWIN, opinion of Canadian loyalty, 47-48.

SOCIALISM: plays little part in Canadian affairs, 248-251; in Canada, 210, 222.

SOCIALISTS, have never collected money to buy rifles, 149.

SPORT, interest in and forms of, 259-262.

ST. LAWRENCE RIVER, improvements along, 192-196.

STRATHCONA, LORD: prophecy of regarding the prairie provinces, 39, 170; once a fur-trader, 295.

STRATHCONA HORSE, daring of in South Africa, 49.

SUDBURY, nickel mines of, 34.

TAFT, WILLIAM H., and reciprocity, 45, 89-91.

TEACHERS, lack of recognition of services of, 125-126.

"TWILIGHT ZONE": borderland between Dominion and provincial powers, 145; embarrassing in labor disputes, 219.

UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS: first people Ontario, 3; mentioned, 6, 7, 9, 225, 274, 295.

UNITED STATES: effects of Civil War upon unity of, 2; emigration to from Canada, 15; population of compared with that of Canada, 18, 269, 275; absorption of immigration by, 20; spring wheat production of, 37; government of compared with that of Canada, 50-51; transportation facilities between Canada and the United States, 64; trade of with Canada, 64-65; lumbermen from our timber lands in Dominion, 76; and reciprocity, 81-94; increase in value of fruit lands in, 105; similarity to Canada, 113; political corruption in, 116; why she built Panama Canal, 128, 187; problems of immigration in, 120, 130, 176; emigration to Canada from, 170; shipyards in, 171; expectations of Panama, 174; little aid given by to shipping, 179; how it transports its wheat crop, 183; a source of the British wheat supply, 197; acreage of wheat in, 201; increase of urban population in, 214; as a competitor of Canada, 216; churches of poorly attended, 252; friendly relations of with Canada, 273; comparison of with Canada, 269-277; Canadians grateful they are not as, 277; a "big ship," 278; what menaces United States menaces Canada, 287; foreign policies of two countries similar, 292; even closer commercial relations of with Canada, 332; will not interfere with Canada's destiny, 332.

VAN HORNE, SIR WILLIAM C, comes up from penury, 53.

WALKER, HORATIO, lost to Canada, 279.

WAR OF 1812, cripples Canada financially, 7.

WELLAND CANAL, not wide enough, 194,

WILSON, WOODROW, tariff reductions under, 94.

YUKON: mentioned, 16; gold discovered in, 23.

THE END