CONTENTdm
British Columbia Historical Books Collection
Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936
"p[3]: "These letters appeared in newspapers during the spring of the present year... and are now reprinted." Journey was made in 1907, and includes the often quoted description of Victoria which compares the city with beauty spots around the world."-- Edwards, M. H., Lort, J. C. R., & Carmichael, W. J. (1975). A bibliography of British Columbia: Years of growth, 1900-1950. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, p. 161.
72 pages ; 18 cm
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Letters to the Family BY RUDYARD KIPLING Toronto The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited Letters to the Family (Notes on a recent trip to Canada) BY RUDYARD KIPLING TORONTO The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited A Copyright, Canada, 1907, by Rudyard Kipling. PREFACE These letters appeared in newspapers during the spring of the present year after a trip to Canada undertaken in the autumn of 1907. They are now reprinted without alteration in book form. September, 1908. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY By RUDYARD KIPLING W I HERE'S the lamp that Hero lit Once to call Leander home? Equal Time hath shoveled it 'Neath the wrack of Greece and Rome. Neither wait we any more That tall glass which Argo bore. Dust and dust of ashes close All the Vestal Virgins' care; And the oldest altar shows But an older darkness there. Age-encamped Oblivion Tenteth every light that shone! Yet shall we, for Suns that die, Wall our wanderings from desire ? Or, because the Moon is high Scorn to use a nearer fire ? Lest some envious Pharaoh stir, Make our lives our sepulchre? Nay! Though Time with petty Fate Prison us and Emperors, By our Arts do we create That which Time himself devours— Such machines as well may run 'Gainst the horses of the Sun. When we would a new abode Space, our tyrant King no more Lays the long lance of the road At our feet and flees before, Breathless, ere we overwhelm, To submit a further realm! J 6 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY IT MUST be hard for.those who do not live there to realize the cross between canker and blight that has settled on England for the last couple of years. The effects of it are felt throughout the Empire, but at headquarters we taste the stuff in the very air, just as one tastes iodoform in the cups and bread-and-butter of a hospital tea. So far as one can come at things in the present fog, every form of unfitness, general or specialized, born or created, during the last generation has combined in one big trust—a majority of all the minorities—to play the game of Government. Now that the game ceases to amuse, nine-tenths of the English who set these folk in power are crying: "If we had only known what they were going to do we should never have voted for them!" Yet, as the rest of the Empire perceived at the time, these men were always perfectly explicit as to their emotions and intentions. They said first, and drove it home by large pictures, that no possible advantage to the Empire outweighed the cruelty and injustice of charging the British working man two-pence halfpenny a week on some of his provisions. Incidentally they explained, so that all Earth except England heard it, that the Army was wicked; much of the Navy unnecessary; that half the population of one of the Colonies practised slavery, with torture, for the sake of private gain, and that the mere name of Empire wearied and sickened them. On these grounds they stood to save England; on these grounds they were elected, with what seemed like clear orders to destroy the bloodstained fetish of Empire as soon as possible. The present mellow condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa is proof of their honesty and obedience. Over and above this, their rr\ere presence in office produced all along our lines the same moral effect as the presence of an incompetent master in a classroom. Paper pellets, books, and ink began to fly; desks were thumped; dirty pens were jabbed into those trying to work; rats and mice were set free amid squeals of exaggerated fear; and, as usual, the least desirable characters in the form were loudest LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 7 to profess noble sentiments, and most eloquent grief at being misjudged. Still, the English are not happy, and the unrest and slackness increase. On the other hand, which is to our advantage, the isolation of the unfit in one political party has thrown up the extremists in what the Babu called "all their naked cui bono." These last are after satisfying the two chief desires of primitive man by the very latest gadgets in scientific legislation. But how to get free food, and free—shall we say— love ? within the four corners of an Act of Parliament without giving the game away too grossly, worries them a little. It is easy enough to laugh at this, but we are all so knit together nowadays that a rot at what is called "headquarters" may spread like bubonic, with every steamer.. ■ I went across to Canada the other day, for a few weeks, mainly to escape the Blight, and also to see what our Eldest Sister was doing. Have you ever noticed that Canada has to deal in the lump with most of the problems that afflict us others severally ? For example, she has the Double- Language, Double-Law, Double-Politics drawback in a worse form than South Africa, because, unlike our Dutch, her French can not well marry outside their religion, and they take their orders from Italy—less central, sometimes, than Pretoria or Stellenbosch. She has, too, something of Australia's labour fuss, minus Australia's isolation, but plus the open and secret influence . of "Labour" entrenched, with arms and high explosives on neighbouring soil. To complete the parallel, she keeps, tucked away behind mountains, a trifle of land called British Columbia, which resembles New Zealand; and New Zealanders who do not find much scope for young enterprise in their own country are drifting up to British Columbia already. Canada has in her time known calamity more serious than floods, frost, drought, and fire—and has macadamized some stretches of her road toward nationhood with the broken hearts of two generations. That is why one can discuss with Canadians of the old stock matters which an Australian or 1 b LETTERS TO THE FAMILY New Zealander could no more understand than a healthy child understands death. Truly we are an odd Family! Australia and New Zealand (the Maori War not counted) got everything for nothing. South Africa gave everything, and got less than nothing. Canada has given and taken all along the line for nigh on three hundred years, and in some respects is the wisest, as she should be the happiest, of us all. She seems to be curiously unconscious of her position in the Empire, perhaps because she has till lately been talked at, or down to, by her neighbours. You know how at any gathering of our men from all quarters it is tacitly conceded that Canada takes the lead in the Imperial game. To put it roughly, she saw the goal more than ten years ago, and has been working the ball toward it ever since. That is why her inaction at the last Imperial Conference made people who were interested in the play wonder why she, of all of us, chose to brigade herself with General Botha and to block the forward rush. I, too, asked that question of many. The answer was something like this: "We saw that England wasn't taking anything just then. Why should we have laid ourselves open to be snubbed worse than we were? We sat still." Quite reasonable—almost too convincing. There was really no need that Canada should have done other than she did— except that she was the Eldest Sister, and more was expected of her. She is a little too modest. We discussed this, first of all, under the lee of a wet deckhouse in mid-Atlantic; man after man cutting in and out of the talk as he sucked at his damp tobacco. The passengers were nearly all unmixed Canadian, mostly born in the Maritime Provinces, where their fathers speak of "Canada" as Sussex speaks of "England," but scattered about their businesses throughout the wide Dominion. They were at ease, too, among themselves, with that pleasant intimacy that stamps every branch of Our Family and every boat that it uses on its homeward way. A Cape liner is all the Sub-Continent from the Equator to Simon's Town; an Orient boat is Australasian throughout, and a C.P.R. steamer can not be con- LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 9 fused with anything except Canada. It is a pity one may not* be born in four places at once, and then one would understand the half-tones, and asides, and the allusions of all our Family life without waste of precious time. These big men, smoking in the drizzle, had hope in their eyes, belief in their tongues, and strength in their hearts. I used to think miserably of other boats at the South end of this same ocean—a quarter full of people deprived of these things. A young man kindly explained to me how Canada had suffered through what he called "the Imperial connection" : how she had been diversely bedeviled by English statesmen for political reasons. He did not know his luck, nor would he believe me when I tried to point it out; but a nice man in a plaid (who knew South Africa) lurched round the corner and fell on him with facts and imagery which astonished the patriotic young mind. The plaid finished his outburst with the uncontradicted statement that the English were mad. All our talks ended on that note. It was an experience to move in the midst of a new contempt. One understands and accepts the bitter scorn of the Dutch, the hopeless anger of one's own race in South Africa is also part of the burden; but the Canadian's profound, sometimes humorous, often bewildered, always polite contempt of the England of to-day cuts a little. You see, that late unfashionable war was very real to Canada. She sent several men to it, and a thinly-populated country is apt to miss her dead more than a crowded one. When, from her point of view, they have died for no conceivable advantage, moral or material, her business instincts, or it may be mere animal love of her children, cause her to remember and resent quite a long time after the thing should be decently ■ forgotten. I was shocked at the vehemence with which some men (and women) spoke of the affair. Some of them went so far as to discuss—on the ship and elsewhere—whether England would stay in the Family or whether, as some eminent statesman was said to have asserted in private talk, she wquld cut the painter to save expense. One man argued, without J IO LETTERS TO THE FAMILY any heat, that she would not so much break out of the Empire in one flurry, as politically vend her children one by one to the nearest Power that threatened her comfort; the sale in each case to be preceded by a steady blast of abuse of the chosen victim. He quoted—really these people have viciously long memories !—the five-year campaign of abuse against South Africa as a precedent and a warning. Our Tobacco Parliament next set itself to consider by what means, if this happened, Canada could keep her identity unsubmerged; and that led to one of the most curious talks I have ever heard. It seemed to be decided that she might— just might—pull through by the skin of her teeth as a nation —if (but this was doubtful) England did not help others to hammer her. Now, twenty years ago one would not have heard any of this sort of thing. If it sounds a little mad, remember that the Mother Country was throughout, considered as a lady in violent hysterics. Just at the end of the talk one of our twelve or thirteen hundred steerage-passengers leaped overboard, ulstered.and booted, into a confused and bitter cold sea. Every horror in the world has its fitting ritual. For the fifth time—and four times in just such weather—I heard the screw stop; saw our wake curve like a whiplash as the great township wrenched herself round; the lifeboat's crew hurry to the boat-deck; the bareheaded officer race up the shrouds and look for any sign of the poor head that had valued itself so lightly. A boat amid waves can see nothing. There was nothing to see from the first. We waited and quartered the ground back and forth for a long hour, while the rain fell and the seas slapped along our sides, and the steam fluttered drearily through the escapes. Then we went ahead. The St. Lawrence on the last day of the voyage played up nobly. The maples along its banks had turned—blood red and splendid as the banners of lost youth. Even the oak is not more of a national tree than the maple, and the sight of its welcome made the folks aboard still more happy. A dry wind brought along all the clean smell of their Continent- ! LETTERS TO THE FAMILY II mixed odors of sawn lumber, virgin earth, and wood-smoke; and they snuffed it, and their eyes softened as they identified point after point along their own beloved river—places where they played and fished and amused themselves in holiday time. It must be pleasant to have a country of one's very own to show off. Understand, they did not in any way boast, shout, squeak, or exclaim—these even-voiced returned men and women. They were simply and unfeignedly glad to see home again, and they said : "Isn't it lovely? Don't you think it's beautiful? We love it." At Quebec there is a sort of place, much infested by locomotives, like a coal-chute, whence rise the heights that Wolfe's men scaled on their way to the Plains of Abraham. Perhaps of all the tide-marks in all our lands the affair of Quebec touches the heart and the eye more nearly than any other. Everything meets there; France, the jealous partner of England's glory by land and sea for eight hundred years; England, bewildered as usual, but for a wonder not openly opposing Pitt, who knew; those other people, destined to break from England as soon as the French peril was removed; Montcalm himself, doomed and resolute; Wolfe, the inevitable trained workman appointed for the finish; and somewhere in the background one James Cook, master of H.M.S. "Mercury," making beautiful and delicate charts of the St. Lawrence River. For these reasons the Plains of Abraham are crowned with all sorts of beautiful things—including a jail and a factory. Montcalm's left wing is marked by the jail, and Wolfe's right by the factory. There is, happily, now a movement on foot to abolish these adornments and turn the battlefield and its surroundings into a park, which by nature and association would be one of the most beautiful in our world. Yet, in spite of jails on the one side and convents on the other and the thin black wreck of the Quebec Railway Bridge, lying like a dumped carload of tin cans in the river, the Eastern Gate to Canada is noble with a dignity beyond words. We saw it very early, when the under sides of the clouds *£$ 12 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY turned chilly pink over a high-piled, brooding, dusky-purple city. Just at the point of dawn, what looked like the Sultan Harun-al-Raschid's own private shallop, all spangled with coloured lights, stole across the iron-gray water, and disappeared into the darkness of a slip. She came out again in three minutes, but the full day had come too; so she snapped off her masthead steering and cabin electrics, and turned into a dingy white ferry-boat, full of cold passengers. I spoke to a Canadian about her. "Why, she's the old So-and-So, to Port Levis," he answered, wondering as the Cockney wonders" when a stranger stares at an Inner Circle train. This was his Inner Circle—the Zion where he was all at ease. He drew my attention to stately city and stately river with the same tranquil pride that we each feel when the visitor steps across our threshold, whether that be Southampton Water on a gray, wavy morning; Sydney Harbour with a regatta in full swing; or Table Mountain, radiant and new-washed after the Chr'st- mas rains. He had, quite rightly, felt personally responsible for the weather, and every flaming stretch of maple since we had entered the river. (The Northwester in these parts is equivalent to the Southeaster elsewhere, and may impress a guest unfavourably.) Then the autumn sun rose, and the man smiled. Personally and politically he said he loathed the city—but it was his. "Well," he asked at last, "what do you think? Not so bad?" "Oh, no. Not at all so bad," I answered; and it wasn't till much later that I realized that we had exchanged the countersign which runs clear round the Empire. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 13 II JUBAL sang in the Wrath of God And the curse of thistle and. thorn— But Tubal got him a pointed rod. And scrabbled the earth for corn. Old—old as that early mold, Young as the sprouting grain— Yearly green is the strife between Jubal and Tubal Cain! Jubal sang of the new-found sea, And the souls its waves divide— But Tubal hollowed a fallen tree And passed to the further side. Black—black as the hurricane-wrack, Salt as the under-main— Bitter and cold is the hate they hold— Jubal and Tubal Cain! Jubal sang of the golden years When wars and wounds shall cease— But Tubal fashioned the hand-flung spears And showed his neighbors peace. New—new as the Nine point Two, Older than Lamech's slain— Roaring and loud is the feud avowed Twix' Jubal and Tubal Cain. Jubal sang of the cliffs that bar And the peaks that none may crown— But Tubal clambered by jut and scar And there he builded a town. High—high as the Passes lie, Low as the culverts drain— Wherever they be they can never agree— Jubal and Tubal Cain! AN UP-COUNTRY proverb says: "She was bidden to the wedding and set down to grind corn." The same fate, reversed, overtook me on my little excursion. There is a crafty network of organizations of business men called Canadian Clubs. They catch people who look interest- 14 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY ing, assemble their members during the mid-day lunch-hour, and, tying the victim to a steak, bid him discourse on anything that he thinks he knows. The idea might be copied elsewhere, since it takes men out of themselves to listen to matters not otherwise coming under their notice and, at the same time, does not hamper their work. It is safely short, too. The whole affair can not exceed an hour, of which the lunch fills half. The Clubs print their speeches annually, and one gets cross-sections of many interesting questions— from practical forestry to State mints—all set out by experts. Not being an expert, the experience, to me, was very like hard work. Till then I had thought speech-making was a sort of conversational whist, that any one could cut in it. I perceive now that it is an Art of conventions remote from anything that comes out of an inkpot, and of colours hard to control. The Canadians seem to like listening to speeches, and, though this is by no means a national vice, they make good oratory on occasion. You know the old belief that the white man, on brown, red, or black lands, will throw back in manner and instinct to the type originally bred there? Thus, a speech in the taal should carry the deep roll, the direct belly- appeal, the reiterated, cunning arguments, and the few simple metaphors of the prince of commercial orators, the Bantu. A New Zealander is said to speak from his diaphragm, hands clenched at the sides, as the old Maoris used. What we know of first-class Australian oratory shows us the same alertness, swift flight, and clean delivery as a thrown boomerang. I had half-expected in Canadian speeches some survival of the Redskin's elaborate appeal to Suns, Moons, and Mountains—touches of grandiosity and ceremonial invocations. But nothing that I heard was referable to any primitive stock. There was a dignity, a restraint, and, above all, a weight in it, rather curious when one thinks of the in-, fluences to which the land lies open. Red it was not; French it was not; but a thing as much by itself as the speakers. So with the Canadian's few gestures and the bearing of ' his body. During the war one watched the contingents from 1 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 15 every point of view, and, most likely, drew wrong inferences. It struck me then that the Canadian, even when tired, slacked off less than the men from the hot countries, and while resting did not lie on his back or his belly, but rather on his side, a leg doubled under him, ready to rise in one surge. This time while I watched assemblies seated, men in hotels and passers-by, I fancied that he kept this habit of semi-tenseness at home among his own; that it was the complement of the man's stilly countenance, and the even, lowered voice. Looking at their foot-marks on the ground they seem to throw an almost straight track, neither splayed nor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall. Talking among themselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their face. These things seems trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everything is worth while. A man told me once—but I never tried the experiment—that each of our Four Races light and handle fire in their own way. Small wonder we differ! Here is a people with no people at their backs, driving the great world-plow which wins the world's bread up and up over the shoulder of the world—a spectacle, as it might be, out of some tremendous Norse legend. North of them lies Niflheim's enduring cold, with the flick and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that Odin and the iEsirs visited. These people also go North year by year, and drag audacious railways with them. Sometimes they burst into good wheat or timberland, sometimes into mines of treasure, and all the North is full of voices—as South Africa was once—telling discoveries and making prophecies. When their winter comes, over the greater part of this country outside the cities, they must sit still, and eat and drink as the ^sir did. In summer they cram twelve months' work into.six, because between such and such dates certain far rivers will shut, and, later, certain others, till, at last, even the Great Eastern Gate at Quebec locks, and men must go in 16 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY and out by the side-doors at Halifax and St. John. These are conditions that make for extreme boldness, but not for extravagant boastings. The maples tell when it is time to finish, and all work in hand is regulated by their warning signal. Some jobs can be put through before winter; others must be laid aside ready to jump forward without a lost minute in spring. Thus, from Quebec to Calgary a note of drive—not hustle, but drive and finish up—hummed like the steam-threshers on the still, autumn air. Hunters and sportsmen were coming in from the North; prospectors with them, their faces full of mystery, their pockets full of samples, like prospectors the world over. They had already been wearing wolf and coon skin coats. In the great cities which work the year round, carriage-shops exhibited one or two seductive nickel-plated sledges, as a hint; for the sleigh is "the chariot at hand here of Love." In the country the farmhouses were stacking up their woodpiles within reach of the kitchen door, and taking down the fly-screens. (One leaves these on, as a rule, till the double windows are brought up from the cellar, and one has to hunt all over the house for missing screws.) Sometimes one saw a few flashing lengths of new stovepipe in a backyard, and pitied the owner. There is no humour in the old, bitter-true stovepipe jests of the comic papers. But the railways—the wonderful railways—told the winter's tale 'most emphatically. The thirty-ton coal cars were moving over three thousand miles of track. They grunted and lurched against each other in the switch-yards, or thumped past statelily at midnight on their way to provident housekeepers of the prairie towns. It was not a clear way either; for the bacon, the lard, the apples, the butter, and the cheese, in beautiful white wood barrels, were rolling eastwards toward the steamers before the wheat should descend on them. That is the fifth act of the great Year-Play for which the stage must be cleared. On scores of congested sidings lay huge girders, rolled beams, limbs, and boxes of LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 17 rivets, once intended for the late Quebec Bridge—now so much mere obstruction—and the victuals had to pick their way through 'em; and behind the victuals was the lumber— clean wood out of the mountains—logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we pay such sinful prices in England— all seeking the sea. There was housing, food, and fuel for millions, on wheels together, and never a grain yet shifted of the real staple which men for five hundred miles were threshing out in heaps as high as fifty-pound villas. Add to this, that the railways were concerned for their own new developments—double-trackings, loops, cut-offs, taps, and feeder lines, and great swoops out into untouched lands soon to be filled with men. So the construction, ballast, and material trains, the grading machines, the wrecking cars with their camel-like sneering cranes—the whole plant of a new civilization—had to find room somewhere in the general rally before Nature cried: "Lay off!" Does any one remember that joyful strong confidence after the war, when it seemed that, at last, South Africa was to be developed—when men laid out railways, and gave orders for engines, and fresh rolling-stock, and labour, and believed gloriously in the future ? It is true the hope was murdered afterward, but—multiply that good hour by a thousand, and you will have some idea of how it feels to be in Canada—a place which even an "Imperial" Government can not kill. I had the luck to be shown some things from the inside—to listen to the details of works projected; the record of works done. Above all, I saw what had actually Deen achieved in - the fifteen years since I had last come that way. One advantage of a new land is that it makes you feel older than Time. I met cities where there had been nothing—literally, absolutely nothing, except, as the fairy tales say, "the birds crying, and the grass waving in the wind." Villages and hamlets had grown to great towns, and the great towns themselves had trebled and quadrupled. And the railways rubbed their hands and cried, like the Afrites of old: "Shall we make a city where no city is; or render flourishing a city that is 18 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY desolate?" They do it too, while, across the water, gentlemen, never forced to suffer one day's physical discomfort in all their lives, pipe up and say: "How grossly materialistic!" I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, philosopher, dramatist, or divine of to-day has to exercise half the pure imagination, not to mention insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is accepted without comment in what is called "the material exploitation" of a new country. Take only the question of creating a new city at the junction of two lines—all three in the air. The mere drama of it, the play of the human virtues, would fill a book. And when the work is finished, when the city is, when the new lines embrace a new belt of farms, and the tide of the Wheat has rolled North another unexpected degree, the men who did it break off, without compliments, to repeat the joke elsewhere. I had some talk with a youngish man whose business it was to train avalanches to jump clear of his section of the track. Thor went to Jotunheim only once or twice, and he had his useful hammer Miolnr with him. This Thor lived in Jotunheim among the green-ice-crowned peaks of the Selkirks —where if you disturb the giants at certain seasons of the year, by making noises, they will sit upon you and all your fine emotions. So Thor watches them glaring under the May sun, or dull and doubly dangerous beneath the spring rains. He wards off their strokes with enormous brattices of wood, wing-walls of logs bolted together, and such other contraptions as experience teaches. He bears the giants no malice; they do their work, he his. What bothers him a little is that the wind of their blows sometimes rips pines out of the opposite hillsides—explodes, as it were a whole valley. He thinks, however, he can fix things so as to split large avalanches into little ones. Another man, to whom I did not talk, sticks in my memory. He had for years and years inspected trains at the head of a heavyish grade in the mountains—though not half so steep as the Hex—where all brakes are jammed home, and the cars slither warily for ten miles. Tire-troubles there LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 19 would be inconvenient, so he, as the best man, is given the heaviest job—monotony and responsibility combined. He did me the honour of wanting to speak to me, but first he inspected his train—on all fours with a hammer. By the time he was satisfied of the integrity of the underpinnings it was time for us to go; and all that I got was a friendly wave of the hand—a master craftsman's sign, you might call it. Canada seems full of this class of materialist. Which reminds me that the other day I saw the Lady herself in the shape of a tall woman of twenty-five or six, waiting for her tram on a street corner. She wore her almost flaxen- gold hair waved, and parted low on the forehead, beneath a black astrachan toque, with a red enamel maple-leaf hatpin in one side of it. This was the one touch of colour except the flicker of a buckle on th£ shoe. The dark, tailor-made dress had no trinkets or attachments, but fitted perfectly. She stood for perhaps a minute without any movement, both hands—right bare, left gloved—hanging . naturally at her sides, the very fingers still, the weight of the superb body carried evenly on both feet, and the profile, which was that of Gudrun or Aslauga, thrown out against a dark stone column. What struck me most, next to the grave, tranquil eyes, was her slow, unhurried breathing in the hurry about her. She was evidently a regular fare, for when her tram stopped she "smiled at the lucky conductor; and the last I saw of her was a flash of the sun on the red maple-leaf, the full face still lighted by that smile, and her hair very pale gold against the dead black fur. But the power of the mouth, the wisdom of the brow, the human comprehension of the eyes, and the out- striking vitality of the creature remained. That is how / would have my country drawn, were I a Canadian—and hung in Ottawa Parliament House, for the discouragement of prevaricators. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY III. H, little did the Wolf-Child care, As first he planned a home, What city should arise and bear The weight and state of Rome. O A shiftless, westward-wandering tramp, Checked by the Tiber's flood, He reared a wall around his camp Of uninspired mud. But when his brother leaped the Wall And mocked its height and make, He guessed the Future of it all And slew him for its sake. Swift was the blow—swift as the thought Which showed him in that hour How unbelief may bring to naught The early steps of Power. Foreseeing Time's imperiled hopes Of Glory, Grace, and Love— All singers, Caesars, artists, Popes— Would fail if Remus throve, He sent his brother to the Gods, And, when the fit was o'er, Went on collecting turves and clods To build the wall once more. WHAT would you do with a magic carpet if one were . lent you ? I ask because for a month we had a private car of our very own—a trifling affair less than seventy foot long and thirty ton weight. "You may find her useful," said the donor casually, "to knock about the country. Hitch on to any train you choose and stop off where you choose." So she bore us over the C.P.R. from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, and when we had no more need of her, vanished like the mango-tree after the trick. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 21 A private car, though many books have been written in it, is hardly the best place from which to study a country, unless it happen that you have kept house and seen the seasons round under normal conditions on the same continent. Then you know how the cars look from the houses; which is not in the least as the houses look from the cars. Then, the very porter's brush in its nickel clip, the long cathedral-like aisle between the well-known green seats, the toll of the bell and the deep organ-like note of the engine wake up memories; and every sight, smell, and sound outside are like old friends remembering old days together. A piano-top buggy on a muddy, board-sidewalked street, all cut up by the narrow tires; the shingling at the corner of a veranda on a new-built house; a broken snake-fence girdling an old pasture of mulleins and skull-headed boulders; a wisp of Virginia creeper dying splendidly on the edge of a patch of corn; half a dozen panels of snow-fence above a cutting, or even a shameless patent-medicine advertisement, yellow on the black of a tobacco-barn, can make the heart thump and the eyes fill if the beholder have only touched the life of which they are part. What must they mean to the native-born? There was a prairie-bred girl on the train, coming back after a year on the Continent, for whom the pine-belted hills with real mountains behind, the solemn loops of the river, and the intimate friendly farm had nothing to tell. "You can do these landscapes better in Italy," she explained, and, with the indescribable gesture of plains folk stifled in broken ground—"I want to push these hills away and get into the open again! I'm Winnipeg." She would have understood the Hanover Road schoolmistress, back from a visit to Cape Town, whom I once saw drive off into thirty miles of mirage almost shouting: "Thank God, here's something like home at last. Other people ricochetted from side to side of the car, reviving this, rediscovering that, anticipating t'other thing, which, sure enough, slid round the next curve to meet them, caring nothing if all the world knew they were home again; J m 22 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY an 1 the newly arrived Englishman with his large wooden packing-cases marked "Settlers' Effects" had no more part in the show than a new boy his first day at school. But two years in Canada and one run home will make him free of the Brotherhood in Canada as it does anywhere else. He may grumble at certain aspects of the life, lament certain richnesses only to be found in England, but as surely as he grumbles so surely he returns to the big skies, and the big chances. The failures are those who complain that the land "does not know a gentleman when it sees him." They are quite right. The land suspends all judgment on all men till it has seen them work. Thereafter as may be, but work they must because there is a very great deal to be done. Unluckily, the railroads which made the country are bringing in persons who are particular as to the nature and amenities of their work ,and if so be they do not find precisely what they are looking for, they complain in print which makes all men seem equal. The special joy of our trip lay in having travelled the line when it was new and, like the Canada of those days, not much believed in; when all the high and important officials, whose little fingers unhooked cars, were also small and disregarded. Now, things, men, and cities were different, and the story of the line mixed itself up with the story of the country, the while the car-wheels clicked out: "John Kino— John Kino! Nagasaki, Yokohama, Hakodate, Heh!" for we were following in the wake of the Imperial Limited, all full of Hongkong and Treaty Ports men. There were old, known, and wonderfully grown cities to be looked at before we could get away to the new work out west, and: "What d'you think of this building and that suburb?" they said, imperiously. "Come out and see what has been done in this generation." The impact of a'Continent is rather overwhelming till you remind yourself that it is no more than your own joy and love and pride in your own patch of garden written a little large over a few more acres. Again, as always, it was the dignity of the cities that impressed—an austere Northern LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 23 dignity of outline, grouping, and perspective, aloof from the rush of traffic in the streets. Montreal, of the black-frocked priests and the French notices, had it; and Ottawa, of the gray stone palaces and the St. Petersburg-like shining water frontages; and Toronto, consumingly commercial, carried the same power in the same repose. Men are always building better than they know, and perhaps this steadfast architecture is waiting for the race when their first flurry of newly-realized expansion shall have spent itself, and the present hurrah's- nest of telephone poles in the streets shall have been abolished. There are strong objections to any non-fusible, bi-lingual community within a nation, but however much the French are made to hang back in the work of development, their withdrawn and unconcerned cathedrals, schools, and convents, and one aspect of the spirit that breathes from them, make for good. Says young Canada: "There are millions of dollars' worth of church property in the cities which aren't allowed to be taxed." On the other hand, the Catholic schools and universities, though they are reported to keep up the old medieval mistrust of Greek, teach the classics as lovingly, tenderly, and intimately as the old Church has always taught them. After all, it must be worth something to say your prayers an a dialect of the tongue that Virgil handled; and a certain touch of insolence, more magnificent and more ancient than the insolence of present materialism, makes a good blend in a new land. I had the good fortune to see the cities through the eyes of an Englishman out for the first time. " Have you been to the Bank? " he cried. " I've never seen anything like it! " " What's the matter with the Bank? " I asked: for the financial situation across the Border was at that moment more than usual picturesque. "It's wonderful!" said he—" marble pillars—acres of mosaic—steel grilles—might be a cathedral. No one ever told me." " I shouldn't worry over a Bank that pays its depositors," I replied soothingly. "There are several like it in Ottawa and Toronto." Next he ran across some pictures in some palaces, and was downright angry because 24 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY no one had told him that there were five priceless private galleries in one city. "Look here!" he explained. "I've been seeing Corots, and Greuzes, and Gainsboroughs, and a Holbein, and—and hundreds of really splendid pictures!" "Why shouldn't you?" I said. "They've given up painting their lodges with vermilion hereabouts." "Yes, but what I mean is, have you seen the equipment of their schools and Colleges—desks, libraries, and lavatories ? It's miles ahead of anything we have and—no one ever told me." "What was the good of telling? You wouldn't have believed. There's a building in one of the cities, on the lines of the Sheldonia5n, but better, and if you go as far as Winnipeg, you'll see the finest hotel in all the world." "Nonsense!" he said' "You're pulling my leg! Winnipeg's a prairie town." I left him still lamenting—about a Club and a Gymnasium this time—that no one had ever told him; and still doubting all that he had heard of Wonders to come. If we could only manacle four hundred Members of Parliament, like the Chinese in the election cartoons, and walk them round the Empire, what an all-comprehending little Empire we should be when the survivors got home! Certainly the cities have good right to be proud, and I waited for them to boast; but they were so busy explaining they were only at the beginning of things that, for the honor of the Family, I had to do the boasting. In this praiseworthy game I credited Melbourne (rightly, I hope, but the pace was too good to inquire) with acres of municipal buildings and leagues of art galleries; enlarged the borders of Sydney harbor to meet a statement about Toronto's wharfage; and recommended folk to see Cape Town Cathedral when it should be finished. But Truth will out even on a visit. Our Eldest Sister has more of beauty and strength inside her three cities alone than the rest of Us put together. Yet it would do her no harm to send a commission through the ten great cities of the Empire to see what is being done there in the way of street cleaning, water-supply, and traffic-regulation. Ih LETTERS TO .THE FAMILY 25 Here and there the people are infected with the unworthy superstition of "hustle," which means half-doing your appointed job and applauding your own slapdasherie for as long a time as would enable you to finish off two clean pieces of work. Little congestions of traffic, that an English rural policeman, in a country town, disentangles automatically, are allowed to develop into ten-minute blocks, where wagons and men bang, and back, and blaspheme, for no purpose except to waste time. The assembly and dispersal of crowds; purchase of tickets, and a good deal of the small machinery of life is clogged and hampered by this unstable, southern spirit which is own brother to Panic. "Hustle" does not sit well on the national character any more than falsetto or fidgeting becomes grown men. "Drive," a laudable and necessary quality, is quite different, and one meets it up the Western Road where the new country is being made. We got clean away from the Three Cities and the close- tilled farming and orchard districts, into the Land of Little Lakes—a country of rushing streams, clear-eyed ponds, and boulders among berry-bushes; all crying "Trout" and "Bear." Not so very long ago only a few wise people kept holiday in that part of the world, and they did not give away their discoveries. Now, it has become a summer playground where people hunt and camp at large. The names of its further rivers are known in England, and men, otherwise sane, slip away from London into the birches, and come out again bearded and smoke-stained, when the ice is thick enough to cut a canoe. Sometimes they go to look for game: sometimes for minerals—perhaps, even, oil. No one can prophesy. "We are only at the beginning of things." . Said an Afrite of the Railway as we passed in our magic carpet: "You've no notion of the size of our tourist traffic. It has all grown up since the early Nineties. The trolley car teaches people in the towns to go for little picnics. When they w V. 26 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY get more money they go for long ones. All this continent will want playgrounds soon. We're getting them ready." The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie white on the long grass at the lake edges, and watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves as they dropped. "Now that's the way trees ought to turn," she said. "Don't you think our Eastern maple is a little violent in colour?" Then we passed through a country where for many hours the talk in the cars was of mines and the treatment of ores. Men told one tales— prospectors' yarns of the sort one used to hear vaguely before Klondike or Nome were public property. They did not care whether one believed or doubted. They, too, were only at the beginning of things—silver perhaps, gold perhaps, nickel perhaps. If a great city did not arise at such a place—the very name was new since my day—it would assuredly be born within a few miles of it. The silent men boarded the cars, and dropped off, and disappeared beyond thickets and hills precisely as the first widely spaced line of skirmishers fans out and vanishes along the front of the day's battle. One old man sat before me like avenging Time itself, and talked of prophecies of evil that had been falsified. I They said there wasn't nothing here excep' rocks an' snow. They said there never wouldn't be nothing here excep' the railroad. There's them that can't see yit," and he gimleted me with a fierce eye. "An' all the while, fortunes is made— piles is made—right under our noses." "Have you made your pile?" I asked. He smiled as the artist smiles—all true prospectors have that lofty smile. "Me? No. "I've been a prospector most o' my time, but I haven't lost anything. I've had my fun out of the game. By God, I've had my fun out of it!" I told him how I had once come through when land and timber grants could have been picked up for half less than nothing. "Yes," he said placidly. "I reckon if you'd had any kind of an education you could ha' made a quarter of a million dollars easy in those days. And it's to be made now if you ?iT\ LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 27 could see where. How? Can you tell me what the capital of the Hudson Bay district's goin' to be? You can't. Nor I. Nor yet where the six next new cities is going to arise. I get off here, but if I have my health I'll be out next summer again—prospectin' North." Imagine a country where men prospect till they are seventy, with no fear of fever, fly, horse-sickness, or trouble from the natives—a country where food and water always taste good! He told me curious things about some fabled gold— the Eternal Mother-lode—out in the North, which is to humble the pride of Nome. And yet, so vast is the Empire, he had never heard the name of Johannesburg! As the train swung round the shores of Lake Superior the talk swung over to Wheat. Oh, yes, men said, there were mines in the country—they were only at the beginning of mines—but that part of the world existed to clean and grade and handle and deliver the Wheat by rail and steamer. The track was being duplicated by a few hundred miles to keep abreast of the floods of it. By and by it might be a four- track road. They were only at the beginning. Meantime here was the Wheat sprouting, tender green, a foot high, among a hundred sidings where it had spilled from the cars; there were the high-shouldered, tea-caddy grain-elevators to clean, and the hospitals to doctor the Wheat; here was new, gaily painted machinery going forward to reap and bind and thresh the Wheat, and all those car-loads of workmen had been slapping down more sidings against the year's delivery of the Wheat. Two towns stand on the shores of the lake less than a mile apart. What Lloyds is to shipping, or the College of Surgeons to medicine, tha? they are to the Wheat. Its honor and integrity are in their hands; and they hate each other with the pure, poisonous, passionate hatred which makes towns grow. If Providence wiped out one of them, the survivor would pine away and die—a mateless hate-bird. Some day they must unite, and the question of the composite name they shall then carry already vexes them. A man there J I 28 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY told me that Lake Superior was "a useful piece of water," in that it lay so handy to the C.P.R. tracks. There is a quiet horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one revisits them. Fresh water has no right or call to dip over the horizon, pulling down and pushing up the hulls of big steamers ; no right to tread the slow, deep-sea dance-step between wrinkled cliffs; nor to roar in on weed and sand beaches between vast headlands that run out for leagues into haze and sea fog. Lake Superior is all the same stuff as what towns pay taxes for, but it engulfs and wrecks and drives ashore, like a fully accredited ocean—a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent. Some people go sailing on it for pleasure, and it. has produced a breed of sailors who bear the same relation to the salt-water variety as a snake-charmer does to a lion- tamer. Yet it is undoubtedly a useful piece of water. ^L LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 29 IV rHE Stranger within my gate, He may be true or kind, But he does not talk my talk— I cannot feel his mind. I know the face and the eyes and the voice But not the soul behind. The men of my own stock They may do ill or well, But they tell the lies I am wonted to, They are used to the lies I tell. We do not need interpreters When we go to buy and sell. The Stranger within my gates, He may be evil or good, I cannot tell what powers control— What reasons sway his mood; Nor when the Gods of his native land May repossess his blood. The men of my own stock, Bitter bad they may be, But, at least, they hear the things I hear, And see the things I see; And whatever I think of them and their nkes They think of the likes of me. This was my father's belief And this is also mine: Let the corn be all one sheaf— The grapes be all of one vine, Lest our children's teeth are set on edge By bitter bread and wine. LET IT be granted that: as the loud-voiced herald hired by the Eolithic tribe to cry the news of the coming day along the caves, preceded the chosen Tribal Bard who sang the more picturesque history of the tribe, so is Journal- j w 3° LETTERS TO THE FAMILY ism senior to Literature, in that Journalism meets the first tribal need after warmth, food, and women. In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent from the Tribal Herald. A tribe thinly occupying large spaces feels lonely. It desires to hear the roll-call of its members cried often and loudly; to comfort itself with the knowledge that there are companions just below the horizon. It employs, therefore, heralds to name and describe all who pass. That is why newspapers of new countries seem often so outrageously personal. The tribe, moreover, needs quick and sure knowledge of everything that touches on its daily life in the big spaces—earth, air, and water news which the Older Peoples have put behind them. That is why its newspapers so often seem so labouriously trivial. For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, Pete O'Halloran, comes in thirty miles to have his horse shod, and incidentally smashes the king-bolt of his buckboard at a bad place in the road. The Tribal Herald—a thin weekly^ with a I patent inside—connects the red nose and the breakdown with an innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy libel. But the Tribal Herald understands that two-and-seventy families of the tribe may use that road weekly. It concerns them to discover whether the accident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete protests, to the neglected state of the road. Fifteen men happen to know that Pete's nose is an affliction, not an indication. One of them loafs across and explains to the Tribal Herald, who next week cries aloud that the road ought to be mended. Meantime Pete, warm to the marrow at having focussed the attention of his tribe for a few moments, retires thirty mile up-stage, pursued by advertisements of- buckboards guaranteed not to break their king-bolts, and later (which is what the tribe were after all the time) some tribal authority or other mends the roads. This is only a big-scale diagram, but with a little attention you can see the tribal instinct of self-preservation quite logically underrunning all sorts of queer modern developments. I, LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 31 As the tribe grows, and men do not behold the horizon from edge to unbroken edge, their desire to know all about the next man weakens a little—but not much. Outside the cities are still the long distances, the "vast, unoccupied areas" of the advertisements; and the men who come and go yearn to keep touch with and report themselves as of old to their lodges. A man stepping out of the dark into the circle of the fires naturally, if he be a true man, holds up his hands and says: "I, So-and-So, am here." You can watch the ritual in full swing at any hotel when the reporter (pro Tribal Herald) runs his eyes down the list of arrivals, and before he can turn from the register is met by the newcomer, who, without special desire for notoriety, explains his business and intentions. Observe, it is always at evening that the reporter concerns himself with strangers. By day he follows the activities of his own city and the doings of nearby chiefs; but when it is time to close the stockade, to lager the wagons, to draw the thorn-bush back into the gap, then in all lan^s he reverts to the Tribal Herald, who is also the tribal Outer Guard. There are counties where a man is indecently pawed over by chattering heralds who bob their foul torches in his face till he is singed and smoked at once. In Canada the necessary "Stand and deliver your sentiments" goes through with the large decency that stamps all the Dominion. A stranger's words are passed on to the tribe quite accurately; no dirt is put into his mouth, and where the heralds judge that it would be better not to translate certain remarks they courteously explain why. It was always delightful to meet the reporters, for they were men interested in their land, with the keen, unselfish interest that one finds in young house-surgeons or civilians. Thanks to the war, many of them had reached out to the ends of our earth, and spoke of the sister nations as it did one good to hear. Consequently the interviews—which are as dreary for the reporter as the reported—often turned into pleasant and unpublished talks. One felt at every turn of the quick r 32 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY sentences to be dealing with made and trained players of the game—balanced men who believed in decencies not to be disregarded, confidences not to be violated, and honour not to be mocked. (This may explain what men and women have told me—that there is very little of the brutal domestic terrorism of the Press in Canada, and not much blackmailing.) They neither spat nor wriggled; they interpolated no juicy anecdotes of murder or theft among their acquaintance; and not once between either ocean did they or any other fellow subjects volunteer that their country was "law-abiding." You know the First Sign-post on the Great Main Road? "When a Woman advertises that she is virtuous, a Man that he is a gentleman, a Community that it is loyal, or a Country that it is law-abiding—go the other way!" Yet, while the men's talk was so good and new, their written word seemed to be cast in conventional, not to say old-fashioned moulds. A quarter of a century ago a subeditor, opening his mail, could identify the Melbourne "Argus," the Sydney "Morning Herald," or the Cape "Times" as far as he could see them. Even unheaded clippings from them declared their origin as a piece of hide betrays the beast that wore it. But he noticed then that Canadian journals left neither spoor nor scent—might have blown in from anywhere between thirty degrees of latitude—and had to be carefully identified by hand. To-day the spacing, the headlines, the advertising of Canadian papers, the chessboard-like look of the open page which should be a daily beautiful study in black and white, the brittle pulp-paper, the machine-set type, are all as standardized as the railway cars of the Continent. Indeed, looking through a mass of Canadian journals is like trying to find one's own sleeper in a corridor train. Newspaper offices are among the most conservative organizations in the world; but surely after twenty-five years some changes could be permitted to creep in; some original convention of expression or assembly might be developed. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 33 I drew up to this idea cautiously among a knot of fellow craftsmen. "You mean," said one straight-eyed youth, "that we are a back-number copying back numbers?" It was precisely what I did mean, so I made haste to deny it. "We know that," he said, cheerfully. "Remember we haveift the sea all round us—and the postal rates to England have only just been lowered. It will all come right." Surely it will; but meantime one hates to think of these splendid people using second-class words to express first- class emotions. And so naturally from Journalism to Democracy. Every country is entitled to her reservation, and pretenses, but the more "democratic" a land is the more make-believes must the stranger respect. Some of the Tribal Heralds were very good to me in this matter, and, as it were, nudged me when it was time to duck in the House of Rimmon. During their office hours they professed an unflinching belief in the blessed word "Democracy," which means any crowd on the move— that is to say, the helpless thing which breaks through floors and falls into cellars; overturns pleasure boats by rushing from port to starboard; stamps men into pulp because it thinks it has lost sixpence, and jams and grills in the doorways of blazing theatres. Out of office, like every one else, they relaxed. Many winked, a few were flippant, but they all agreed that the only drawback to Democracy was Demos—a jealous God of primitive tastes and despotic tendencies. I received a faithful portrait of him from a politician who had worshipped him all his life. It was practically the Epistle of Jeremy—the sixth chapter of Baruch—done into unquotable English. But Canada is not yet an ideal Democracy. For one thing, she has had to work hard among rough-edged surroundings which carry inevitable consequences. For another, the law in Canada exists and is administered, not as a surprise, a joke, a favour, a bribe, or a Wrestling Turk exhibition, but as an integral part of the national character—no more to be forgotten or talked about than trousers. If you 3 * 34 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY kill, you hang. If you steal, you go to jail. This has worked toward peace, self-respect, and I think the innate dignity of the people. On the other hand—which is where the trouble will begin—railways and steamers make it possible nowadays to bring in persons who need never lose touch of hot and cold water-taps, spread tables, and crockery till they are turned out, much surprised, into the wilderness. They clean miss the long weeks of salt-water and the slow passage across the plains which pickled and tanned the early emigrants. They arrive with soft bodies and unaired souls. I had this vividly brought home to me by a man on a train among the Selkirks. He stood on the safely railed rear platform, looked at the gigantic pine-furred shoulder round which men at their lives' risk had led every yard of the track, and chirruped: "I say, why can't all this be nationalized?" There was nothing under heaven except the snows and the steep to prevent him from dropping off the cars and hunting a mine for himself. Instead of which he went into the dining-car. That is one type. A man told me the old tale of a crowd of Russian immigrants who at a big fire in a city 'verted to the ancestral type, and blocked the streets yelling: "Down with the Czar!" That is another type. A few days later I was shown a wire stating that a community of Doukhobors—Russians agajn— had, not for the first time, undressed themselves, and were fleeing up the track to meet the Messiah before the snow fell. Police were pursuing them with warm underclothing, and trains would please take care not to run over them. So there you have three sort of steam-borne unfitness— soft, savage, and mad. There is a fourth brand, which may be either home-grown or imported, but democracies do not recognize it, of downright bad folk—grown, healthy men and women who honestly rejoice in doing evil. These four classes acting together might conceivably produce a rather pernicious democracy; alien hysteria, blood-craze, and the like reinforcing local ignorance, sloth, and arrogance. For example, I read a letter in a paper sympathizing with these LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 35 same Doukhobors. The writer knew a community of excellent people in England (you see where the rot starts!) who lived barefoot, paid no taxes, ate nuts, and were above marriage. They were a soulful folk, living pure lives. The Doukhobors were also pure and soulful, entitled in a free country to live their own lives, and not to be oppressed, etc., etc. (Imported soft, observe, playing up to Imported mad.) Meantime, disgusted police were chasing the Doukhobors into flannels that they might live to produce children fit to consort with the sons of the man who wrote that letter and the daughters of the crowd that lost their heads at the fire. "All of which," men and women answered, "we admit. But what can we do? We want people." And they showed vast and well-equipped schools, where the children of Slav immigrants are taught English and the songs of Canada. "When they grow up," people said, "you can't tell them from Canadians." It was a wonderful work. The teacher holds up pens, reels, and so forth, giving the name in English; the children repeating Chinese fashion. Presently when they have enough words they can bridge back to the knowledge they learned in their own country, so that a boy of twelve, at, say, the end of a year, will produce a well-written English account of his journey from Russia, how much his mother paid for food by the way, and where his father got his first job. He will also lay his hand on his heart, and say, "I—am —a—Canadian." This gratifies the Canadian, who naturally purrs over an emigrant owing everything 'to the land which adopted him and set him on his feet. The Lady Bountiful of an English village takes the same interest in a child she has helped on in the world. And the child repays by his gratitude and good behaviour. Personally, one cannot care much for those who have renounced their own country. They may have had good reason, but they have broken the rules of the game, and ought to be penalized instead of adding to their score. Nor is it true, as men pretend, that a few full meals and fine clothes obliterate all taint of alien instinct and reversion. A thou- 36 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY sand years cannot be as yesterday for mankind.; and one has only to glance at the races across the border to realize how in outlook, manner, expression, and morale the South and Southeast profoundly and fatally affects the North and Northwest. That was why the sight of the beady-eyed, muddy- skinned, aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads and Oriental bundles in their hands, always distressed one. "But why must you get this stuff?" I asked. "You know it is not your equal, and it knows that it is not your equal; and that is bad for you both. What is the matter with the English as immigrants?" The answers were explicit, "Because the English do not work. Because we are sick of Remittance-men and loafers sent out here. Because the English are rotten with Socialism. Because the English don't fit with our life. They kick at our way of doing things. They are always telling us how things are done in England. They carry frills ! Don't you know the story of the Englishman who lost his way and was found half-dead of thirst beside a river? When he was asked why he didn't drink, he said: 'How the deuce can I without a glass?' " • "But," I argued over three thousand miles of country, "all these are excellent reasons for bringing in the Englishman. It is true that in his own country he is taught to shirk work, because kind, silly people fall over each other to help, and debauch and amuse him. Here, General January will stiffen him up. Remittance-men are an affliction to every branch of the Family, but your manners and morals can't be so tender as to suffer from a few thousand of them among your six millions. As to the-Englishman's Socialism, he is, by nature, the most unsocial animal alive. What you call Socialism is his intellectual equivalent for Diabolo and Limerick competitions. As to his criticisms, you surely wouldn't marry a woman who agreed with you in everything, and you ought to choose your immigrants on the same lines. You admit that the Canadian is too busy to kick at anything. The Englishman is a born kicker. ("Yes, he is all that," LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 37 they said.) He kicks on principle, and that is what makes for civilization. So did your Englishman's instinct about .the glass. Every new country needs—vitally needs—one-half of one per cent, of its population trained to die of thirst rather than drink out of their hands. You are always talking of the second generation of your Smyrniotes and Bessarabians. Think what the second generation of the English are!" They thought—quite visibly—but they did not much seem to relish it. There was a queer string-halt in their talk—a conversational shy across the road—when one touched on these subjects. After a while I went to a Tribal Herald whom I could trust, and demanded of him pointblank where the trouble really lay, and who was behind it. "It is Labour," he said. "You had better leave it alone." J 3^ LETTERS TO THE FAMILY THREE things make earth unquiet, And four she can not. brook; The pious Agur counted them, And put them in a book— These Four Tremendous Curses With which mankind is curst: But, a Servant when he Reigneth, Old Agur counted first. A Handmaid that is Mistress We need not call upon; A Fool when he is full of Meat Will fall asleep anon. An Odious Woman married May bear a babe and mend— But a Servant when he Reigneth Is Confusion to the end. His feet are swift to tumult, His hands are slow to toil; His ears are deaf to judgment, His lips are loud in broil: And, if his folly opens The unnecessary hells, A Servant when he Reigneth Throws the blame on some one else. ONE cannot leave a thing alone if it is thrust under the nose at every turn. I had not quitted the Quebec steamer three minutes when I was asked point- blank : "What do you think of the question of Asiatic Exclusion which is Agitating our Community?" The Second Sign-post on the Great Main Road says: " If a Community is agitated by a Question—inquire politely after the health of the Agitator." This I did, without success ; and had to temporize all across the Continent till I could find some one to. help me to acceptable answers. The Question appears to be confined to British Columbia. There, after a while, the men who had their own reasons 1 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 39 for not wishing to talk referred me to others who explained, and on the acutest understanding that no names were to be published (it is sweet to see engineers afraid of being hoist by their own petards) one got more or less at something like facts. The Chinaman has always been in the habit of coming to British Columbia, where he makes, as he does elsewhere, the finest servant in the world. No one, I was assured on all hands, objects to the biddable Chinaman. He takes work which no white man in a new country will handle, and when kicked by the mean white will not grossly retaliate. He has always paid for the privilege of making his fortune on this wonderful coast, but with singular forethought and statesmanship, the popular Will, some few years ago, decided to double the head tax on his entry. Strange as it may appear, the Chinaman now charges double for his services, and is scarce at that. This is said to be one of the reasons why overworked white women die or go off their heads; and why in new cities you can see blocks of flats being built to minimize the inconveniences of housekeeping without help. The birth-rate will fall later in exact proportion to those flats. Since the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese have taken to coming over to British Columbia. They also do work which no white man will; such as hauling wet logs for lumber mills out of cold water at from eight to ten shillings a day. They supply the service in hotels and dining-rooms and keep small shops. The trouble with them is that they are just a little too good, and when attacked defend themselves with asperity, A fair sprinkling of Punjabis—ex-soldiers, Sikhs, Muzbis, and Jats—are coming in on the boats. The plague at home seems to have made them restless, but I could not gather why so many of them come from Shahpur, Phillour, and Jullundur way. These men do not, of course, offer for house-service, but work in the lumber mills, and with the least little care and attention could be made most valuable. Some one ought to tell them not to bring their old men J 1 4° LETTERS TO THE FAMILY with them, and better arrangements should be made for their remitting money home to their villages. They are not understood, of course; but they are not hated. The objection is all against the Japanese. So far— except that they are said to have captured the local fishing trade at Vancouver, precisely as the Malays control the Cape Town fish business—they have not yet competed with the whites; but I was earnestly assured by many men that there was danger of their lowering the standard of life and wages. The demand, therefore, in certain quarters is that they go —absolutely and unconditionally. You many have noticed that Democracies are strong on the imperative mood. An attempt was. made to shift them shortly before I came to Vancouver, but it was not very successful, because the Japanese barricaded their quarters and flocked out, a broken bottle held by the neck in either hand, which they jabbed in the faces of the demonstrators. It is, perhaps, easier to haze and hammer bewildered Hindus and Tamils, as is being done across the Border, than to stampede the men of the Yalu and Liaoyang. But when one began to ask questions one got lost in a maze of hints, reservations, and orations, mostly delivered with constraint, as though the talkers were saying a piece learned by heart. Here are some samples :— A man penned me in a corner with a single heavily capitalized sentence. "There is a General Sentiment among Our People that the Japanese Must Go," said he. "Very good," said I. "How d'you propose to set about it?" "That is nothing to us. There is a General Sentiment," etc. "Quite so. Sentiment is a beautiful thing, but what are you going to do?" He did not condescend to particulars, but kept repeating the sentiment, which, as I promised, I record. Another man was a little more explicit. "We desire," he said, "to keep the Chinaman. But the Japanese must go." LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 41 "Then who takes their place? Isn't this rather a new country to pitch people out of?" "We must develop our Resources slowly, sir—with an Eye to the Interests of our Children. We must preserve the Continent for Races which will assimilate with Ours. We must not be swamped by Aliens." "Then bring in your own races and bring 'em in quick," I ventured. This is the one remark one must not make in certain quarters of the West; and I lost caste heavily while he explained (exactly as the Dutch did at the Cape years ago) how British Columbia was by no means so rich as she appeared; that she was throttled by capitalists and monopolists of all kinds; that white labour had to be laid off and fed and warmed during the winter; that living expenses were enormously high; that they were at the end of a period of prosperity, and were now entering on lean years; and that whatever steps were necessary for bringing in more white people should be taken with extreme caution. Then he added that the railway rates to British Columbia were so high that emigrants were debarred from coming on there. "But haven't the rates been reduced?" I asked. "Yes—yes, I believe they have, but immigrants are so much in demand that they are snapped up before they have got so far West. You must remember, too, that skilled labour is not like agricultural labour. It is dependent on so many considerations. And the Japanese must go." "So people have told me. But I heard stories of dairies and fruit farms in British Columbia being thrown up because there was no labour to milk or pick the fruit. Is that true, d'you think?" "Well, you can't expect a man with all the chances that our country offers him to milk cows in a pasture. A Chinaman can do that. We want races that will assimilate with ours," etc., etc. "But didn't the Salvation Army offer to bring in three or four thousand English some short time ago? What came of that idea?" J m 42 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY "It—er—fell through." "Why?" "For political reasons, I believe. We do not want People who will lower the Standard of Living. That is why the Japanese must go." "Then why keep the Chinese?" "We can get on with the Chinese. We can't get on without the Chinese. But we must have Emigration of a Type that will assimilate with Our People. I hope I have made myself clear?" I hoped that he had, too. Now hear a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper. "We have to pay for this precious state of things with our health and our children's. Do you know the saying that the Frontier is hard on women and cattle? This isn't the frontier, but in some respects it's worse, because we have all the luxuries and appearances—the pretty glass and silver to put on the table. We have to dust, polish, and arrange 'em after we've done our housework. I don't suppose that means anything, to you, but—try it for a month ! We have no help. A Chinaman costs fifty or sixty dollars a month now. Our husbands can't always afford that. How old would you take me for? I'm not thirty. Well thank God, I stopped my sister coming out West. Oh, yes, it's a fine country—for men." "Can't you import servants from England?" "I can't pay a girl's passage in order to have her married in three months. Besides, she wouldn't work. They won't when they see Chinamen working." "Do you object to the Japanese, too?" "Of course not. No one does. It's only politics. The wives of the men who earn six and seven dollars a day— skilled labour they call it—have Chinese and Jap servants. We can't afford it. We have to think of saving for the future, but those other people live up to every cent they earn. They know they're all right. They're Labour. They'll be looked after, whatever happens. You can see how the State looks after me." p LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 43 A little later I had occasion to go through a great and beautiful city between six and seven of a crisp morning. Milk and fish, vegetables, etc., were being delivered to the silent houses by Chinese and Japanese. Not a single white man was visible on that chilly job. Later still a man came to see me, without too publicly giving his name. He was in a small way of business, and told me (others had said much the same thing) that if I gave him away his business would suffer. He talked for half an hour on end. "Am I to understand, then," I said, "that what you call Labor absolutely dominates this part of the world ? " He nodded. "That it is difficult to get skilled labour into here?" "Difficult? My God, if I want to get an extra hand for my business—I pay Union wages, of course—I have to arrange to get him here secretly. I have to go out arid meet him, accidental-like, down the line, and if the Unions find out that he is coming, they, like as not, order him back East, or turn him down across the Border." "Even if he has his Union ticket? Why?" "They'll tell him that labour conditions are not good here. He knows what that means. He'll turn back quick enough. I'm in a small way of business, and I can't afford to take any chances fighting the Unions." "What would happen if you did?" "D'you know what's happening across the Border? Men get blown up there—with dynamite." "But this isn't across the Border?" "It's a damn-sight too near to be pleasant. And witnesses get blown up, too. You see, the Labour situation ain't run from our side the line. It's worked from down under. You may have noticed men were rather careful when they talked about it?" "Yes, I noticed all that." "Well, it ain't a pleasant state of affairs. I don't say that the Unions here would do anything to you—and please understand I'm all for the rights of Labour myself. Labour J 44 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY has no better friend than me—I've been a working man, though I've got a business of my own now. Don't run away with any idea that I'm against Labour—will you?" "Not in the least. I can see that. You merely find that Labour's a little bit—er—inconsiderate, sometimes?" "Look what happens across the Border! I suppose they've told you that little fuss with the Japanese in Vancouver was worked from down under, haven't they? I don't think our own people 'ud have done it by themselves." "I've heard that several times. Is it quite sporting, do you think, to lay the blame on another.country?" "You don't live here. But as I was saying—if we get rid of the Japs to-day, we'll be told to get rid of someone else to-morrow. There's no limit, sir, to what Labour wants. None!" "I thought they only want a fair day's wage for a fair day's work ?" "That may do in the Old Country, but here they mean to boss the country. They do." "And how does the country like it?" "We're about sick of it. It don't matter much in flush times—employers'll do most anything sooner than stop work—but when we come to a pinch, you'll hear something. We're a rich land—in spite of everything they make out— but we're held up at every turn by Labour. Why, there's businesses on businesses which friends of mine—in a small way like myself—want to start. Businesses in every direction—if-they was only allowed to start in. But they ain't." "That's a pity. Now, what do you think about the Japanese question?" "I don't think. I know. Both political parties are playing up to the Labour vote—if you understand what that means." I tried to understand. "And neither side'll tell the truth—that if the Asiatic goes, this side of the Continent'll drop out of sight, unless we get free white immigration. And any party that proposed white immigration on a large scale 'ud be snowed under in LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 45 next election. I'm telling you what politicians think. Myself, I believe if a man stood up to Labour—not that I've any feeling against Labour—and just talked sense, a lot of people would follow him—quietly, of course. 1 believe he could even get white immigration after a while. He'd lose the first election, of course, but in the long run. . . . We're about sick of Labour. I wanted you to know the truth." "Thank you. And you don't think any attempt to bring in white immigration would succeed?" "Not if it didn't suit Labour. You can try it if you like, and see what happens." On that hint I made an experiment in another vcity. There were three men of position, and importance, and affluence, each keenly interested in the development of their land, each asserting that what the land needed was white immigrants. And we four talked for two hours on the matter—up and down and in circles. The one point on which those three men were unanimous was, that whatever steps were taken to bring people into British Columbia from England, by private recruiting or otherwise, should be taken secretly. Otherwise the business of the people concerned in the scheme would suffer. At which point I dropped the Great Question of Asiatic Exclusion which is Agitating all our Community; and I leave it to you, especially in Australia and the Cape, to draw your own conclusions. Externally, British Columbia appears to be the richest and the loveliest section of the Continent. Over and above her own resources she has a fair chance to secure an immense Asiatic trade, which she urgently desires. Her land, in many places over large areas, is peculiarly fitted for the small farmer and fruit-grower, who can send his truck to the cities. On every hand I heard a demand for labour of all kinds. At the same time, in no other part of the Continent did I meet so many men who insistently decried the value and possibilities of their country, or who dwelt more fluently on the hardships and privations to be endured by m 46 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY the white immigrant. I believe that one or two gentlemen have gone to England to explain the drawbacks viva voce. It is possible that they incur a great responsibility in the present, and even a terrible one for the future. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 47 VI I SEE the grass shake in the sun for leagues on either hand, I see a river loop and run about a treeless land— An empty plain, a steely pond, a distance diamond-clear, And low blue naked hills beyond. And what is that to fear? Go softly by that river-side or, -when you would depart, You'll find its every winding tied and knotted round your heart, Be wary as the seasons pass, or you may ne'er outrun The wind that sets that yellowed grass ashiver 'neath the Sun. "I hear the summer storm outblown—the drip of the grateful wheat. I hear the hard trail telephone a far-off horse's feet. I-hear the horns of autumn blow to the wild-fowl overhead; And I hear the hush before the snow. And what is that to dread?" Take heed what spell the lightning weaves—what charm the echoes shape— Or, bound among a million sheaves, your soul may not escape. Bar home the door of summer nights lest those high planets drown The memory of near delights in all the longed-for town. "What need have I to longer fear? Now, friendly, I behold My faithful seasons robe the year m silver and in gold. Now I possess and am possessed of the land where I would be, And the curve of half Earth's generous breast shall soothe and ravish me !" AFTER Politics, let us return to the Prairie which is the High Veldt, plus Hope, Activity, and Reward. Winnipeg is the door to it—a great city in a great plain, comparing herself, innocently enough, to other cities of her acquaintance, but quite unlike any other city. When one meets, in her own house, a woman not seen since girlhood she is all a stranger till some remembered tone or gesture links up to the past, and one cries: "It is you after all." But, indeed, the child has gone; the woman with /r- 48 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY her influences has taken her place. I tried vainly to recover the gawky, graceless city I had known, so unformed and so insistent on her shy self. I even ventured to remind a man of it. "I remember," he said, smiling, "but we were young then. This thing," indicating an immense perspective of asphalted avenue that dipped under thirty railway tracks, "only came up in the last ten years—practically the last five. We've had to enlarge all those warehouses yonder by adding two or three stories to 'em, and we've hardly begun to go ahead yet. We're just beginning." Warehouses, railway-sidings, and such are only counters in the White Man's Game, which can be swept up and re- dealt as the play varies. It was the spirit in the thin dancing air—the new spirit of the new city—which rejoiced me. Winnipeg has Things in abundance, but has learned to put them beneath her feet, not on top of her mind, and so is older than many cities. None the less the Things had to be shown —for what shopping is to the woman showing off his town is to the right-minded man. First came the suburbs—miles on miles of the dainty, clean-outlined, wooden-built houses, where one can be so happy and so warm, each unjealously divided from its neighbor by the lightest of boundaries. One could date them by their architecture, year after year, back to the Early Nineties, which is when civilization began; could g-uess within a few score dollars at their cost and the incomes of their owners, and could ask questions about the new domestic appliances of to-day. "Asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks came up a few years ago," said our host as we trotted over miles of it. "We found it the only way to fight the prairie mud. Look!" Where the daring road ended, there lay unsubdued, level with the pale asphalt, the tenacious prairie, over which civilization fought her hub-deep way to the West. And with asphalt and concrete they fight the prairie back every building season. Next came the show-houses, built by rich men with an eye to the honor and glory of their city, which is the first obligation of wealth in a new land. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 49 We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards and avenues, all sluiced down with an air that forbade any thought of fatigue, and talked of city government and municipal taxation, till, in a certain silence, we were shown a suburb of uncared for houses, shops, and banks, whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the shoulders of loafers. Dirt and tin cans lay about the street. Yet it was not the squalor of poverty so much as the lack of instinct to keep clean. One race prefers to inhabit there. Next a glimpse of a cold, white cathedral, red-brick schools almost as big (thank goodness!) as some convents; hospitals, institutions, a mile or so of shops, and then a most familiar-feeling lunch at a Club which would have amazed my Englishman at Montreal, where men, not yet old, talked of Fort Garry as they remembered it, and tales of the founding of the city, of early administrative shifts and accidents, mingled with the younger men's prophecies and frivolities. There are *a few places still left where men can handle big things with a light touch, and take more for granted in five minutes than an Englishman at home could puzzle out in a year. But one would not meet many English at a lunch in a London club who took the contract for building London Wall or helped bully King John into signing Magna Charta. I had two views of the city—one on a gray day from the roof of a monster building, whence it seemed to overflow and fill with noises the whole vast cup of the horizon; and still, all round its edge, jets of steam and the impatient cries of machinery showed it was eating out into the Prairie like a smothered fire. The other picture was a silhouette of the city's flank, mysterious as a line of unexplored cliffs, under a sky crimson- barred from the zenith to the ground, where it lay, pale emerald behind the uneven ramparts. As our train halted in the last of the dusk, and the rails glowed dull red, I caught the deep surge of it, and seven miles across the purple levels saw the low, restless aurora of its lights. It is rather an awesome thing to listen to a vanguard of civilization talking to 4 5° LETTERS TO THE FAMILY itself in the night in the same tone as a thousand-year-old city. All the country hereabouts fs riddled with railways for business and pleasure undreamed of fifteen years ago, and it was a long time before we reached the clear prairie of air and space and open land. The air is different from any air that ever blew; the space is ampler than most spaces, because it runs back to the unhampered Pole, and the open land keeps th3 secret of its magic as closely as the sea or the desert. People here do not stumble against each other around corners, but see largely and tranquilly from a long way off what they desire, or wish to avoid, and they shape* their path accordingly across the waves, and troughs, and tongues, and dips and fans of the land. When mere space and the stoop of the high sky begin to overwhelm, earth provides little ponds and lakes, lying in soft-flanked hollows, where people can step down out of the floods of air, and delight themselves with small and known distances. Most of the women I saw about the houses were down in the hollows, and most of the men were on the crests and the flats. Once, while we halted a woman drove straight down at us from the sky-line, along a golden path between black ploughed lands. When the horse, who managed affairs, stopped at the cars, she nodded mysteriously, and showed us a very small baby in the hollow of her arm. Doubtless she was some exiled Queen flying North to found a dynasty and establish a country. The Prairie makes everything wonderful. They were threshing the wheat on both sides of the track as far as the eye could see. The smoke of the machines went up in orderly perspective, alongside the mounds of chaff—thus : a machine, a house, a mound of chaff, a stretch of wheat in stooks—and then repeat the pattern over the next few degrees of longtitude. We ran through strings of nearly touching little towns, where I remembered an occasional shack; and through big towns once represented by a name-board, a siding, and two troopers of the North- LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 51 West Police. In those days men proved that Wheat would not grow north of some fool's line, or other, or, if it did, that no one would grow it. And now the Wheat was marching with us as far as the eye could reach; the railways were out, two, three hundred miles north, peopling a new wheat country; and north of that again the Grand Trunk was lay- _ ing down a suburban extension of a few thousand miles across the Continent, with branches perhaps to Dawson City, certainly to Hudson Bay. "Come north and look!" cried the Afrites of the Railway. "You're only on the fringe of it here." I preferred to keep the old road, and to gape at miracles accomplished since my day. The old, false-fronted, hollow-stomached Western hotels were gone; their places filled by five-storey brick or stone ones, with Post Offices to match. Occasionally some overlooked fragment of the past still cleaved to a town, and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often one had to get a mile away and look back on a place—as one holds a palimpsest up against the light—to identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings. Each town supplied the big farming country behind it, and each town school carried the Union Jack on a flagstaff in its playground. So far as one could understand, the scholars are taught neither to hate, nor despise, nor beg from, their own country. I whispered to a man that I was a little tired of a three days' tyranny of Wheat, besides being shocked at farmers who used clean bright straw for fuel, and made bonfires of their chaff-hills. "You're 'way behind the times," said he. "There's fruit and dairying and any quantity of mixed farming going forward all around—let alone irrigation further West. Wheat's not our only king by a long sight. Wait till you strike such and such a place." It was there I met a prophet and a preacher in the shape of a Commissioner of the Local Board of Trade (all towns have them), who firmly showed me the vegetables which his district produced. They were vegetables too—all neatly staged in a little kiosk near the station. II 52 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY I think the pious Thomas Tusser would have loved that man. "Providence," said he, shedding pamphlets at every gesture, "did not intend everlasting Wheat in this section. No, sir! Our business is to keep ahead of Providence—to meet her with mixed farming. Are you interested in mixed farming ? Psha ! Too bad you missed our fruit and vegetable show. It draws people together, mixed farming does. I don't say Wheat is narrowing to the outlook, but I claim there's more sociability and money in mixed farming. We've been hypnotised by Wheat and Cattle. Now—the cars won't start yet awhile—I'll just tell you my ideas." For fifteen glorious minutes he gave me condensed essence of mixed farming, with excursions into sugar beet (did you know they are making sugar in Alberta?), and he talked of farmyard muck, our dark mother of all things, with proper devotion. "What we want now," he cried in farewell, "is men— more men. Yes, and women." They need women sorely for domestic help, to meet the mad rush of work at harvest time—maids who will help in house, dairy and chicken-run till they are married. A steady tide sets that way already; one contented settler recruiting others from England; but if a tenth of that energy wasted on "social reform" could be diverted to decently thought out and supervised emigration work' ("Labor" does not yet object to people working on the land) we might do something worth talking about. The races which work and do not form Committees are going into the country at least as fast as ours. It makes one jealous and afraid to watch aliens taking, and taking honestly, so much of this treasure of good fortune and sane living. There was a town down the road which I had first heard discussed nigh twenty years ago by a broken-down prospector in a box-car. "Young feller," said he, after he had made a professional prophecy, "you'll hear of that town if you live. She's born lucky." LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 53 1 saw the town later—it was a siding by a trestle bridge where Indians sold beadwork—and as years passed I gathered that the old tramp's prophecy had come true, and that Luck of some kind had struck the little town by the big river. So, this trip, I stopped to make sure. It was a beautiful town of six thousand people, and a railway junction, beside a high- girdered iron bridge; there was a public garden with trees at the station. A company of joyous men and women, whom that air and that light, and their own goodwill, made our brothers and sisters, came along in motors, and gave us such^ a day as never was. "What about the Luck?" I asked. "Heavens!" said one. "Haven't you heard about our natural gas—the greatest natural gas in the world ? Oh, come and see !" I was whirled off to a roundhouse full of engines and machinery-shops, worked by natural gas which comes out of the earth, smelling slightly of fried onions, at a pressure of six hundred pounds, and by valves and taps is reduced to four pounds. There was Luck enough to make a metropolis. Imagine a city's heating and light—to say nothing of power— laid on at no greater expense than that of piping! "Are there any limits to the possibilities of it?" I demanded. "Who knows ? We're only at the beginning. We'll show you a brick-making plant, out on the prairie, run by gas. But just now we want to show you one of our pet farms." Away swooped the motors, like swallows, over roads any width you please, and up on to what looked like the High Veldt itself. A Major of the Mounted Police, who had done a year at the War, told us how the ostrich-farm fencing and the little meercats sitting up and racing about South Africa had made him homesick for the sight of the gophers by the ^wayside, and the endless panels of wire fencing along which we rushed. (The Prairie has nothing to learn from the Veldt about fencing, or tricky gates). 54 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY "After all," said the Major, "there's no country to touch this. I've had thirty years of it—from one end to the other." Then they pointed out all the quarters of the horizon- say, fifty miles wherever you turned—and gave them names. The show farmer had taken his folk to church, but we friendly slipped through his gates and reached the silent, spick and span house, with its trim barn, and a vast mound of copper-colored wheat, piled in the sun between two mounds #of golden chaff. Everyone thumbed a sample of it and passed judgment—it must have been worth a few hundred golden sovereigns as it lay, out on the veldt—and we sat around, on the farm machinery, and, in the hush that a shut-up house always imposes, we seemed to hear the lavish earth getting ready for new harvests. There "was no true wind, but a push, as it were, of the whole crystal atmosphere. "Now for the brickfield !" they cried. It was many miles off. The road led by a never-to-be-forgotten drop, to a river broad as the Orange at Norval's Pont, rustling between mud hills. An old Scotchman, in the very likeness of Charon, with big hip boots, controlled a pontoon, which sagged back and forth by current on a wire rope. The reckless motors bumped on to this ferry through a foot of water, and Charon, who never relaxed, bore us statelily across the dark, broad river to the further bank, where we all turned to look at the lucky little town, and discuss its possibilities. "I think you can see it best from here," said one. "No, from here," said another, and their voices softened on the very name of it. Then for an hour we raced over true prairie, great yellow- green plains crossed by old buffalo trails, which do not improve motor springs, till a single chimney broke the horizon like a mast at sea; and thereby were more light-hearted men and women, a shed and a tent or two for workmen, the ribs and frames of the brick-making mechanism, a fifteen foot square shaft sunk, sixty foot down to the clay, and, stark and black, the pipe of a natural-gas well. The rest was >-> LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 55 Piairie—the mere curve of the earth—with little grey birds calling. I thought it could not have been simpler, more audacious or more impressive, till I saw some women in pretty frocks go up and peer at the hissing gas-valves. "We fancied that it might amuse you," said all those merry people, and between laughter and digressions they talked over projects for building, first their own, and next other cities, in brick of all sorts; giving figures of output and expenses of plant that made one gasp. To the eye the affair was no more than a novel or delicious picnic. What it actually meant was a committee to change the material of civilization for a hundred miles around. I felt as though I were assisting at the planning of Nineveh; and whatever of good comes to the little town that was born lucky I shall always claim a share. But there is no space to tell how we fed, with a prairie appetite, in the men's quarters, on a meal prepared by an artist; how we raced home at speeds no child could ever hear of, and no grown-up should attempt; how the motors squattered at the ford, and took pot-shots at the pontoon till even Charon smiled; how great horses hauled the motors up the gravelly bank into the town; how there we met people in their Sunday best, walking and driving, and pulled ourselves together, and looked virtuous; and how the merry company suddenly and quietly evanished because they thought that their guests might be tired. I can give you no notion of the pure, irresponsible frolic of it; of the almost affectionate kindness, the gay and inventive hospitality that so delicately controlled the whole affair; any more than I can describe a certain quiet half-hour in the dusk just before we left, when the company gathered to say g"Ood-bye, while young couples walked in the street, and the glare of the never-extinguished natural-gas lamps colored the leaves of the trees a stage green. It was a woman, speaking out of the shadow, who said, what we all felt: "You see, we just love our town." "So do we," I said, and it slid behind us. jJf-J 56 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY VII WHEN the Great Ark, in Vigo Bay Rode stately through the half-manned fleet, From every ship about her way She heard the mariners entreat— "Before we take the seas again Let down your boats and send us men! "We have no lack of victual here With work—God knows !—enough for all, To hand and reef and watch and steer, Because our present strength is small; While your three decks are crowded so Your crews can scarcely stand or go ! "In war, your numbers only raise Confusion and divided will; In storm, the mindless deep obeys Not multitudes but single skill; In calm, your numbers, closely pressed, Must breed a mutiny or pest. "We, even on unchallenged seas, Dare not adventure where we would; But forfeit brave advantages For lack of men to make 'em good; Whereby, to England's double cost, Honor and profit both are lost." THE Prairie proper ends at Calgary, among the cattle ranches, mills, breweries, and three million acre irrigation works. The river that floats timber to the town from the mountains does not slide nor rustle like Prairie rivers, but brawls across, bars of blue pebbles, and a greenish tinge in its water hints of the snows. What I saw of Calgary was crowded into one lively half- hour (motors were invented to run about new cities). What I heard I picked up, oddly enough, weeks later, from a young Dane in the North Sea. He was qualmish, but his Saga of triumph upheld him. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 57 "Three year ago I come to Canada by steerage—third class. And I have the language to learn. Look at me! I have now my own dairy business in Calgary, and—look at me!—my own half section, that is, three hundred and twenty acres. All my land which is mine. And now I come home, first class, for Christmas here in Denmark, and I shall take out back with me, some friends of mine which are farmers, to farm on those irrigated lands near by Calgary. Oh, I tell you there is nothing wrong with Canada for a man which works." "And will your friends go ?" I inquired. "You bet they will. It is all arranged already. I bet . they get ready to go now already; and in three years they will come back for Christmas here in Denmark, first class like me." "Then you think Calgary is going ahead ?" "You bet! We are only at the beginning of things. Look at me! Chickens? I raise chickens also in Calgary," &c, &c. After all this pageant of unrelieved material prosperity, it was a rest to get to the stillness of the big foothills, though they, too, had been inspanned for the work of civilisation. The timber off their sides was ducking and pitch- poling down their swift streams, to be sawn into house stuff for all the world. The woodwork of a purely English villa may come from as many Imperial sources as its owner's income. The train crept, whistling to keep its heart up, through the winding gateways of the hills, till it presented itself, very humbly, before the true mountains, the not so Little Brothers to the Himalayas. Mountains of the pine-cloaked, snow-capped breed are unchristian things. Men mine into the flanks of some of them, and trust to modern science to pull them through. Not long ago, a mountain kneeled on a little mining village as an angry \ elephant kneels; but it did not get up again, and the half of that camp was no more seen on earth. The other half still stands—uninhabited. The "heathen in his blindness" w 5^ LETTERS TO THE FAMILY would have made arrangements with the Genius of the Place before he ever drove a pick there. As a learned scholar of a little known university once observed to an engineer officer on the Himalaya-Tibet Road—"You white men gain nothing by not noticing what you cannot see. You fall off the road, or the road falls on you, and you die, and you think it all an accident. How much wiser it was when we were allowed to sacrifice a man officially, sir, before making bridges or other public works. Then the local gods were officially recognised, sir, and did not give any more trouble, and the local workmen, sir, were much pleased with these precautions." There are many local gods on the road through the Rockies: old bold mountains that have parted with every shred of verdure and stand wrapped in sheets of wrinkled silver rock, over which the sight travels slowly as in delirium ; mad, horned mountains, wreathed with dancing mists; low-browed and bent-shouldered faquirs of the wayside, sitting in meditation beneath a burden of glacier-ice that thickens every year; and mountains of fair aspect on one side, but on the other seamed with hollow sunless clefts, where last year's snow is blackened with this year's dirt and smoke of forest-fires. The drip from it seeps away through slopes of unstable gravel and dirt, till, at the appointed season, the whole half-mile of undermined talus slips and roars into the horrified valley. The railway winds in and out among them with little inexplicable deviations and side-twists, much as a buck walks through a forest-glade, sidling and crossing uneasily in what appears to be a plain path. Only when the track has rounded another shoulder or two, a backward and upward glance at some menacing slope, shows why the train did not take the easier-looking road on the other side of the gorge. From time to time the mountains lean apart, and nurse between them some golden valley of slow streams, fat pastures, and park-like uplands, with a little town and cow bells tinkling among berry bushes; and children who have LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 59 never seen the sun rise or set, shouting at the trains; and real gardens round the houses. At Calgary it was a frost, and the dahlias were dead. A day later nasturtiums bloomed untouched beside the station platforms, and the air was heavy and liquid with the breath of the Pacific. One felt the spirit of the land change with the changing outline of the hills till on the lower levels by the Fraser, it seemed that even the Sussex Downs must be nearer at heart to the Prairie, than British Columbia. The Prairie people notice the difference, and the Hill people, unwisely, I think, insist on it. Perhaps the magic may lie in the scent of strange evergreens and mosses not known outside the ranges : or it may strike from wall to wall of timeless rifts and gorges, but it seemed to me to draw out of the great sea that washes further Asia—the Asia of allied mountains, mines, and forests. We rested one day high up in the Rockies, to visit a lake carved out of pure jade, whose property is to colour every reflection on its bosom to its own tint. A belt of brown dead timber on a gravel scar, showed, upside down, like sombre cypresses rising from green turf and the reflected snows were pale green. In summer many tourists go there, but we saw nothing except the wonder-working lake lying mute in its circle of forest, where red and orange lichens grew among grey and blue moss, and we heard nothing except the noise of its outfall hurrying through a jam of bone-white logs. The thing might have belonged to Tibet or some unexplored valley behind Kinchinjunga. It had no concern with the West. As we drove along the narrow hill road a piebald pack- pony with a china-blue eye came round a bend, followed by two women, black-haired, bareheaded, wearing beadwork squaw-jackets, and riding straddle. A string of pack- ponies trotted through the pines behind them. "Indians on the move?" said I. "How characteristic!" As the women jolted by, one of them very slightly turned her eyes, and they were, past any doubt, the com- JJ I 60 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY prehending equal eyes of the civilized white woman which moved in that berry-brown face. "Yes," said our driver, when the cavalcade had navigated the next curve, "that'll be Mrs. So-and-So and Miss So-and-So. They mostly camp hereabout for three months every year. I reckon they're coming in to the railroad before the snow falls." "And whereabout do they go?" I asked. "Oh, all about anywheres. If you mean where they come from just now—that's the trail yonder." He pointed to a hair-crack across the face of a mountain, and I took his word for it that it was a safe pony: trail. The same evening, at an hotel of all the luxuries, a slight woman in a very pretty evening frock was turning over photographs, and the eyes beneath the strictly-arranged hair were the eyes of the woman in the beadwork jacket who had quirted the piebald pack-pony past our buggy. Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures! But do you know any other country where two women could go out for a three months' trek and shoot in perfect comfort and safety ? These mountains are only ten days from London, and people more and more use them for pleasure-grounds. Other and most unthought-of persons buy little fruit-farms in British Columbia as an excuse for a yearly visit to the beautiful land, and they tempt yet more people from England. This is apart from the regular tide of emigration, and serves to make the land known. If you asked a State- owned railway to gamble on the chance of drawing tourists, the Commissioner of Railways would prove to you that the experiment could never succeed, and that it was wrong to risk the taxpayers' money in erecting first-class hotels. Yet South Africa could, even now, be made a tourists' place —if only the railroads and steamship lines had faith. On thinking things over I suspect I was not intended to appreciate the merits of British Columbia too highly. Maybe I misjudged; maybe she was purposely misrepresented; but I seemed to hear more about "problems" and LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 61 "crises" and "situations" in her borders than anywhere else. So far as eye or ear could gather, the one urgent problem was to find enough men and women to do the work in hand. Lumber, coal, minerals, fisheries, fit soil for fruit, dairy, and poultry farms are all there in a superb climate. The natural beauty of earth and sky match these lavish gifts; to which are added thousands of miles of safe and sheltered waterways for coastal trade; deep harbours that need no dredge; the ground-works of immense and ice-free i ports—all the title-deeds to half the trade of Asia. For the peoples' pleasure and good disport salmon, trout, quail, and pheasant play in front of and through the suburbs of her capitals. A little axe-work and road metalling gives a city one of the loveliest water-girt parks that we have outside the tropics. Another town is presented with a hundred islands, knolls, wooded coves, stretches of beach, and dingles, laid down as expressly for camp-life, picnics, and boating parties, beneath skies never too hot and rarely too cold. If they care to lift up their eyes from their almost sub-tropical gardens they can behold snowy peaks across blue bays, which must be good for the soul. Though they face a sea out of which any portent may arise, they are not forced to protect or even to police its waters. They are as ignorant of drouth, murrain, pestilence, locusts, and blight, as they are of the true meaning of want and fear. Such a land is good for an energetic man. It is also not so bad for the loafer. I was, as I have told you, instructed on its drawbacks. I was to understand that there was no certainty in any employment; and that a man who earned immense wages for six months of the year would have to be kept by the community if he fell out of work for the other six. I was not to be deceived by golden pictures set before me by interested parties (that is to say, by almost everyone I met), and I was to give due weight to the difficulties and discouragements that beset the intending immigrant. Were I an intending immigrant I would risk a good deal of discomfort to get on to the land in British Columbia; 0T 62 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY and were I rich, with no attachments outside England, I would swiftly buy me a farm or a house in that country for the mere joy of it. I forgot those doleful and unhumourous conspirators among people who fervently believed in the place; but afterwards the memory left a bad taste in my mouth. Cities, like women, cannot be too careful what sort of men they allow to talk about them. Time had changed Vancouver literally out of all knowledge. From the station to the suburbs, and back to the wharves, every step was strange, and where I remembered open spaces and still untouched timber, the tramcars were fleeting people out to a lacrosse game. Vancouver is an aged city, for only a few days previous to my arrival the Vancouver Baby—i.e., the first child born in Vancouver— had been married. A steamer—once familiar in Table Bay—had landed a few hundred Sikhs and Punjabi jats—to each man his bundle —and the little groups walked uneasy alone, keeping, for many of them had been soldiers, to the military step. Yes, they said they had come to this country to get work. News had reached their villages that work at great wages was to be had in this country. Their brethren who had gone before had sent them the news. Yes, and sometimes the money for the passage out. The money would be paid back from the so-great wages to come. With interest? Assuredly with interest. Did men lend money for nothing in any country? They were waiting for their brethren to come and show them where to eat, and later, how to work. Meanwhile this was a new country. How could they say anything about it? No, it was not like Gurgaon or Shahpur or Jullundur. The Sickness (plague) had come to all these places. It had come into the Punjab by every road, and many—many—many had died. The crops, too, had failed in some districts. Hearing the news about these so-great wages they had taken ship for the belly's sake—for the .money's sake—for the children's sake. "Would they go back again?" M LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 63 They grinned as they nudged each other. The Sahib had not quite understood. They had come over for the sake of the money—the rupees, no, the dollars. The Punjab was their home where their villages lay, where their people were waiting. Without doubt—without doubt—they would go back. Then came the brethren already working in the mills —cosmopolitans dressed in ready-made clothes, and smoking cigarettes. "This way, O you people," they cried. The bundles were reshouldered and the turbaned knots melted away. The last words I caught were true Sikh talk : "But what about the money, O my brother ?" Some Punjabis have found out that money can be too dearly bought. There was a Sikh in a sawmill, had been driver in a mountain battery at home. Himself he was from Amrksar. (Oh, pleasant as cold water in a thirsty land is the sound of a familiar name in a fair country !) "But you had your pension. Why did you come here?" "Heaven-born, because my sense was little. And there was also the Sickness at Amritsar." (The historian a hundred years hence will be able to write a book on economic changes brought about by pestilence. There is a very interesting study somewhere of the social and commercial effects of the Black Death in England.) In a wharf, waiting for a steamer, some thirty Sikhs, many of them wearing their old uniforms (which should not be allowed) were talking at the tops of their voices, so that the shed rang like an Indian railway station. A suggestion that if they spoke lower life would be easier was instantly adopted. Then a senior officer with a British India medal asked hopefully: "Has the Sahib any orders where we are to go?" Alas he had none—nothing but goodwill and greetings for the sons of the Khalsa, and they tramped off in fours. It is said that when the little riot broke out in Vancouver these "heathen" were invited by other Asiatics to tr 64 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY join in defending themselves against the white man. They refused on the ground that they were subjects of the King. I wonder what tales they sent back to their villages, and where, and how fully, every detail of the affair was talked over. White men forget that no part of the Empire can live or die to itself. Here is a rather comic illustration of this on the material side. The wonderful waters between Vancouver and Victoria are full of whales, leaping and rejoicing in the strong blue all about the steamer. There is, therefore, a whalery on an island near by, and I had the luck to travel 'with one of the shareholders. "Whales are beautiful beasts," he said affectionately. "We've a contract with a Scotch firm for every barrel of oil we can deliver for years ahead. It's reckoned the best for harness-dressing.'' He went on to tell me how a swift ship goes hunting whales with a bomb-gun and explodes shells into their insides so that they perish at once. "All the old harpoon and boat business would take till the cows come home. We kill 'em right off." "And how d'you strip 'em?" It seemed that the expeditious ship carried also a large air-pump, and pumped up the carcass to float roundly till she could attend to it. At the end of her day's kill she would return, towing sometimes as many as four inflated whales to the whalery, which is a factory full of modern appliances. The whales are hauled up inclined planes like logs to a sawmill, and as much of them as will not make oil for the Scotch leather-dresser, or cannot be dried for the Japanese market, is converted into potent manure. "No manure can touch ours," said the shareholder. "It's so rich in bone, d'you see. The only thing that has beat us up to date is their hides; but we've fixed up a patent process now for turning 'em into floorcloth. Yes, they're beautiful beasts. That fellow," he pointed to a black hump in a wreath of spray, "would cut up a miracle." LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 65 "If you go on like this you won't have any whales left," I said. "That is so. But the concern pays 30 per cent., and— a few years back, no one believed in it." I forgave himf everything for the last sentence. ^mJ 6£ LITTERS TO THE FAMILY VIII WERE my heart as some men's are, thy errors would . not move me! But thy faults I curious find, and speak because I love thee! Patience is a thing divine; and far, I grant, above me! Foes sometimes befriend us more; our blacker deeds objecting, Than th' obsequious bosom guest, with false respect affecting. Friendship is the Glass of Truth, our hidden stains detecting. While I use of eyes enjoy, and inward light of reason, Thy observer will I be and censor but in season, Hidden mischief to conceal in State or Love is treason. Thomas Campion, M.D. CANADA possesses two pillars of Strength and Beauty in Quebec and Victoria. The former ranks by herself among those Mother-cities of whom none can say " This reminds me." To realize Victoria you must take all that the eye admires most in Bournemouth, Torquay, the Isle of Wight, the Happy Valley at Hong Kong, the Doon, Sorrento, and Camps Bay; add reminiscences of the Thousand Islands, and arrange the whole round the Bay of Naples, with some Himalayas for the background. Real estate agents recommend it as a little piece of England—the island on which it stands is about the size of Great Britain—but no England is set in any such seas or so fully charged with the mystery of the larger ocean beyond. The high, still twilights along the beaches are out of the old East just under the curve of the world, and even in October the sun rises warm from the first. Earth, sky, and water wait outside every man's door to drag him out to play if he looks up from his work; and, though some other cities in the Dominion do not quite understand this immoral mood of Nature, men who have made their money in them go off to Victoria, and with the zeal of converts prea*ch and preserve its beauties. LETTERS TO THE FAMILY We went to look at a marine junk store which had oftee beea Esquimalt, a station of the British Navy. It was reached through winding roads, lovelier than English lanes, along watersides and parkways any one of which would have made the fortune of a town. "Most cities," a man said, suddenly, "lay out their roads at right angles. We do in the business quarters. What d'you think?" "I fancy some of those big cities will have to spend millions on curved roads some day for the sake of a change," I said. "You've got what no money can buy." "That's what the men tell us who come to live in Victoria. And they've had experience." It is pleasant to think of the Western millionaire, net from some gridiron of rectangular civilization, confirming good Victorians in the policy of changing vistas and restful duoes*. There is a view, when the morning mists peel off the harbor where the steamers tie up, of the Houses of Parliament on one hand, and a huge hotel on the other, which as aft example of cunningly fitted-in water-fronts and facades is worth a very long journey. The hotel was just being finished. The ladies' drawing-room, perhaps a hundred feet by forty, carried an arched and superbly enriched plaster ceiling of knops and arabesques and interlacings, which somehow seemed familiar. "We saw a photo of it in Country Life," the contractor explained. "It seemed just what the room needed, so one of our plasterers, a Frenchman—that's him—took and copied it. It comes in all right, doesn't it?" About the time the noble original was put up in England Drake might have been sailing somewhere off this very coast. So, you see, Victoria lawfully holds the copyright. I tried honestly to render something of the color, the gaiety, and the graciousness of the town and the island, but only found myself piling up unbelieveable adjectives, and bo let it g-© with a hundred other wonders and repente'd that I had W f 66 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY wasted my time and yours on the anxious-eyed gentlemen wno talked of "drawbacks." A verse cut out of a newspaper seems to sum up their attitude: "As the Land of Little Leisure Is the place where things are done, So the Land of Scanty Pleasure Is the place for lots of fun. In the Land of Plenty Trouble Peopie laugh and people should, But there's some one always kicking In the Land of Heap Too Good!" At every step of my journey people assured me that I had seen nothing of Canada. Silent mining men from the North; fruit-farmers from the Okanagan Valley; foremen of railway gangs, not so long from English public schools; the oldest inhabitant of the town of Villeneuve, aged twenty-eight; certain English who lived on the prairie and contrived to get fun and good fellowship as well as money; the single-minded wheatgrowers and cattlemen; election agents; police troopers expansive in the dusk of wayside halts; officials dependent on thi popular will, who talked as delicately as they walked; and queer souls who did not speak English, and said so loudly in the dining-car—each, in his or her own way, gave me to understand this. My excursion bore the same relation to their country as a 'bus-ride down the Strand bears to London, so I knew how they felt. The excuse is that our own flesh and blood are more interesting than anybody else, and I held by birth the same right in them and their lives as they held in any other part of the Empire. Because they had become a people within the Empire that right was admitted and no word spoken, which would not have been the -case a few years ago. One may mistake many signs on the road, but there is no mistaking the spirit of sane and realized nationality, which fills the land from end to end with precisely as the joyous hum of a big dynamo well settled to its load makes a back-ground to all the other shop noises. For many reasons that Spirit came late, but since it has come after the day of little things, LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 69 doubts, and open or veiled contempts, there is less danger that it will go astray among the boundless wealth and luxury that await it. The people, the schools, the churches, the Press in its degree, and, above all, the women, understand without manifestoes that their land must now as always abide under the Law in deed and in word and in thought. This is their caste-mark, the ark of their covenant, their reason for being what they are. In the big cities, with their village-like lists of police court offences; in the wide-open little Western towns where the present is as free as the lives and the future as safe as the property of their inhabitants; in the coast cities galled and humiliated at their one night's riot ("It's not our habit, Sir! It's not our habit!") ; up among the mountains where the officers of the law track and carefully bring into justice the astounded malefactor; and behind the orderly prairies to the barren grounds, as far as a single white man can walk, the relentless spirit of the breed follows up, and oversees, and controls. It does not much express itself in words, but sometimes, in intimate discussion, one is privileged to catch a glimpse of the inner fires. They burn hotly. " We do not 'mean to be de-civilised," said the first man with whom I talked about it. That was the answer throughout—the keynote and the explanation. Otherwise the Canadians are as human as the rest of us to evade or deny a plain issue. The duty of developing their country is always present, but when it comes to taking thought, better thought, for her defence, they refuge behind loose words and childish anticipations of miracles—quite in the best Imperial manner. All admit that Canada is wealthy; few that she is weak; still fewer that, unsupported, she would very soon cease to exist as a nation. The anxious inquirer is told that she does her duty towards England by developing her resources; that wages are so high a paid army is out of the question; that she is really maturing splendid defence schemes, but must not be hurried or dictated to; that a little wise diplomacy is all that will ever be needed in this so JJ f& LETTERS to THE FAMILY civilised era; that when the evil ?day comes something will happen (it certainly will), th$ whole concluding, very soften, with a fervent essay on the immorality of war, aboutas much to the point as carrying a dove through the streets to allay a pestilence. The question before Canada is not what she tfeinks ©r pays, feut what an enemy may think it necessary to make her pay. If she continues wealthy and remains weak she will surely be attacked under one pretext or another. Then she will go under, and her spirit will return to the dust wit& her flag as it slides.down the halliards. "That is absurd," is always the quick answer. "In her own interests England could never permit it. What you speak of pre-supposes the fall of England." Not necessarily. Nothing worse than a stumble by the way; but when England stumbles the Empire sihakes. Canada's weakness is lack of men. England's weakness is an excess of voters who propose to live at the expense of the State. These loudly resent that any money should be diverted from themselves; and since money is spent on fleets and armies to protect the Empire while it is consolidating, they argue that if the Empire ceased to exist armaments would cease too, and the money so saved could be spent on their proper comforts. They pride themselves on being an avowed and organized enemy of the Empire which, as others see it, waits only to give them health, prosperity, and power beyond anything their votes could win them in England. But their leaders need their votes in England, as they need their outcries and discomforts to help them in their municipal and Parliamentary careers. No engineer lowers steam in his own boilers. So they are told little except evil of the great heritage out- sMe, and are kept compounded in cities under promise of free rations and amusements. If the Empire were threatened they would not, in their own interests, urge England to spend men and money on it. Consequently it might be well if the natio&s within the Empire were strong enough to endure a little bat- LITTERS TO THE FAMILY 71 fcering unaided at tlpse first ©u&selr^till such time, that is, as England were permitted t® mcev?e to theiif help. For this end an influx && good men is needed more urgemtly/ every year chiring which peace holds—men loyal, clean and experienced in citizenship, with women not ignorant ©I sacrifice. Bier© the gentlemen* who propose to be kept by their neighbors are out? helper allies. They have succeeded in making uneasy the class immediately above them, whricft? is the English) woTrking class, as yet umdebauched %> the tempta-r tisa* ol State-aide^ idOieness or State-guaranteed irresponsibility. "B&ghtaA has miflftafes of such silent careful; M1&. accustomed, even* yet, to; provide- for thei!F owk tfffspriaig, to; bring them urp in a resolute Ifear osf G*©d*, and t©' d'esiife mo moTe than t&e reward! of their ©wi Tabors, A few years ago thas class would not have cared' t@ shitft; mow they feel tke general disquiet. f key rwe close to it. Tea-and-sugar borrowing friends have toldf them jocularly, or with threats, of a good time coming when things will go hard with* the uneheerful giver. The piospect appeals neither to their reason nor to their Savings Bank, boo&s. They hear—they do not need to read—the speeches delivered in their streets on a Sunday morning. It is o.ne of their pre-occupations to send their children to Sunday School by roundabout roads, lest they should pick up abominable blasphemies. When the tills of the little shops are raided, or when the family ne'er-do-well levies on his women with more than usual brutality, they know, because they suffer, what principles are being put into practice. If these people could quietly be shown a quiet way out of it all, very many of them would call in their savings (they are richer than they look), and slip quietly away. Ins the English country, as.well as in the towns, there is a feeling—not yet panic, but the dull edge of it—that the future will be none too rosy for such as are woa?teng, ©r are in the habit of working. This is all to ©air advantage. Canada can best serve her own interests and those of the Empire by systematically exploiting this new ree?uiting- 72 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY ground. Now that South Africa, with the exception of Rhodesia, has been paralysed, and Australia has not yet learned the things which belong to her peace, Canada has the chance of the century to attract good men and capital into the Dominion. But the men are much more important than the money. They may not at first be as clever with the hoe as the Bessarabian or the Bokhariot, or whatever the fashionable breed is, but they have qualities of pluck, good humour, and a certain well-wearing virtue which are not altogether bad; they will not hold aloof from the life of the land, nor pray in unknown tongues to Byzantine saints; while the verv tenacity and caution which made them cleave to England this long, help them to roof deeply elsewhere. They are mor» likely to bring their women than other classes, and those women will make sacred and individual homes. A little regarded Crown Colony has a proverb that no district can be called settled till there are pots of musk in the house-windows —sure sign that an English family has come to stay. It is not certain how much of the present steamer-dumped foreign population has any such idea. We have seen a financial panic in one country send whole army corps of aliens kiting back to the lands whose allegiance they foreswore. What would they or their likes do in time of real stress, since no instinct in their bodies or their souls would call them to stand by till the storm were over? Surely the conclusion of the whole matter throughout the whole Empire must be men and women of our own stock, habits, -language, and hopes brought in by every possible means under a well-settled policy? Time will not be allowed us to multiply to unquestionable peace, but by drawing upon England we can swiftly transfuse what we need of her strength into her veins, and by that operation bleed her into health and sanity. Meantime, the only serious enemy to the Empire, within or without, is that very Democracy which depends on the Empire for its proper comforts, and in whose behalf these things are urged. Uniform Editions of Mr. Kipling's Prose Works: Library edition in Scarlet cloth binding with medallion in gold on the side, gilt tops, eighteen volumes, $1.50 per volume. Pocket edition, printed on thin paper, in scarlet limp leather, with gilt edges, eighteen volumes, $1.50 per volume. " Plain Tales from the Hills." " Life's Handicap." " Many Inventions." "Light that Failed." "Wee Willie Winkie." " Soldiers Three." '' Captains Courageous."—Illustrated, '' Jungle Book.'' —Illustrated. "The Day's Work." "Second Jungle Book."—Illustrated. "Stalky & Co." "From Sea to Sea"—Letters of Travel. Two Vols. "The Naulahka." " Kim."—Illustrated. "Just So Stories for Little Children."—Illustrated. " Traffics and Discoveries." "Puck of Pook's Hill." Also in extra gilt cloth, gilt edges, $1.5.0 each. "Captains Courageous' "Soldier Tales" "The Jungle Book" "Second Jungle Book" The following in special cover designs have illustrations in colour, $1.50 per volume : "The Jungle Book." '"The Brushwood Boy." "They." The Macmillan Go. of Canada, Limited TORONTO
Other copies : http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/561619387
Books
III-1995
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Toronto : The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited
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Original Format: University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. PR4856 A52 1907
Canada--Description and travel
Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936--Correspondence
Letters to the family (notes on a recent trip to Canada)
Text