BEYOND THE FRONTIER
The following chapter was originally a serious complaint against the
schoolbooks of Canada, but, in the light of more mature thinking along
the lines of standardization, it appears to us now that the points we
have made against the textbooks are really points in their favor. We
have established (Chapter I.) that the standardization of error would
simplify our thinking, thus making life easier and, to that extent,
better. We must commend Canada for her pioneer work in our theory,
especially when, as we readily perceive, it is done at the expense of
her own development, therefore in a spirit of true self-sacrifice.
The lower schoolbooks we shall quote in this statement, for contrast
with university teaching, are: _Ontario Public School Geography_,
authorized for use in the public schools of Ontario; _The Teacher’s
Manual_, authorized for use of teachers in Ontario; _Public School
Geography_, authorized for use in the public schools of Alberta;
_Manual of Geography, I_, authorized for use of teachers and high
school students of Alberta; Dent’s _Canadian Geography Readers_, Book
II, optional or supplementary reading in several provinces; _The
Canadian School Geography_, authorized for use in the public schools
of British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Saskatchewan;
_Canadian Readers_, authorized for use in the public schools of
Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Most of these
books are dated 1928 or 1929. All of them were bought from displays for
the present school season.
The observed temperatures about to be quoted in this article for
contrast with the textbooks are, unless otherwise stated, taken from
the records of the Dominion Meteorological Service. Some of the other
facts used are from Government reports; most of the rest are from my
own observation through ten winters and thirteen summers spent in the
Arctic, during which I traveled there afoot about 20,000 miles--a good
opportunity to see conditions as they are.
Studying the books purchased, I found that practically all of the
geographies were still holding to the ancient Greek philosophical view
that the farther north you go the colder it is, no matter what the time
of year. One book expresses it, “The temperature steadily decreases
from the Equator to the Poles,” and the others have the same idea
worded differently. The climate of the North is “especially unfavorable
for both plants and animals.” In the Arctic “terrible blizzards often
rage for days together.”
Postponing our discussion of the more important season of summer,
what are the facts about the Canadian winter? One is that children
in certain wheat-raising sections of Alberta, who probably shudder
with sympathy for the poor Eskimos, are themselves living in a region
that has minimum winter periods colder than any Eskimo is known to
have lived through. Few Eskimos have ever seen sixty below zero. The
probable lowest temperature for the North Pole itself is twenty degrees
warmer, say fifty-eight or sixty below. The lowest temperature recorded
on the north coast of Canada is fifty-two below. But we have the
following minima from the southern third of Canada: Quebec, sixty-three
below; Ontario, sixty below; Manitoba, sixty-three below; Saskatchewan,
seventy below; Alberta, seventy-eight below.
There is probably, then, no Eskimo living who has felt a temperature
as low as thousands of our children face going to school in prosperous
communities of southern Canada. If there are Eskimos who have felt cold
equal to that of some of our farming communities, they belong to tribes
that winter inland, well to the south of the coast dwellers.
As to blizzards and snowfall: excluding the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts, the line of heaviest snowfall in Canada is approximately at
the Canada-United States border. Storms are, on the average, fewer and
milder in the Arctic than in any other equally large area on earth, as
the great explorer, Nansen, pointed out more than thirty years ago. It
is for these reasons among others that trans-Arctic flying is steadily
pushing to the front as the practical solution of commerce by air
between the Old World and the New.
However, from the strictly economic point of view, it makes little
difference what we teach in the schools about the winter temperatures
of Canada. Mining, for instance, can be carried forward in any climate,
for among the successful coal mines are those of Alabama, 1,000
miles south of Winnipeg, and those of Spitsbergen, 2,000 miles north
of Winnipeg. In factory work the expenditure for fuel varies and
is an important charge against operation, but still there are great
industrial centers developing all the way from Birmingham to Montreal.
Blizzards are perhaps unpleasant. I have met in the Arctic numbers of
Royal Canadian Mounted Police who had been stationed at Regina, in
southern Saskatchewan, not so far from the United States border, and
I don’t remember finding one who did not think Regina blizzards as
bad as any they had seen on the north coast of Canada. Yet Regina is
considered one of the fine Canadian cities and its chief handicap of
late years has been not the cold nor blizzards of winter--it has been
the dryness of the hot summers. July temperatures are frequently higher
in that part of Saskatchewan than in the Miami part of Florida.
Cold may distress you, but Montreal is larger than New Orleans. Of the
two Red River valleys, the one in Louisiana is warmer, but the one in
Manitoba is better for wheat. Winnipeg, which handles more wheat than
any city in the world, has an average temperature for the year that is
just at the freezing point--thirty-two F.
Winter temperatures, then, have little effect upon the prosperity of
lands or the growth of cities, nor do blizzards signify. It is the
summer temperatures that matter, and the length of the summer, for upon
them depend the economic vegetations that give food to the people and
feed to grazing animals.
The greatest economic damage to Canada that is wrought by the public
schools is, therefore, in describing incorrectly its northern summers.
For the schools teach as a principle that the farther north you go the
colder the summers become. They do further harm by misrepresenting not
only the summer temperatures of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada but also
the length of the growing season.
As to the heat and length of the northern summer, and some of their
direct results, the textbooks approved by various provinces teach the
following things among others: “In northern Canada and northern Alaska
... during the short summer the very slanting sunlight is unable to
raise the temperature much above the freezing point,” says a geography
approved by several provinces. “There is no warm season (in the
Arctic),” is how we are told the same thing in a manual of geography
authorized by a department of education for the guidance of teachers,
and printed not by a commercial house, but by a King’s Printer. Every
province has some officially approved textbook that states or implies
that hot weather--eighty to ninety degrees in the shade--does not
occur in the Arctic at all, and that it occurs rarely even in those
parts of the Northwest Territories that lie between the Arctic Circle
and Edmonton--which is just south of 54° and corresponds to Leeds in
England, Copenhagen in Denmark, and Moscow in Russia.
This would be sad if true. But the summer temperatures in the Mackenzie
district of the Northwest Territories hard up against the Arctic
Circle really go to ninety-six degrees, while the highest for Prince
Edward Island, in southeastern Canada, is only ninety-two. The highest
temperature recorded since 1900 in Winnipeg is one hundred degrees and
the same temperature has been recorded in Alaska by the United States
Weather Bureau at Fort Yukon, north of the Arctic Circle. Temperatures
ranging from eighty to ninety degrees are common both in the Canadian
and Alaskan Arctic.
Some of the lower school geographies give the real facts of Arctic
summer temperatures, but do not correlate them so as to enable an
ordinary student to realize that what the textbook says elsewhere
about the summer never being warm must be incorrect. The texts state,
for instance, that in midsummer the sun delivers about half as much
heat per hour in the Arctic as it does at the equator. Elsewhere
they mention that the Arctic day is twenty-four hours long and the
equatorial day only twelve hours long. What they do not draw attention
to, thus failing to enlighten the careless reader, is that there is no
difference between the result of half the heat-delivery for double the
time and double the heat-delivery for half the time.
It is just because half the heat for double the time is as good as
double the heat for half the time that you expect, and do get, tropical
heat in those north polar lowlands (and they are extensive) where sea
breezes do not seriously interfere.
Having described the climate in such unfriendly terms, perhaps it is
consistency that impels the Canadian textbooks to make the vegetation
correspond with it. “Much of this vast area,” says one, “is a treeless
wilderness of rock and swamp, covered with mosses and lichens which
provide food for the caribou and musk ox.” “In the extreme north,”
says another, “(there is) a cold desert where, however, vegetation is
not entirely wanting; for in the marshes in summer the ground becomes
covered with reindeer moss on which the caribou and musk oxen feed.”
“Why cannot trees grow there?” asks a third, to which the general
textbook reply is that the winters are too cold for them. A reading
selection continues the work of the geographies with, “In that land
there is little but ice and snow.”
But what are the facts? One is that inside the Arctic Circle mosses and
lichens are not so prevalent as they are inside the textbook covers.
By tonnage they comprise less than ten per cent of the vegetation. The
other ninety per cent is represented by flowering plants. In all my
Arctic experience I have never found a region where mosses and lichens
prevailed over the flowering plants. I had to visit a section near
Churchill, Manitoba, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle, to see that
sort of country.
What about trees? A hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle in Canada
the Forestry Branch of the Department of the Interior has reported
trees seventy feet high, straight, and fourteen inches through. Similar
trees go at least twice that height beyond the Circle in Siberia.
Moreover, the textbooks imply in most cases, and specify in one,
that winter cold limits the growth of trees; but the coldest known
spot north of the equator--Verkhoyansk, in the Yakutsk Province of
Siberia--has a dense forest of both evergreen and deciduous trees,
although the recorded temperatures go down to ninety-three degrees
below zero.[16] The Prairie Provinces which have approved this book
are themselves in part treeless. Would they appreciate the intimation
that this is because of the cold? And if so, how can they reconcile
the teaching of their schools with the fact that the largest treeless
sections of the Prairie Provinces themselves are in their southern
parts, the largest forests in the northern?
The Canadian textbook allegation that in the Arctic “there is little
but ice and snow” conveys to the child among other things the idea
that there is a heavy snowfall. Instead, the snowfall, as previously
mentioned, is heavier in the most southerly hundred miles of Canada
than in the most northerly hundred. Or again, the pupil may think the
statement means that in July and August there is more snow or ice on
the ground in the North. But the fact is that British Columbia has ten
times as much snow in July (permanent snow) as the whole of the much
larger section of our continent designated the Northwest Territories.
The part of Alaska which lies in the temperate zone has a hundred times
as much permanent snow as there is in the Arctic section of Alaska. In
the south Alaska mountains the snow line comes down to sea level; in
the north Alaska mountains it is 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the sea.
Lest the child may think that the desolation and worthlessness are
largely confined to the Arctic Circle proper, a fifth-year Canadian
reader instructs him in part as follows: “Long before the treeless
wastes are reached, the forest ceases to be forest except by
courtesy.... On the shores of Great Bear Lake--which is, of course, in
the Temperate Zone--four centuries are necessary for the growth of a
trunk not so thick as a man’s wrist.... Still farther north the trees
become mere stunted stems set with blighted buds that have never been
able to develop themselves into branches; until, finally, the last
vestiges of arboreal growth take refuge under a thick carpet of lichens
and mosses, the characteristic vegetation of the Barren Grounds.”
The textbook editor borrows this heartening description, and much other
cheerful information about Canadian resources and climate, from a
book entitled, humorously enough, _Greater Canada_. If a country thus
described be indeed a “Greater Canada,” then we wonder what those may
believe who are really pessimistic.
Against this “Greater Canada” view let us set the facts, uncontested by
those who have lived on Great Bear Lake and have traversed the forest
north of it to where it meets the Arctic prairie. Instead of being no
bigger around than your wrist, the larger trees on Bear Lake are a foot
and a half through, and a hundred feet high. There is no such gradual
diminution in size as the author makes out. We have already mentioned,
for instance, the Forestry Service report which describes trees seventy
feet high a hundred miles north of Great Bear Lake and within five
miles of the beginning of the Arctic prairie. Again there is Big Stick
Island, northeast of Great Bear Lake, a clump really beyond the tree
line. It is only a few acres, and yet the trees are a foot through,
tall and straight.
I have come in from the Arctic prairie to the northernmost forest at
various points on the thousand-mile front ranging from the Colville to
the Coppermine, and I have never seen the peculiar trees of _Greater
Canada_ with “blighted buds that have never been able to develop
themselves into branches.” Once, for instance, when I discovered trees
just a few miles inland from Franklin Bay in a section where I did
not expect them, I entered in my diary the unusually (for me) poetic
description that I had seen “a little band of Christmas trees climbing
the hillside.” They were of such proportions as to branch and stem that
they would have been saleable at Yuletide in any of our cities.
We have commented before on the textbook idea that the chief vegetation
of the Arctic, or even of the “Barren Grounds,” is mosses and lichens.
Here we comment rather on the name itself--Barren Grounds. According
to a bulletin of the Department of the Interior, the epithet “Barren
Grounds” was originally applied to the prairie districts between
Winnipeg and Calgary. When growing knowledge showed how absurd the name
was for that section, it was not abolished as it should have been, but
was, so to speak, lifted up and transported from the southern prairies
across the northern forest to the northern prairies and there set down
to do its part in holding back the development of the North as it
already had held back for awhile the development of the West.
I was born and brought up in that West which was originally called
“Barren Grounds,” and have often said that had I been transferred in
my boyhood by magic from the prairies, across which I used to ride
as a cowboy, to the prairies of Banks Island, 200 miles north of the
north coast of Canada, I should have known on waking up that I was
not in my home district, but I could not have decided offhand that I
was not somewhere in northern North Dakota or southern Saskatchewan.
Dropping on my knees and playing Sherlock Holmes, I could have decided
by careful study of the vegetation and soil that I was in a strange
place, but looking off to the sky line I should have felt at home.
There would have been the same rolling prairie, with perhaps somewhat
less grass but with a great many more flowers. Had it been winter there
would have been snow on the ground in both places, but less in Banks
Island than in Saskatchewan.
With such experience of the trees, grasses and flowers of southern
and of northern Canada, it is easier for me to read the lower school
textbooks as works of humor than of sober instruction. But children
take them seriously, and it is difficult to look upon the results as
merely funny.
The ground frost of northern Canada is made a handicap in the
textbooks. But in real life as often as not it is useful. “Fields of
ice and snow and a permanently frozen subsoil effectively limit man’s
movements in the Arctic ... regions,” says one of them, and that is a
just sample of what most of them say or imply.
The first advantage of frozen subsoil is that there can be no dry
season. The growers of cereals and vegetables now count on that in
Alaska. So do the reindeer ranchers. For if the season has less rain
than usual it means only that the ground will thaw deeper than usual,
and the roots of the plants will reach farther down for their water.
The only thing the rancher has to guard against is the trampling out
of the forage vegetation by the animals, just as he would if he were
an Australian sheep farmer. So far as dry seasons are concerned, he
can graze the same numbers on a given ranch for any period of years, a
thing the Australian cannot do, for his feed varies with the rains.
A second advantage, less important, but spectacular and about to come
much into public view, bears upon flying. For where there is a frozen
subsoil there is no underground drainage, and rain and thaw waters stay
where they fall. This creates innumerable lakes all over the country,
providing flyers with natural landing fields for pontoons in summer
and skis in winter. That is one reason why accidents are fewer in the
Arctic than in temperate or tropic flying. If you are a mile high and
you develop engine trouble, you can always glide to a safe landing
where the subsoil is frozen.
Those who have kept track of the advance of the Hudson Bay Railway from
The Pas to Churchill, even if it be only through press despatches, are
familiar with a third advantage, for the ground frost has simplified
and made cheaper and easier the building of that important pioneer
line. In so far as the cost of construction is derived from taxes, the
people of the whole of Canada have benefited in purse from the very
condition which they formerly thought would increase the building costs.
Coming back again to Arctic vegetation in the textbooks, we find a
reader approved for school use in four provinces saying: “There are no
trees in this cold land, but there is a kind of hard brown moss that
grows under the snow.” There are known to be more than 300 species of
Arctic moss. These the textbook ignores along with more than 700 kinds
of flowering plants. And why does this one moss that is known to the
textbook compiler do its growing under the snow? Isn’t it poor judgment
for even a moss to wait idle during the hot summer and to begin to
grow in the fall when snow comes? Or--and I gather this from the
complete selection--perhaps the author believes that a snow covering is
permanent in the Arctic. The fact is, of course, that Arctic land is
permanently snow-covered only on or near mountains. Most Arctic lands
are low and, like the Prairie Provinces, they have snow in winter and
none in summer. In Peary Land, the most northerly land on earth, there
are bees and butterflies in the rolling meadows of flowers and grass.
The textbook statement that musk oxen feed on moss is perhaps a
minor error from the point of view of this article, but it shows how
widespread are the inaccuracies. All those who have studied this animal
report that it lives mainly on grasses, sedges, and browse.
Up to this point, the geographies have, in the main, agreed to disagree
with the scientists. On the question of animal life they begin to
disagree with each other. Some of them, having talked so convincingly
of sparse vegetation, continue this idea. For, since many of the Arctic
animals are herbivorous, if the text admitted that there are large
numbers of them, the children might well begin to puzzle as to what
they lived on. Therefore we find one author saying that the Eskimos
live almost wholly on animals and that their “available food supply is
scanty.” A school reader has it that “there are very few (musk oxen)
left. They keep them in a park with a high wire fence about it.”
Others, however, report large herds of caribou and musk oxen, and some
go so far as to mention polar bears, wolves, foxes, hares, seals and
fish. But we gather from the texts that these animals lead a precarious
existence.
As a fact, few known waters are richer in fish, whales and seals than
those of the Arctic. The caribou of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada number
several hundred for each single Eskimo, and yet travelers who have
described bands of thousands, and even herds of a hundred thousand
moving together, have never reported any noticeable depletion in the
vegetation.
In the case of musk oxen, there are probably 4,000 wild for every
forty that are in fenced parks. These wild musk oxen are in no danger
of extinction at present, for most of them are on islands that are
uninhabited, many of them never even visited by Eskimos.
Having invented a fictitious country and named it Eskimoland, the
textbooks find it necessary to invent a fictitious people, and the
Eskimos are misrepresented even more than the territories they inhabit.
They are supposed to be all alike, though some of them live farther
away from others than Canada is from Mexico, and have less contact.
Their climate has only one description in most textbooks, although
they really live in several different climates. The materials of
the description of land and people, so far as they are not invented
have, however, been gathered from many Eskimo countries, many Eskimo
climates, and many Eskimo peoples. The result is a patchwork portrait
which resembles no Eskimo who ever lived. Then they make this patchwork
man live in a patchwork country. One is as real as the other.
The schoolbook accounts of the Eskimo presumably arouse in the child
both pity and amusement. Here are some of the quotations:
“The Eskimo has an environment which forces him into constant conflict
with Nature. He is in continual danger of freezing and starving to
death.”
“The Eskimo suffers from intestinal diseases, malnutrition and scurvy,
and his resistance to disease is greatly lowered.
“The ravenous eating of tallow candles and soap by Eskimo children is
well attested.”
“When the Eskimo boy is thirsty, he drinks oil.”
Against this picture stands in my mind my own experience of living more
than ten years as an Eskimo among Eskimos. To me it seems that as a
race they have more leisure than city dwellers, for instance. Some of
the geographies mention their ivory carving and ornamental ceremonial
dress, but they leave it a mystery how a people under terrific strain
for a livelihood find time for such things. My observation has been
that in many communities the needed work to provide food, shelter
and clothing requires from the Eskimo less than half of our standard
eight-hour day. Four hours of work and eight of sleep give him twelve
hours of leisure. Accordingly, a man will spend a week carving an
ivory handle which he could have made plain in half a day. A woman who
could sew a warm coat in two days will spend two months making one not
so warm (but in her opinion prettier) by cutting up whole skins and
piecing them together in complicated designs. Entire communities spend
weeks singing and dancing and listening to story-tellers spinning out
long tales of adventure with spirits and with men. The winters, so
frightful in the textbooks, are their holiday season, spent in carrying
out elaborate festivities.
Most of the textbooks say or imply that most or all Eskimos live in
snow or ice houses in winter. This is geographical hodgepodge. No
Eskimos live in ice houses, or at least I never heard of it. Some
live in snow houses, but more than half the Eskimos in the world have
never seen them. In the textbooks all snow houses are called “igloos,”
but the word _iglu_ simply means house in general, or dwelling. It is
misleading to imply that snow houses are known to all Eskimos and used
by most of them. In many districts the snow house, being unknown, is
not even represented by any word in the vocabulary. Many Eskimos live
in houses built of earth and wood, or with bone rafters and walls of
stone and earth. There are several other types of dwelling.
The case is worse about the use of oil. According to the above textbook
quotation and many similar, they drink it. Before my recent study of
Canadian lower school texts, I had heard that they did this for two
other reasons--one that they liked it, and the other to keep warm. It
remained for a Toronto textbook to advance the new explanation that
they do it to quench thirst. But to have this true, the laws of both
physiology and chemistry would have to be changed. Physiology teaches
that thirst is quenched only by water, and chemistry that there is in
oil no water which the human stomach is capable of extracting.
The Eskimo stomach is similar to your stomach. If you think he drinks
oil for any reason, I would suggest that you take about a water tumbler
of whatever oil you prefer. If you have a strong will you may be able
to get it down, but the chances are three in four that you will not be
able to keep it down. If you are the one in four who can keep it down,
you will very soon wish that you weren’t.
The truth is that Eskimos use oil with their food, as we do salad oil
or gravy. They eat it but they don’t drink it, and, therefore, instead
of being weird monstrosities, they are just like us in this respect, as
they are in most fundamental human things.
One textbook says that a cold climate produces people who are stunted
in mind and body. For body the Eskimo might be described as of average
stature rather than small. Mentally their teachers usually report them
to be near the European average.
That brings us to the question of the spread of European education in
the Far North. A school reader says: “There are no books in that land
and (the Eskimos) could not read them if there were.” If this were
true, it would bear out the allegation that the Eskimos are stupid,
for the Danes began trying to teach them reading and writing about
two centuries ago. They found them apt pupils, the knowledge gained
by one or a few spreading by native instruction from house to house
and village to village. The work since then has been shared by two
governments, the Danish and that of the United States--Canada has,
as yet, taken no direct educational action. Effective cultural work
has been done by the churches, among them the Anglicans, Lutherans,
Moravians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Roman Catholics. It would
be strange if the efforts of all these bodies, some going back two
hundred years, left it still a justifiable criticism of Eskimos that
they cannot read or write. As a matter of fact, more than half the
total Eskimo population of Greenland, Labrador, Canada and Alaska
can read and write some language, generally their own. They publish
some of their own books and have (in Greenland) a magazine that has
appeared regularly since 1867. Editors, proof-readers, type-setters,
engravers, printers, subscription solicitors and the rest have all
been Eskimo through all that time. No other language has been employed
in connection with the journal. It is as Eskimo as the _Spectator_ is
English.
Which, by the way, is more interesting, the fiction that “the Eskimo”
does not know what a book is, or the fact that one of the older
journals in the western hemisphere is in Eskimo?
That Eskimo children eat soap is ridiculous on the face of it. I have
never seen Eskimos eat candles, nor heard of a case. But if they did
eat tallow candles it would be no stranger than the eating of tallow in
any other form. Tallow is only suet, and many a well-ordered meal in
our country still includes suet pudding.
As for the “deficiency diseases and scurvy,” the Eskimos are, as far as
we know, free from them so long as they live on their own accustomed
diets. Once they begin to live on white men’s groceries and neglect
to secure fresh meat, these diseases grow. Dr. William A. Thomas, of
Chicago, found in Labrador, for instance, that the Eskimos who suffered
most were those nearest the trading stations and most supplied with
white men’s food. In the sections beyond the reach of the traders, or
little affected by them, the deficiency troubles vanished.
As to commercial dealings with the outside world, we are instructed
by the geographies in contrary ways. On page 12 of one of them, the
printed matter says: “The Eskimos have almost no trade with other
people. They must depend on their own country to supply their wants.”
But on page 123 of this same book, there is a photograph of six power
schooners--not whaleboats--with the caption “Eskimo Whaleboats, Fort
McPherson!”
It is, as a matter of fact, one of the important industries of Edmonton
to supply Eskimos with power schooners. I have seen a photograph from
the Arctic, sent me by an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
showing $100,000 worth of these in a single view. The same engines
that produce electric light for these Eskimos on shipboard in summer
are used by them sometimes to light their houses in winter. Some have
separate Delco electric lighting systems for their homes.
But the teachers of Edmonton, the city which furnishes most of these
supplies, use now, or did use recently, textbooks which state or imply
that the Eskimos have no boats except skin canoes, and no light except
seal-oil lamps. Nor can you defend the books by suggesting that they
are talking of fifty or a hundred years ago. The context shows that
these allegations are supposed to fit the present.
To balance all these unfavorable truths about the northern half of
Canada, I have been able to discover in the school texts one--and only
one--favorable mistake. A geography says, “Mosquitoes are found all
over the North American continent except in the extreme north.” Anyone
who has been there will tell you that the contrary is the fact. Until
you approach the Arctic you do not know how bad mosquitoes can be.
A thing which the incorrect schoolbooks are doing is to dampen that
current enthusiasm about the Far North of Canada which is due to the
beginning of actual mining in the Middle North, where Flin Flon and
Sherritt Gordon are already words to conjure with.
For these mines are in the sub-Arctic, which, according to the
textbooks, is almost as bad as the Arctic itself, a land barren because
of the cold. Mining is expensive where food is not produced locally and
where no one lives except the miners and their dependents. There is, in
consequence, a fundamental need to colonize even the richest mineral
districts with a food-producing population. Sunlight and rainfall
are, therefore, the most important resources of any district, and the
younger generation of Canadians should be permitted to grow up with a
true understanding of how heat and water are distributed, and how these
are used by nature for the production of those plants upon which all
animal life, including the human, must in the last resort depend.
Canada is two things, a people and a country. We need truthful
histories for a reasonable judgment of our past; we need accurate
geographies for planning the future. The schoolboys and the schoolgirls
of today, most of them without university training, will step into
control of this land tomorrow. Their chief equipment for that task
is their education. What the university courses teach in advanced
geography and climatology is not propaganda but truth. Why not give
the pupils of the common schools the advantage of the same correct
description of the climate and its results, so that they, too, will
know how to prepare for the great spread of settlements northward that
must continue till inhabited Canada becomes as broad as it is long,
a nation drawing power from all its territories, even the farthest
islands in the northern sea?