A Flight Across the Plains
AWAY WE glide, down the eastern slope. We have entered Alberta now. A
farming Province? Yes, all the Prairie Provinces are. That is their
chief glory, for agriculture is the one industry that man cannot do
without, unless he cuts down his numbers by ninety-nine per cent. and
tries to live like his savage forefathers, by hunting and fishing alone.
Yet farming is not everything, even here. We only hear of what comes off
the surface of the prairie, as a rule; but underground there is wealth
we have scarcely begun to touch. Look at those coal mines on the
mountain slopes—down south and up north, and away out on the plain.
One-seventh of all the coal in the world is right here in Alberta.
Already she digs out more than any other Province in Canada.
“When we came in first and dug our well,” an old settler once told me,
“we threw out two wagon loads of coal. One time we made a little camp
fire at night and were surprised to find it still burning in the
morning. We had made our fire of sticks on a bed of coal, without
knowing it.”
British Columbia, richer in water-power, and with plenty of coal within
easy reach, will one day be the busiest manufacturing workshop of the
whole Pacific slope. But Alberta and Saskatchewan have great water-power
too, and Manitoba has more than all three put together.
It is hard for any one to believe, who thinks of the Prairie Provinces
as flat, that their streams have “fall” enough to create the tremendous
water-power which careful measurement shows them to possess. But look!
One of the streams that join to make the Bow River starts at a height of
6,775 feet above sea level. Even from Calgary the water falls 2,150
feet, and from Edmonton 750 feet, to the meeting place of the North and
South Saskatchewan; from that point it falls 540 feet more before
entering Lake Winnipeg; and between the Lake and the sea at Port Nelson
is an additional fall of 710 feet. In the south-east, the water from
Lake of the Woods has to fall about 350 feet to reach Lake Winnipeg.
“Liquid gold,” the brown water deserves to be called, now running to
waste in all our rivers. We only use a minute fraction of it all, to
make electric light and power. One day we may use it, as they now do in
Norway, to extract from the air all the nitrogen we need to put back in
the land, to replace what we have taken out in wheat. The richest soil
cannot be drained of its riches without becoming poor.
It is not lack of power that keeps even the prairie from developing
great manufactures, but only lack of a great population to buy the
goods. Long haulage of raw material does not prevent large-scale
manufacturing in other “purely agricultural” regions.
You don’t like statistics, perhaps—I don’t exactly love them
myself—but a few picked figures now and then are good to chew on. Take
these, for instance:
Already the manufactures of Western Canada amount to $333,000,000 in a
year. British Columbia stands first with $149,000,000, Manitoba next
with $94,000,000, then Alberta with $51,000,000 and Saskatchewan with
$38,000,000. “Vegetable products” account for $88,000,000, including
$42,000,000 from flour and grist mills; “Animal products,” for
$73,000,000, including $31,000,000 from slaughtering and meat packing,
and nearly $21,000,000 from butter and cheese; “Wood and paper,” for
$88,000,000, of which British Columbia contributes $62,000,000. Textiles
exceed $17,000,000, and iron and steel industries $13,000,000.
· · · · · ·
The foothills past, we sail out over the plain in company with the balmy
Chinook. A wonderful wind this zephyr, as the Greeks called it—
“Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea.”
In the middle of winter it has come to my farm, a hundred miles east of
the mountains, and driven the mercury up to 75. Not “in the shade,” of
course; but why stay in the shade when you can be out in the warm sun?
The city of Calgary, as we fly over it now, has five times the people it
had when we rode through it twenty years ago. And the face of the
country east and south has completely changed. The West is not satisfied
with new roads and railways, it must have new lakes and rivers too. The
Canadian Pacific Railway Company has tapped the Bow in two places, and
the streams flowing out spread over a three-million-acre block in 4,000
miles of irrigating ditches and canals. It is the biggest irrigation
scheme in the world, except a few carried out by powerful Governments.
The farmers of several neighboring districts have now co-operative
irrigation systems of their own, with the Provincial Government’s help.
What a contrast, between the waist-deep sea of green alfalfa and the dry
land still untouched by the life-giving water of the Bow! Southern
Alberta does not lack moisture: an inexhaustible supply pours down from
the mountain snow in never-failing streams.
Look at that three-acre picture, set in a broad green frame of maple,
ash, willow, poplar and dainty caragana, and filled with melons,
tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, giant cabbages, onions and
potatoes—all watered, like the farm beyond, from the St. Mary River,
near Lethbridge. “I thought there was no such color as green up here
when we came in first,” says the farmer’s wife, “but that was before we
turned the water on. And look at it now!” It is a sight for sore eyes.
Do you hear the hum of bees? They are flying to and from that cottage
yonder. The lady knitting at the door, under a shady porch of wild
hop-vine, says she makes $10 per square foot of her “holding,” which is
a two-by-two wooden stand with a hive on it. The bees pasture on the
neighbors’ alfalfa, and bring her $40 worth of honey in a season. Reckon
what that comes to per acre, if you have the time and arithmetic.
Somebody must have reckoned it up, for he has just brought in ten
million bees for distribution through these Western Provinces.
Eastward still we fly. Do you smell gas? That is the “medicine” of
Medicine Hat. Puncture the earth, and up it comes: ready-made light and
heat. Hot-house flowers grown by that heat have beautified the tables of
Montreal, 2,000 miles away.
Here we are skimming over a cattle ranch. The old-style ranch is not
quite dead, but is on its last legs—like the old-style caterpillar that
shrivels up into a chrysalis before its resurrection into a beautiful
new-style butterfly. Listen to the rancher talking to one of his
neighbors. “I’ve got to go out of business,” says he.
“No,” says neighbor; “just change it, as I did. I used to let the beasts
rustle, and turn them off as four or five-year-olds. Now, the market for
that sort of stuff is gone. I breed them and feed them through the
winter, so they’re in fine shape as two-year-olds, and at the worst of
times I get a good enough price for a good beast. Here’s the latest
Government report from the Winnipeg stockyards: ‘The market was draggy
owing to the poor quality of the offerings, but there was a good demand
for anything showing quality and flesh.’ They’ve been telling us that
for years, and it’s time we took it in.”
Hear the music rising from the next ranch—sheep baa-ing for their
lambs. Their owner was not satisfied with the common range ewes,
weighing about 100 pounds and giving five or six pounds of wool. Six
years ago he began buying pure-bred rams, and now his average is 175
pounds of sheep and nearly ten pounds of wool. Quality, only quality
pays. And quality in the beast shows quality in the man.
We are in Saskatchewan already. Here is another fine Parliament Building
in the middle of a garden, with pleasure boats on a lake. Little “Pile
of Bones,” as it was before the railway came, is now Regina, Queen City
of the Middle Province. On a cabinet minister’s window-sill is a
beautiful vase. No, it is not imported from England or France; it is
made of fine white Saskatchewan clay, the only deposit known in Canada.
But it is not this rare white clay that makes the wealth of
Saskatchewan; it is the common brown dirt.
We speed through the sunny air, and over the vast central plain. Would
you recognize it? The unbroken wilderness, where twenty years ago we
rode day after day without meeting a soul, is now a checker-board of
golden wheat fields, dotted with farmhouses and big barns, villages and
schools, and crossed by a network of railways, each a string of
elevator-beads—not only the Canadian Pacific now, but two other
transcontinental systems, the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk, now
merged in the Canadian National.
Nearly all the sod shacks have gone. From most of the log cabins the
people have moved into new frame houses, though many of the old
dwellings have been cased in to make the new. The frame house itself has
been vastly improved, in looks as well as convenience. The natural taste
for beauty is finding expression, as it was seldom allowed to in hard
pioneering days. Hundreds of prairie habitations are pleasant to look
upon, tasteful in color and form, with shady verandas, and gardens
neatly fenced.
I wish it could be said that the average prairie farmhouse was provided
with a bathroom, hot and cold water, and drainage, and kept comfortably
warm in the coldest spells of weather; but only an exceptional district
here and there has a majority of its homes as well equipped as that. Ten
years from now, such a district will be no longer exceptional.
Look at that network of wires along the roadsides, and running into
nearly every house. This Province uses 96,000 telephones, Manitoba
68,000, Alberta 64,000 and British Columbia 79,000. That means 958,000
miles of wire. It is not as if we were short of post-offices; over 4,200
serve these four Provinces; with 350 rural delivery routes, so that many
thousands of country folk get their letters, and papers, and even “cash
on delivery” parcels, without going to any post-office.
Do you notice another change? The “bald-headed prairie” is not so bald
now. It was not always so bald as we saw it a few years ago, but the
Indians took to setting the prairie on fire to drive the buffalo. Where
this was checked and the trees had a chance, they spread fast.
Most of the pioneer settlers were too busy at first to think of planting
trees to beautify their new homes. Many, unfortunately, had no intention
of making permanent homes here; they would make just enough
“improvements” to get their patents, and then sell their homesteads and
go off to repeat the process farther afield; they were “land
speculators” just as truly as those who bought large tracts to hold it
for high prices. Some of the real home-makers, however, had enough
foresight to plant trees around their shacks at the very start.
Look at that charming picture. A neat white farmhouse, with a wide
veranda, green lawns and flower-beds, divided from the barnyard by a
hedge of blue spruce and lilac. The whole range of buildings is
sheltered on the north, west and east, by a thick grove of maples and
poplars thirty or forty feet high. That has all grown up in twenty
years. The farmer began planting trees the year after he reaped his
first crop.
Westerners discovered after a while, and especially after soil drifting
had become a nuisance, that trees were needed to protect our fields from
the wind. The Dominion Government and the Canadian Pacific both started
tree nurseries, distributing millions of seedlings and cuttings to
farmers, who plant them in shelter belts along their fences. In 1924 the
Government Forestry Stations supplied 5,215,800 of these young trees, to
4,593 applicants.
This Province grows more wheat than any other in the Dominion, than any
State in the Union to the south. But listen!
There is a grain-grower speaking. “I had a hard time at first,” he says,
“and left for the States. I found things worse in the farming line
there, as indeed they are to-day. Thousands quit this country, like me;
we didn’t know how to get a crop. We had thought of the West as a sort
of big ready-made farm. ‘All you have to do is tickle the earth with a
plow and she laughs with a harvest,’ we used to think. We were too new
to the country; and we were mostly young men, and in too much of a
hurry. We hadn’t a lot of old farmers around us, as people have in older
countries, to tell us that hard times were always followed by good
times.”
“No,” say I, “we were a nation of newcomers; and we are not much more
now, for what is half a century in the lifetime of a country? Besides,
we had pulled up stakes somewhere else to come here; so it seemed the
simplest thing to pull them up again and go somewhere else. We had to
learn the good habit of ‘sticking it.’ Some men here are simply nomads,
throw-backs to our pre-historic hunting tribe, and they will go on
moving for ever. Perhaps when they have sampled the whole of this
continent and find they can’t get farther west than the Farthest West,
they may try the Farthest East and settle in China till they are ready
to start a fresh migration on the track of their early ancestors,
through Asia to Europe again!
“Perhaps they will find the perfect climate, somewhere. I have sampled
all sorts of climate in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and never
found one that escaped fierce criticism from the inhabitants. I met a
man the other day who had thought to find it in Southern
California,—‘lie on your back and let the fruit drop into your mouth,’
you know. He had come back a wiser man. And he showed me a story by an
eminent American author, in the most popular magazine of his country,
describing a personal experience at Los Angeles. Here are his very
words:
“‘Three days and nights of dry suffocation; gasping for breath
in the stinging, scorching, withering, enervating heat; days of
shrill, shrieking, moaning wind that smites you hip and thigh;
of excruciating and shriveling blasts from the blistering pit of
that vast shameless inferno, the deadly desert, where dead
things lie and bleach, and poisonous reptiles bask on the
sun-baked rocks; days when your skin is pelted and prickled with
invisible bullets of alkaline dust; when depression reigns,
vitality ebbs, and nerves are set on edge.’
“Every climate may have a fit of sulks or temper now and then; but ours
at its worst never inflicts anything like that. It may put an extra edge
on our appetite, but not on our nerves. It is a magnificent nurse of
hardy, healthy men and women.
“We can always find plenty to grumble at, if we think grumbling will
improve our digestions, wherever we go. You remember the sporting offer
that the Premier of this Province made to one of his people who said he
was ‘fed up and wanted to quit’—‘Tell me when you’ve found a better
place and I’ll lend you the fare.’ When the man had studied up
conditions in every country in the geography, and taken a glance at
Mars, he turned back quite cheerfully to his own Western farm and
hitched up his team for the fall plowing.”
“Yes,” says our friend, “the man who stayed, or came back as I did, and
took pains to learn what the earth really wanted, is the happiest man
to-day.
“We learned to select and test our seed grain, and that accounts for the
high proportion of number one wheat that makes the Canadian West famous
now. We learned to summer-fallow a third or a half of our land every
year, to preserve moisture for next year’s crop. But that’s a terribly
wasteful plan, besides turning the fibry soil into dust that blows off
and takes the young crop with it. We’ve got to go on learning, that’s
all, and get out of the old rut, and go in for regular rotation of
crops, or at least lay down the fields in pasture, turn and turn about,
to give the land a chance to recover. That means more livestock, and
some of us won’t take the trouble. But it has to be done, for the sake
of those who come after us. The country won’t die when we do.”
“True for you! Fortunately we are getting ashamed of the old false idea
that when a man has bought a piece of land, or got it as a homestead, he
has a right to do as he likes with it. That land is a piece of Canada.
The land of Canada is all that the people of Canada will have to live
on, to the end of the world. Who are we, that we should dare to spoil it
for all who come after us, taking out of it in thirty or forty voracious
crops of grain the plant food which nature has taken thousands of years
to accumulate?”
[Illustration]
_From the Russian Oven_
[Illustration]
_At the Spinning Wheel_
[Illustration]
_The Old House and the New—On_
_a Ruthenian Farm_
[Illustration]
_A Family from Poland_
There’s a man driving a dozen cows out to pasture. He has evidently
learnt the livestock lesson. Let us pay him a visit. “Yes,” he says, “I
learned that much years ago, and it was all right as far as it went. I
didn’t keep all my eggs in one basket, and if wheat was poor Mrs. Cow
would always keep our heads above water. But that was nothing to what
she could do, as I soon found out when I studied the matter, and learned
to select and test the cows, and weed out those that didn’t pay for
their board. Breeding up, and feeding right, I call this herd my little
gold mine.”
Quality, again! Quality all the time.
“And I don’t spend the gold on gas,” he adds, as an automobile speeds
by. “Think of it! Over 63,000 passenger autos in this Province
alone—one to every three or four grown-up people—40,000 in Alberta,
nearly as many in Manitoba, and 32,000 in British Columbia. Every man
must judge for himself, but living as I do, only three miles from town,
I couldn’t give ‘business’ as an excuse for keeping a car. What with the
cost in money, and the time a man is tempted to spend running around
when he’s wanted at home, some of us have been kept pretty tight pinched
by our cars.”
“You wouldn’t call the West extravagant, on the whole, would you?”
He laughs. “No and Yes. You know as well as I do, we farmers didn’t
spend over much on ourselves at the best of times. You wouldn’t call a
telephone an extravagance, would you, or a gramophone?”
“Not for the world! I should be sorry to see the poorest farmer give
them up. It’s things like that, and now the radio, with good roads, and
the auto when you live a long way out, that have ended the ‘isolation’
we used to complain of. They bring us the advantages of city life
without its disadvantages.”
“That’s right. And so far as we farmers have spent too much, it has
generally not been for pleasure, but for business. We have taken too
much land, and bitten off more than we can chew—that was the way of the
country, and we had to learn better. We’ve often bought more and bigger
machinery than we could profitably use—that was partly because everyone
was begging us to raise more grain during the war, partly because we
were too easily persuaded by professional salesmen. We haven’t had a
business training, worse luck.”
“No; we’ve been too busy with the producing end of our business to study
the commercial end of it. Think of the work we put in to raise the crops
we do! Of the 1,956,000 people in the Prairie Provinces, 1,652,000 are
classed as ‘rural,’ but they include all the old folk and women and
children on the farms, and even villagers. Yet our handful of country
folk managed to raise in one year a good 10,000,000 wagon loads of
grain, not to speak of hay and potatoes, and the rest. If you put those
wagons in procession, so close together you couldn’t cross the street
between them, that string would be so long that Mother Earth could tie a
girdle around her waist with it and have spare ends left long enough to
trip over.
“It’s a big manufacturing business, this agriculture of ours, making
food out of earth and air and water and a little seed. In any other big
manufacturing business, do you think the men who make the goods in the
factory have to sell them over the counter—or buy the machinery, for
that matter? The concern must have its buying experts, and its selling
organization as a matter of course.
“We have made some progress on the selling side, with grain and cattle
and wool and fruit and butter and eggs; but it is only a beginning. It
is too much to hope that every experiment will succeed at once. An
infant can’t run till it has got some practice in walking, and it can
never learn even to walk if it stops trying after a fall or two.
“We need co-operation—not between food-raisers at the food-eaters’
expense, but co-operation in each class, leading to complete
co-operation between both classes. If that is a dream, it is one that
must come true when we all awake to the need of working together for the
good of the whole community.”
* * * * *
Off again. Do you see what that boy is digging, down there? Sweet
potatoes. They are called “semi-tropical.” As a fact, we have a
semi-tropical climate; not for long at a time, but long enough for corn
and tomatoes and tobacco, through a big stretch of the prairie—to say
nothing of the coast. We have discovered that sunflower makes about as
good fodder as corn, and grows a tremendous weight of crop. But the corn
line, like the wheat line, is pushing farther and farther north. For
this, and for a hundred other most practical benefits, we have to thank
the quiet, ceaseless work of the experimental farms, started long ago by
the Dominion Government—work now carried on by the Provincial
Governments too, at their universities. We don’t all make the use of
these that we might, we are so busy. Fortunately they come to us, if we
don’t go to them, sending out “extension lectures,” and manning the
“Better Farming Trains” which the railways lend.
Every Western Province has its own full-fledged university, a centre of
light and leading, besides its normal schools for training teachers.
Just over yonder, at Saskatoon, is the University of Saskatchewan.
Eastward again we fly, and look down on Manitoba—no longer a “postage
stamp province,” for it has been growing in size, as well as in every
other way. One extension followed another till in 1912 Manitoba pushed
up to Hudson Bay, and the Province covers 232,000 square miles.
Saskatchewan has 243,000 square miles, Alberta 253,000, and British
Columbia 353,000.
Big figures these. The West is a big place, as I have observed. That is
nothing to brag about. Its bigness should inspire us with a humble
determination to do big things with it, and for it, each in our own
little corner of it, looking beyond our own little corner, too; for if
we have a broad country we are bound to take broad views.
A big country indeed, endowed with land and railways and roads and
schools and all the machinery of Government for countless millions of
citizens. We hold the West in trust, a sacred trust, not for ourselves
and our children alone, but for the millions who might be here to use it
with us. We shall gain, as well as they, by their coming; though even if
we had nothing to gain, we cannot escape the responsibility of holding a
realm so much vaster than we can use.
Our most urgent need is to unearth our hidden wealth, to develop our
enormous undeveloped resources, of which our uncultivated or
half-cultivated land is the greatest part. Our first business, then, is
plainly to get population, people able and willing to work. We have to
devise new plans of settlement, of land-holding or land arrangement, of
agricultural production and agricultural commerce—yes, and agricultural
manufacture, so that we shall no longer depend almost wholly on the sale
of raw material. Every possible avenue must be explored, every resource
of human ingenuity taxed to the utmost, brushing aside all obstructive
traditions and conventions, and thoroughly testing every plan with one
glimmer of hope in it, to get and keep a large and permanent, because
successful and contented, body of people doing this vital work.
It is not the big wheat farm or cattle ranch that means big population,
but just the opposite.
Most of the new settlers we can hope to get will be poor. Small farming,
and often very small farming, is the only kind possible to them. What of
that?
It was the small man, the poor man, with little or no capital beyond his
own body and brains, who built up this country from the beginning. It is
the small man, reinforcing us in his hundreds of thousands from the
mother country and from many other lands, that we must get to build it
up with fresh vigor from now on. Yes, and we must give him a better
chance than he ever had under the broadcasting, go-as-you-like,
sink-or-swim homestead system, which so often allowed him to sink, with
grievous loss both to him and to the country.
There is no fear for the wheat supply. Any cutting down of the present
wheat acreage, beyond what may be required from time to time to prevent
over-production, will be made up for by the multitude of small wheat
fields on the multitude of small farms that will now come into
existence.
The small farmer, if he thinks and plans his way carefully, is not only
self-supporting—able to feed his family even if the rest of the world
should sink under the sea, and independent of labor costs, which are the
last straw on many a big farmer’s back; he is also independent, to a
degree which few yet realize, of the foreign market, and of unfortunate
conditions abroad that keep that market down.
Such men are to be found in every Province already. Here is one. He has
cut his coat strictly according to his cloth. He does not try to farm
one acre more than he can handle with his own small capital,
supplemented by very little credit. He works no more land and carries no
more stock than he can thoroughly cultivate and care for in normal times
by himself, or with such help as his family can give—and occasionally
the neighbors, to whom he lends his help in turn. He spares neither
brain work nor hand work to produce—not simply the largest quantity,
but the most that can be got of the highest quality, so as to secure the
highest net cash yield per acre and per hour.
I know his family are well dressed and well fed, for I have more than
once dropped in unexpectedly, about meal times. There is always plenty
of variety on the table, but you notice, even in winter, that almost
everything on the bill of fare was raised right there. A little tea and
sugar are their only imports; British Columbian apples are the only food
from outside the farm.
This man has been improving his land steadily from the start, till
almost the last inch of his quarter is under cultivation. He is a hard
worker, of course; “but I don’t kill myself,” he says; “what’s the use?
I don’t want the moon.” Yet he is by no means lacking in ambition. He
had a very high ambition from the beginning—to be independent—and he
has got more than he aimed at; while thousands who aimed at something
much bigger have overshot the mark, through over-ambition, and are not
even independent, but struggling in the chains of heavy debt.
Small men, or rather men with small means, can do big things by working
together, as the Danes have shown us by the wonderful results of their
combination of scientific dairying and hog-raising with nation-wide
co-operation in marketing.
This Province of Manitoba has been learning fast in the last few years.
She still grows over two million acres of wheat—Saskatchewan has twelve
million and Alberta nearly six—but no longer stakes her whole existence
on that crop. In 1920 butter and cheese factories received from
Manitoban farmers the milk or cream of 24,600 cows. By 1923 that number
had risen to 107,200, yielding 10,730,000 pounds of butter and 231,000
of cheese. In the same year Alberta sold 17,870,000 pounds of butter and
1,865,000 of cheese, from 158,000 cows, while Saskatchewan’s output,
from 95,400 cows, was 10,870,000 pounds of butter and 119,000 of cheese.
A few years ago we were importing butter to the prairie; now we are
exporting butter from this same prairie to England, and the people there
are delighted with its quality.
The prairie farmers’ takings for the year, from these factories, came to
nearly $13,000,000. British Columbia’s factory output of 2,960,000
pounds of butter and 290,000 pounds of cheese, from 39,000 cows, gave
the farmers over $2,000,000. These figures take no account of the
enormous quantity of milk sold in its natural state, or used on the
farms.
Winnipeg alone must need a big supply. The little settlement which had
such a stormy and romantic infancy has grown into the largest city of
the West, with nearly 200,000 inhabitants, including 30,000 Slavs,
14,500 Hebrews, 6,700 Scandinavians and 6,200 Germans and Dutch. It is
noticeable, by the way, that seventy per cent of the people in the five
biggest prairie cities—Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and
Edmonton—are of “British” stock, including “Americans” of British
descent; though they are only fifty-six per cent of the whole population
of the three Provinces. That is, the English-speaking folk tend to
gather in cities much more than the Slavs, and very much more than the
Scandinavians and Germans.
Winnipeg holds all the railways bunched together in her hand, before
they spread out east and west. The largest railway “yard” in America is
here—the Canadian Pacific’s, with 258 miles of track in it; and the
Canadian National has 200 miles of yard track too. In twelve months
225,000,000 bushels of western wheat have passed out through this
eastern gateway.
Here is a Parliament Building, stately and fine enough for a Dominion,
not to speak of a Province. “When Canada has a bigger population than
the little mother-land, as one day she certainly will have, and the
Empire wants a more central capital than London, Winnipeg will be all
ready with the equipment,” a hopeful Westerner remarks.
She is certainly ready with the golf links, where eminent statesmen are
said to find their chief recreation. There must be a dozen such courses
around this city, and some of them are owned not by clubs but by the
community, so that here, at any rate, golf is not only the rich man’s
game; any one may play who can.
We have little leisure out on the Western country-side, and get all the
healthy exercise we need on the farm; but hundreds of country villages
have their baseball and tennis clubs for summer, and hockey for winter.
The cities and towns, of course, have their organized sports and healthy
athletic clubs of all kinds, with enthusiastic musical and literary
associations too. The churches and schoolhouses, in town and country
alike, are centres of social activity.
If there is one country school in the West where the children are not
any day to be found playing and shouting as children should, I have yet
to find it, and hope I never shall. Many school gardens are cultivated
by the pupils; and large numbers of farm boys and girls are now active
members of juvenile societies which give prizes for the best-bred and
best-fed steers, heifers and hogs, or the best samples of grain. That
youngster of eleven, captain of the soccer team, “pitched on” the hay of
an eight-acre field the other day, by himself, when a sudden emergency
called his father away and it “looked like rain.”
Corps of Cadets and Boy Scouts flourish in scores of country centres, as
well as in the larger towns. There are over 18,000 Boy Scouts in these
four Provinces (that is more than the number in the East), besides 7,500
“Wolf Cubs,” or Junior Scouts. There are nearly 21,000 Cadets, in 340
companies, besides other organizations which likewise aim at helping
each new generation to develop the health of mind and body Acquired for
good citizenship. The Cadets are connected with our Department of
National Defence; but they include in their programme lectures on
citizenship, and organized games, as well as physical training,
“first-aid” work, scouting and signalling.
“We love peace as much as any Quaker,” says a Western war veteran who is
now an enthusiastic officer in the Canadian Militia, “and warmly
sympathize with every movement, international conference, or anything
else, towards the abolition of war. Peace is the chief interest and
foundation principle of our Empire—_pax Britannica_. If we train
ourselves to be ready for emergencies, in the present state of a world
we can’t help belonging to, we look forward persistently to the growth
of commonsense and good feeling which will make emergencies few and far
between.”
As a matter of fact, we have no “standing army,” except a little force
of 4,000 or so, for the whole of this vast Dominion. In the Western
battalions of the ordinary “Non-permanent Militia” about 13,000 men are
enrolled.