the first piece of property' the family have ever owned. One morning she came with a piece of news-comment. 'Ain't it funny?' she said, 'there's four H'english people living on this h'avenue, and their names h'all begin with h. There's 'arris, 'awkyard, 'ayden and 'amshar.' The aspirate is only one of the average emigrant's acquisitions. The whole structure of his conversation is different. Self-reliance has crept into it, as well as new expressions that may be slangy, but are certainly packed with meaning. How does this note come? Let me illustrate again : Three years ago I motored from Saskatoon into the Goose Lake country, where now there is a railway. With me was Dr. Richmond Henderson, Professor of Sociology in the University of Chicago. Near Buffalo Post Office, about lunch time, we went into a sod house in search of water for the machine. The farmer came out and obliged us, and the Professor talked with him. He was agriculturally born, was six years out from England, where he worked for wages; had been three years a hired man, and now had his own farm with a hundred and fifty acres of growing grain, four horses, implements, cattle, hogs and poultry. His discourse was Western-double Western; for when the Professor had finished with him, I asked: 'From what part of Devonshire did you come?' He smiled all over his face as he answered, 'From Newton Abbot, zur, and where do 'ee belong?' One of these days Mr. Tancock will go back to the old home a landed proprietor, and more-he will be a creator. The railway having saved him a sixty-mile drive to town, he will have a frame house, his buildings will be substantial; his stock will be increased. He will contrast the aspect of his farm with what it was the first day he saw it—a bald, lonely stretch of prairie, on which waving buffalo grass seemed to tell how vast a solitude he was invading. Mr. Tancock, perhaps, is only dimly conscious of how great a thing he has done, partly because it is being done by thousands of others. He will not know of the creative note that has come to pervade his personality. His old friends will discern it, but will not know how it comes there. They will marvel at the indifference with which he talks of long journeys, the familiarity with which he refers to the Americans and Germans and the price of land. He went away timid. He comes back unafraid. Sixpence was a sum of money to him. It is now a negligible asset. He tells of a space and quality of life that seems romantic, of things that are different-different in the West of Canada from what they are in the West of England. And he tells how different things are in the West of England from what he thought they were when he looked backward at them from Saskatchewan. You may have seen pictures of the Emigrant's Progress from the sod house to the brick home, and from the ox-wagon even to the automobile. It is good, very good, but it cannot show you what is going on in his mind. He writes letters to England at longer and longer intervals. His inquiries about particular people grow fewer. The information he gives about himself is apt to dwindle down to a summary of the year's crops, and agricultural events, with a few remarks about family changes and a hope that 'this will find you all well, as it leaves me at present.' He is not a trained journalist, and therefore does not know how to anticipate the questions he would be asked, nor the information he would volunteer, if he were smoking by the old fireside. Indeed, as I have suggested, he is only dimly conscious of the changes that are going on within him. When he arrives in the New Country, he notices things that are different, many of them things that would not be allowed in the Old Country. The rails over which he travels from the Atlantic to the prairie are simply spiked to the sleepers-there are no chairs and bolts and wedges. The engines that come and go from the head of his train about every fifth hour are bigger and heavier than those with which he has been familiar. He does not notice the difference in size so much as the change in appearance. For they are not painted and burnished and brassed, as he has been accustomed to see locomotives at home. When the train stops to change engines, he sees the passengers descending to the platform to enjoy ten minutes' walk, and he observes that the conductor starts the train before everybody has got abroad. Here are three things that are different, and that indicate a brand of reliance and self-reliance with which he will become more familiar as he becomes more of a Canadian. If he starts to work on a well-equipped farm he will be quite surprised to find that it is far easier to drive four horses abreast than it is to handle two walking tandem, and that if he is harrowing in the seed a little carriage for him to ride on behind the harrow adds very much to his comfort and very little to each horse's labour. When harvest comes the self-binder cuts a swath of wheat eight feet wide, binds and delivers the sheaves, in rows, to the extent of over twenty acres of crop a day. At threshing-time the Englishman sees with astonishment a machine that will thresh 3000 bushels a day, that carries the wheat into the wagon ready for the granary without anybody touching, lifting, or weighing it, and that blows the straw through a big pipe into a stack without any human intervention from the time the sheaf was thrown hugger-mugger into the yawning cylinder which knocks the berries out of the chaffed head. Everywhere he goes there is revolution. The impossible in England becomes a commonplace in a country which a few years ago was inhabited by a few wandering Indians and millions of buffalo. The horses need not be shod. The doors need not be locked at night. The master is a fellow-worker; and if the minister comes in pastoral call, he sits at meat with hired man and master too. There are two or three churches in the near-by town. The chances are that the Methodist ranks first in quality of building, size, and influence of its congregation. If there be an Anglican vicar, he is a brother in the ministry with the Methodists and Presbyterians, for his church lives without any adventitious aid from the State, and he has forgotten to look for signs of exclusiveness about the grace of God. After a while there may be an election to the Legislature or to the Dominion House of Commons. Mr. Emigrant goes to a political meeting to find that no mysterious greatness hangs about the candidate who has invited his opponent to debate with him. He sees the chairman chosen from the meeting; he listens to speeches that are not concluded until after midnight, and then, as the day of polling draws nigh and he picks up scraps of information about the questions at issue, he cannot refrain from telling those with whom he talks things over that everything is as different as it can be from an election in the Old Country. When he foregathers freely with his new fellow Westerners, he discovers social and personal differences which, in a direct way, correspond to the mechanical and other peculiarities to which he has already become accustomed. He may be in a neighbourhood where the farmers help one another thresh instead of hiring an outfit furnished with men who do everything except haul the grain away from the machine. He will find it a relief, after a somewhat monotonous summer, to work a week or two with a company of his neighbours. If he is fairly popular and communicative he will discover, about the third day, that some of his companions are developing a habit of inciting him to monologue. About the fifth day he will know that they want to hear him talk, not so much for what he says, but for the delightfully novel way he says it. For the first time in his life he will know that he speaks English with a Devonshire accent. Though he will not know whether to be pleased or humiliated, he will find himself consciously imitating the phrases and inflections of his comrades, among whom there will most likely be several Canadians from Ontario; an American, who went to Agricultural College somewhere in the Middle Western States; a Scandinavian; and perhaps a Doukhobor. After supper the American will engage him in conversation, and inquire what part of England he comes from. When he learns that it is Devonshire, he will ask questions that make the Devonian wonder how much more the American knows about a county he has never seen. It is rather a grievous discovery for a good Englishman to make -that a foreigner knows more about his country than he knows himself. It is not necessary to suggest that the English countyman is more ignorant of his own country than any other emigrant is; but it is unhappily true that the sense of local patriotism is much less distinctly developed among the English who come to Canada than it should be. This is true, not only of the labouring classes, but also of those who are educationally fitted for other occupations. The explanation is twofold. Primarily it lies in the past, in the lingering of the idea that the business of the average man was to be content with whatever station of life he found himself in. He was not, he could not be, anything of a traveller. It is only forty years. since it began to be considered as part of the State's duty that the labourer should be taught to read. The county was for county families. Quarter sessions and the assizes were the limit of the county consciousness of the average man. Within living memory, fairs and hangings were the only occasions for holiday-making that the bulk of the population knew. Cricket, newspapers, trains and county councils have done much to spread the sense of county patriotism. But where the county is centuries old, the present generation can have very little sense of creation when they contemplate it. Things are not so on this continent. I can illustrate the difference of age and youth in this respect by a story of a friend who was taken to a political meeting in a little town in the Adirondack mountains near Lake Champlain the night before an election. He was the victim of what I have heard Lord Morley describe as the 'desperate passion for oratory' which pervades America; and made a speech on generally patriotic lines. He had been introduced by his host as an eminent British political leader-a pleasant fiction which reflected a desire that the townsfolk should receive a proper impression of their neighbour's overseas friendships. Next day the speech was reported in the nearest daily paper, and the speaker, finding himself in the village, was accosted by Deacon Banker and another prominent inhabitant. Deacon Banker strolled up to the buggy in which my friend was sitting, and said : 'You're the man who made the speech last night, ain't you? I want our postmaster to know you. Say, George' (to the post master), did you see the Enterprise says an English Member of Parliament was here last night? Yes, sir' (to my friend), 'you made us a cracking good speech. I tell you' (to the postmaster) we're away ahead of the rest of the county in this campaign.' Again, this local patriotism-which undiscerning people sojourning in the St. Lawrence Valley for the first time have sneered at has a larger edition in a State pride that is an incalculable asset to the republic. Let me illustrate again. I have twice had the happy experience of travelling through Western Canada for days at a time with trainloads of State editorial associations→ men and women out for a good time, as well as to learn the truth about a new country. At suitable intervals the Minnesotans would assemble on station platforms, at hotel entrances, in public halls and in the main streets of ambitious cities, and join in their own particular yell: Gopher! Gopher! Gopher State! Editors! editors! Minneso-ta! The party from Michigan had not developed an editorial yell. They sang Michigan, my Michigan.' In both cases, you see, the State was the spring of all their joy. It endowed each individual with a sense of possession, a bigness, a glory that made him vocal in a strange land. There is nothing like it in Britain, there is nothing quite like it in CanadaI mean the robustness of expression, the contagion of enthusiasm. In both countries there is an approximation to it that one would fain encourage. Once in a while this ebullient patriotism in our neighbours is laughable, but in the main it is healthily admonitory. I have called it a tremendous asset. Remember that in the republic are millions of people who were not born to its liberty, who have been attracted to it by hopes of material profit. For them, for the republic, it has been a great gain that they should encounter a nationalism that can be seen and heard and felt; and the spirit of which acts as a permanent vaccine in the political consciousness of the alien. There is nothing quite like it in Canada for several reasons. Confederation which is less than fifty years old was not consecrated by the shedding of blood, nor even by the wrenching of less vital ties. As an historical provocateur it is, therefore, devoid of the ecstatic element which produced Fourth of July oratory and Fourth of July exhumation of the political corpse of George the Third. Our provinces are not sovereign provinces, as the States are sovereign States. We have not been in the habit of priding ourselves on the immensity of our achievements, the illimitability |