describe the Canada of ,to-day, and his volume deserves the
highest praise for the thoroughness and ability with which it has been written and for its unflagging interest. The stay-at- home Briton is so justly accused of a lamentable ignorance of Colonial life and manners—witness the time-honoured story of the globe-trotter invited to an Australian country house who astonished his host by appearing at dinner in riding- breeches and explaining that he " always thought you wore 'em all the time, you know "—that we should welcome the ap- pearance of other works of the sort dealing with the Colonies from a social and economic standpoint. There is so much to be learnt, and the average Englishman has realised neither the immense local patriotism nor the sensitiveness of these new communities, conscious, perhaps a little too conscious at times, of their youth, but sure of a glorious future. Even those who, with the best intentions in the world, came to congratulate and cheer the Colonial soldiers who had taken part in the war, and visited London at the time of his Majesty's Coronation, had often the vaguest idea of who their visitors were. In this connection the author tells us a story which we had seen in a modified form in " Mr. Dooley's " last volume, and believed to be an extravagance of the great Irish-American humourist
" A lady having examined the men of a Canadian cavalry de- tachment camped at the Alexandra Palace, with much of the pose she would assume at a Wild West Exhibition, remarked to an officer, 'Do all the tribes speak as good English as you do ?'"
But the absolute ignoramus of this type is rare, and grows rarer. It is to those who have some second-hand knowledge of Canada, and have sons whom they wish to place, that we particularly recommend the chapters on British Columbia, Manitoba, and the North-West. Mr. Bradley evidently dis- likes the " dumping down " of groups of new settlers from the urban areas of Great Britain on the prairie : it leads, in his
opinion, to failure and disappointment in a large majority of cases. The emigrant from the great cities—and even the townsman of Eastern Canada—is unfitted as a rule by temperament and experience for a country life, and the South Briton is not the Colonist he was a century ago. The author's remarks on emigration deserve the closest attention in view of the schemes now afloat for the settlement of the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal with British Colonists, and of the " back-to-the-land " movement nearer home :— " So far from being peasants, wedded for generations to the soil, and fearful of towns like the Mennonites, Doukhobors, Finns, or crofters, the majority of these . emigrants are almost as ignorant of any farming life as they are of the moon. . . . . . A few of them—mechanics or farm labourers—go out with the intention of following their own trades, but the majority either have no trade, or intend to abandon it, for what seems to them to be the easy and pleasant life of a farmer or his assistant. Canadians cannot realise the mystic attraction that anything in the shape of an outdoor life has, in theory at least, for the Britisher of all classes unused to outdoor labour.; and unfortu- nately, those who know the country only as an abstract thing of beauty, or a field for amusement ana relaxation, and who could not tell barley from rye, or a Hereford from a Shorthorn, are increasing throughout every class under existing conditions in England. To any one who has watched these movements for two or three decades there is something almost pathetic in the simple faith of the well-meaning and evergreen philanthro- pist, who with light heart will dump down large groups of Englishmen ea bloc in a district with the fond hope that they will stay there. It has been tried a hundred times, and may, perhaps, be tried another hundred, but with results wide of the promoter's intentions. Other races, and even the other stocks of the British race, can thrive upon this herding system, but the South Briton never. As a breed he is no longer a successful tamer of solitudes, his true instincts being much more often townwards, though he talks to the contrary."
With regard to the young gentleman emigrant who goes out to Canada as a " farm pupil " the author is even less sanguine.
The elaborate preparation at agricultural colleges, &c., which may be useful for persons who are anxious to farm on a large scale in England, is of little or no practical value for the Colonies. You cannot reproduce the atmosphere and can-
• Canadd in the Twentieth Century. By A. 0. Bradley. London : A. Constable and Co. I jag. net.]
habits that will militate against his success as a Colonist must be reckoned with by the most optimistic. Above all, the intending emigrant must realise that he will have to work with his hands unless he means to give fresh point to the old joke of the young Englishman indignant at being set to harrow wheat or load hay who roundly declared that he came out " to learn farming, not to engage in menial occupations." A boy sent straight from school to work for two or three years under an active Ontario farmer has a far better chance in the North-West than the young man who has learnt a smattering of English farming, and imagines that his know- ledge is all-sufficient for a new country, and that he can give the Colonial farmers useful hints on management.
Turning to political and economic problems, Mr. Bradley has a firm belief that Lord Selkirk's prophecy that the prairie lands of the North-West would one day hold thirty million people is likely to be more than realised in a not very distant future. These territories produce the necessities the pro- duction of which can never be overdone ; the peculiar condi- tions of light and heat give the best wheat crop in the world ; and even the winter, severe as it is, stimulates the Italian and Southern Slav settlers, to say nothing of the Anglo-Celts and Scandinavians. Timber and water-power are abundant, coal and minerals await the day when they are needed, and recent discoveries show that the colonisable area, instead of consisting of a two hundred mile wide strip north of the forty-ninth parallel, extends to the distant Peace River, five hundred miles from the United States boundary, where wheat can be grown as successfully as at Winnipeg. The "American danger," which seems to have alarmed a few publicists in the last few years, appears to Mr. Bradley to be hugely exaggerated. Many of the emigrants from the North-West States are of British or Canadian origin, and all belong to the capable, law-abiding farming class, who are by no means sorry to settle in a country where even a local politician who used his revolver with fatal effect in a drinking saloon would inevitably be hanged, and where horse thieves, train robbers, and all the motley desperadoes who still infest the Western United States dare not follow them for fear of the omnipresent mounted police. The French-Canadian, too, if not as a rule an ardent Imperialist, is quite contented with his lot, a little suspicious of the United States, and a good Canadian on the whole, though of a curiously conservative— not to say unprogressive—type. But there are no difficulties such as those that beset the United States, no dangerous racial or social problems which may have to be solved on the march, and, as yet, no threatening neighbours. To whatever greatness Australia and South Africa may attain, Canada will be the white man's Colony par excellence.
Our author's 'description of Canadian life and scenery merits nothing but praise. His method is the time-honoured method of the guide-book. He accompanies his readers from one point to another between the Newfoundland lights and Esquimalt, and gives them the fruits of his knowledge and his past experience of cities and provinces in an easy, polished style, never diffuse and never pompous, and, above all, never made tedious by lists of places, persons, or dates. And here he gives us a hint of what the guide-book could be—and what the guide-book of the future will be—no colossal agglomeration of facts for which not one traveller in a thousand has any use, but a pleasant and well-informed travelling companion, with a sure discernment of essential truths. Well illustrated from photographs, well printed and interesting from first to last, this is by far the best descrip- tion of any of the great British Colonies that we have read. It is to be hoped that Australia and South Africa will find authors as capable of describing their peoples and their territories.
NOVELS.
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