o in new countries,
he looked far ahead. Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in
old countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests.
Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be
extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and
principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities
and wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London. The difference,
however, between the old European town and the new Western town is that
differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical form,
as was the case in the life of Ingolby. In order to accentuate the
primitive and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine
from a race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that of
Lebanon or Manitou at any time. I chose a heroine from the gipsy race,
and to heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she had
come I made her a convert to the settled life of civilization. I had
known such a woman, older, but with the same characteristics, the same
struggles, temptations, and suffering the same restriction of her life
and movements by the prejudice in her veins--the prejudice of racial
predilection.

Looking at the story now after its publication, I am inclined to think
that the introduction of the gipsy element was too bold, yet I believe
it was carefully worked out in construction, and was a legitimate,
intellectual enterprise. The danger of it was that it might detract from
the reality and vividness of the narrative as a picture of Western life.
Most American critics of the book seem not to have been struck by this
doubt which has occurred to me. They realize perhaps more faithfully
than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are
by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and
North. Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia
drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western towns,
with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life. For
instance, a town like Winnipeg has sections which represent the life of
nearly every race of Europe, and towns like Lebanon and Manitou, with
English and French characteristics controlling them mainly, are still as
subject to outside racial influences as to inside racial antagonisms.

I believe The World for Sale shows as plainly as anything can show
the vexed and conglomerate