depends on
the administrative talent of the Comptroller.

When we have heard arm-chair critics attack police expenditure, we have
thought not only of the practice of economy as already indicated in the
case of reports from officers at many points, but of the amount saved to
Canada by the devoted and self-sacrificing efforts of these men to head
off lawless movements and to create in the remotest points of the
country a wholesome respect for constituted authority.

There were many wonderful patrols in the Arctic circle, but those which
had to do with the detection of crime or the unravelling of mysteries
connected with the disappearance of explorers and traders or others
naturally attracted most attention. There were not many of these
particular patrols, for the Esquimaux were not by any means murderously
inclined. The cases investigated showed that they had been moved by
provocation.

One of these cases resulted in the famous Bathurst Inlet patrol. In 1911
two men, Mr. H. V. Radford, an American, and Mr. T. G. Street, a
Canadian, went on an exploring and specimen collecting journey into the
North. They reached Bathurst Inlet in 1912, having wintered at Schultz
Lake. In May, 1913, that well-known northern patrol man, Sergeant W. G.
Edgenton, of the Mounted Police, who was in command of the post at
Fullerton, reported that a rumour had come to him through Eskimo that
Radford and Street had been killed by the Eskimos in June, 1912. A few
days later one of the Eskimos, by name Akulack, who had travelled part
of the way with the explorers, came to Chesterfield Inlet and gave Mr.
H. H. Hall, the Hudson's Bay Company officer there, an account of what
he had heard. It appeared that the wife of one of the Eskimos who was
travelling with the explorers had fallen on the ice and was seriously
hurt. So the Eskimo refused quite properly to leave her in that
condition, upon which Radford tried to enforce obedience by repeatedly
striking the Eskimo till a general row started and the two explorers, or
whatever they were, suffered death. It took three years or so to get at
the facts, with the final decision that, the murder having been traced
to the perpetrators, the whole evidence showed that it was a case where
the Eskimo had acted in self-defence and that, while in imminent fear of
being killed by the white men, they had taken the lives of the latter.
But the Mounted Police had to travel many a long and dangerous mile
through many