es, where reside
twenty thousand foreigners almost en bloc. The contest was going to be
very close. Offices were opened in a certain block. Legally it
requires three years to transform a foreigner into a voting Canadian
subject. He must have resided in Canada three years before he can take
out his papers. The process is simple to a fault. The newcomer goes
before a county judge with proof of residence and two Canadian
witnesses. He must not be a criminal, and he must be of age. That is
all that is required to change a Pole or a Sicilian or a Slav into a
free and independent Canadian fully competent to apprehend that voting
implies duties and fitness as well as rights. The contest was going to
be very close. A few of the party leaders could not bear to have those
newcomers wait a long three years for naturalization. They got
together and they forged in the same hand, the same manipulation, the
signatures of three hundred foreigners, who did not know in the least
what they were doing, to applications for naturalization
papers--foreigners who had not been three months in Canada. If forgery
did not matter, why should perjury? The perpetrators of this fraud
happened to be provincial and of a stripe different politically from
the federal government then in power at Ottawa. The other party had
not been asleep while this little game was going on. The party heeler
neither slumbers nor sleeps. The papers with those three hundred
forged signatures--names in the writing of foreigners, who could
neither read, write, nor speak a word of English--were sent down to the
Department of Justice in Ottawa; and everybody waited for the
explosion. The explosion did not come. Those perjuries and forgeries
slumber yet, secure in the Department of Justice. For when the
provincial politicians heard what had been done to trap them, they sent
down a little message to the heelers of the party in power: If you go
after us for _this_, we'll go after you for _that_; and perhaps the pot
had better not call the kettle black. The chiefs of each party were
powerless to act because the heelers of both parties had been alike
guilty.

It may be said that the fault here was not in the poor ignorant
foreigner but in the corrupt Canadian politicians. That is true of
Canada, as it is of similar practices in the United States; but the
presence of the ignorant, irresponsible foreigner in hordes made the
corruption possible, where it is neither