is at war, she knows not with what. When women who are full of
energy and ability have nothing to do, there is bound to be
unhappiness. In Canada a woman has perfect freedom to do anything she
chooses. Her opportunity is limited only by her own personality. What
she wills, she may, if she can. If she can't, then her quarrel must be
with self, not with life. Children can not choose their parents; but a
woman can choose the parent of her child; and when her choice is high
and wide and happy, it bodes better for the race than when conditions
have forced her into an alliance that must be more or less of an armed
truce on a low plane.

As an example of the fairness of marriage laws in Canada, if a
fur-trader marry an Indian woman--according to the custom of the tribe,
simply taking her to wife without ceremony, she is his legal heir, and
her children are his legal heirs. This was established in a famous
trial in the courts of Quebec. A trader became contractor and
politician. When prosperity came, he discarded his Indian wife and
married an English girl. On his death the Indian wife and children
sued for his estate. It was awarded to them by the courts and
established a precedent that guaranteed social status to the children
of such unions. This is one of the things that easterners can not
comprehend. I have never heard the opprobrious phrase "squaw man" used
on the Canadian frontier; and descendants of the MacKenzies, the
Isbisters, the Hardistys, the Strathconas, the Macleans, the
MacLeods--blush, not with shame but pride, in acknowledging the Indian
strain of blood.

The fact that some of the western provinces notoriously ignore a
woman's property rights in her husband's estate--is sometimes quoted to
prove the unfairness of Canada's laws to women. I am no defender of
those lax property laws. They ought to, and will soon, be changed; but
let us give even the devil his dues; and the devil in this case was the
mad real estate speculation. When thousands of adventurers poured in
from everywhere and began buying and selling and reselling property, it
impeded quick turn overs to reserve the absent wife's third.
Sometimes, as in the case of a famous actor, the wives numbered four.
Ordinarily in Canada--certainly in eastern provinces--a third is the
wife's reserve unless she sign it away. How four wives could each have
a third was a poser for the speculator and the knot was cut by ignoring
the wife's claims.