had to live,
and they did it at first by fur hunting. Jean Ba'tiste, the Frenchman,
who might have been a courtier when he came, promptly doffed court
trappings and donned moccasins and exchanged a soldier's saber for a
camp frying-pan and kept pointing his canoe up the St. Lawrence till he
had threaded every river and lake from Tadousac to Hudson Bay and the
Rockies. It was the pursuit of the little beaver that paid the piper
for all the discovering and exploring of Canada. When John Bull
came--also in pursuit of ideals--he, too, in a more prosperous way
promptly exchanged the pursuit of ideals for the pursuit of the little
beaver. It was the little beaver that led the way for Radisson, for La
Salle, for La Verandrye, for MacKenzie, for Fraser, for Peter Skene
Ogden, from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia, from the Athabasca to the
Sacramento.

While all this is of the past, the heritage of a fur-hunting ancestry
has entered into the very blood and brawn and brain of Canada in a kind
of iron dauntlessness that makes for manhood. Some of her greatest
leaders--like Strathcona and MacKenzie--have been known as "Men of the
North"; and whether they have fur-traded or not, nearly all those "Men
of the North" who have made their mark have had the iron dauntlessness
of the hunter in their blood. It is a sort of tonic from the
out-of-doors, like the ozone you breathe, which fills body and soul
with zest. Canada is sensitive to any reference to her fur trade for
fear the world regard her as a perpetual fur domain. Her northern
zones are a perpetual fur domain--we may as well acknowledge that--they
can never be anything else; and Canada should serve notice on the
softer races of the world that she does not want them. They can stand
up neither to her climate nor to her measure of a man, but far from
cause of regret, this is a thing for gratulation. Canada can never be
an overcrowded land, where soft races crowd for room, like slugs under
a board. She will always have her spacious domain of the North--a
perpetual fur preserve, a perpetual hunting ground, where dauntless
spirits will venture to match themselves against the powers of death;
and from that North will ever emerge the type of man who masters life.

II

The last chapter of the fur trade has not been written--as many assert.
The oldest industry of mankind, the most heroic and protective against
the elements--against Fenris and Loki and all those Spirits of E