dian
population two-thirds are women and children--over an area the size of
two-thirds of Europe--I ask you frankly, do you think they are going to
exterminate the game very fast? Remember the climate of the North
takes care of her own. White men can stand only so many years of that
lonely cold, and then they have "to come out" or they dwarf mentally
and degenerate.

Take a single section of this great northern fur preserve--Labrador,
which I visited some years ago. In area Labrador is 530,000 square
miles, two and a half times the size of France, twice the size of
Germany, twice the size of Austria-Hungary. Statistical books set the
population down at four thousand; but the Moravian missionaries there
told me that including the Eskimo who come down the coast in summer and
the fishermen who come up the coast in summer the total population was
probably seventeen thousand. Now Labrador is one of the finest game
preserves in the world. On its rocky hills and watery upper barrens
where settlement can never come are to be found silver fox--the finest
in the world, so fine that the Revillons have established a
fur-breeding post for silver fox on one of the islands--cross fox
almost as fine as silver, black and red fox, the best otter in the
world, the finest marten in America, bear, very fine Norway lynx, fine
ermine, rabbit or hare galore, very fine wolverine, fisher, muskrat,
coarse harp seal, wolf, caribou, beaver, a few mink. Is it common
sense to think the population of a few thousands can hunt out a fur
empire here the size of two Germanies? Remember it was not the hunter
who exterminated the buffalo and the beaver and the seal and the otter!
The poacher destroyed one group of sea furs; the railway and the farm
supplanted the other. West of Mackenzie River and north of British
Columbia is a game region almost similar to Labrador in its furred
habitat, with the exception that the western preserve is warmer and
more wooded. Northward from Ontario is another hinterland which from
its very nature must always be a great hunting ground. Minerals
exist--as the old French traders well knew and the latter-day
discoveries of Cobalt prove--and there is also heavy timber; but north
of the Great Clay Belt, between the Clay Belt and the Bay, lies the
impenetrable and--I think--indestructible game ground. Swamp and rock
will prevent agricultural settlement but will provide an ideal fur
preserve similar in climate to Labra