ve
her own line of six thousand ton steamers to Australia, and the British
investor will no longer throw away his money on hellicat South American
republics, or give it as a hostage to the States. He will keep it in the
family as a wise man should. Then the towns that are to-day the only
names in the wilderness, yes, and some of those places marked on the map
as Hudson Bay Ports, will be cities, because--but it is hopeless to make
people understand that actually and indeed, we _do_ possess an Empire of
which Canada is only one portion--an Empire which is not bounded by
election-returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the South--an
Empire that has not yet been scratched.

[Footnote 1: See pp. 187-188.]

Let us return to the new towns. Three times within one year did fortune
come knocking to the door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that
town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in the days when the
steam-tram ran off the rails twice a week; and once at Spokane Falls.
But in the roar of the land-boom he did not hear her, and she went away
leaving him only a tenderness akin to weakness for all new towns, and a
desire, mercifully limited by lack of money, to gamble in every one of
them. Of all the excitements that life offers there are few to be
compared with the whirl of a red-hot boom; also it is strictly moral,
because you _do_ fairly earn your 'unearned increment' by labour and
perspiration and sitting up far into the night--by working like a fiend,
as all pioneers must do. And consider all that is in it! The headlong
stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for
merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw
material of a city--men, lumber, and shingle--are shot on to the not yet
nailed platform; the slashing out and pegging down of roads across the
blank face of the wilderness; the heaving up amid shouts and yells of
the city's one electric light--a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked
pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town-lots; the roar
of 'Let the woman have it!' that stops all bidding when the one other
woman in the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real-estate
offices; the real-estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious
imagination; the gorgeous pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the
bar-room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland meeting in its
heart; the misspelled curse against 'this dam hole in t