y inevitable
consequences. For another, the law in Canada exists and is administered,
not as a surprise, a joke, a favour, a bribe, or a Wrestling Turk
exhibition, but as an integral part of the national character--no more
to be forgotten or talked about than one's trousers. If you kill, you
hang. If you steal, you go to jail. This has worked toward peace,
self-respect, and, I think, the innate dignity of the people. On the
other hand--which is where the trouble will begin--railways and steamers
make it possible nowadays to bring in persons who need never lose touch
of hot and cold water-taps, spread tables, and crockery till they are
turned out, much surprised, into the wilderness. They clean miss the
long weeks of salt-water and the slow passage across the plains which
pickled and tanned the early emigrants. They arrive with soft bodies and
unaired souls. I had this vividly brought home to me by a man on a train
among the Selkirks. He stood on the safely railed rear-platform, looked
at the gigantic pine-furred shoulder round which men at their lives'
risk had led every yard of the track, and chirruped: 'I say, why can't
all this be nationalised?' There was nothing under heaven except the
snows and the steep to prevent him from dropping off the cars and
hunting a mine for himself. Instead of which he went into the
dining-car. That is one type.

A man told me the old tale of a crowd of Russian immigrants who at a big
fire in a city 'verted to the ancestral type, and blocked the streets
yelling, 'Down with the Czar!' That is another type. A few days later I
was shown a wire stating that a community of Doukhobors--Russians
again--had, not for the first time, undressed themselves, and were
fleeing up the track to meet the Messiah before the snow fell. Police
were pursuing them with warm underclothing, and trains would please
take care not to run over them.

So there you have three sort of steam-borne unfitness--soft, savage, and
mad. There is a fourth brand, which may be either home-grown or
imported, but democracies do not recognise it, of downright bad
folk--grown, healthy men and women who honestly rejoice in doing evil.
These four classes acting together might conceivably produce a rather
pernicious democracy; alien hysteria, blood-craze, and the like,
reinforcing local ignorance, sloth, and arrogance. For example, I read a
letter in a paper sympathising with these same Doukhobors. The writer
knew a community of exce