that energy wasted on 'social
reform' could be diverted to decently thought out and supervised
emigration work ('Labour' does not yet object to people working on the
land) we might do something worth talking about. The races which work
and do not form Committees are going into the country at least as fast
as ours. It makes one jealous and afraid to watch aliens taking, and
taking honestly, so much of this treasure of good fortune and sane
living.

There was a town down the road which I had first heard discussed nigh
twenty years ago by a broken-down prospector in a box-car. 'Young
feller,' said he, after he had made a professional prophecy,' you'll
hear of that town if you live. She's born lucky.'

I saw the town later--it was a siding by a trestle bridge where Indians
sold beadwork--and as years passed I gathered that the old tramp's
prophecy had come true, and that Luck of some kind had struck the little
town by the big river. So, this trip, I stopped to make sure. It was a
beautiful town of six thousand people, and a railway junction, beside a
high-girdered iron bridge; there was a public garden with trees at the
station. A company of joyous men and women, whom that air and that
light, and their own goodwill, made our brothers and sisters, came along
in motors, and gave us such a day as never was.

'What about the Luck?' I asked.

'Heavens!' said one. 'Haven't you heard about our natural gas--the
greatest natural gas in the world? Oh, come and see!'

I was whirled off to a roundhouse full of engines and machinery-shops,
worked by natural gas which comes out of the earth, smelling slightly of
fried onions, at a pressure of six hundred pounds, and by valves and
taps is reduced to four pounds. There was Luck enough to make a
metropolis. Imagine a city's heating and light--to say nothing of
power--laid on at no greater expense than that of piping!

'Are there any limits to the possibilities of it?' I demanded.

'Who knows? We're only at the beginning. We'll show you a brick-making
plant, out on the prairie, run by gas. But just now we want to show you
one of our pet farms.'

Away swooped the motors, like swallows, over roads any width you please,
and up on to what looked like the High Veldt itself. A Major of the
Mounted Police, who had done a year at the (Boer) war, told us how the
ostrich-farm fencing and the little meercats sitting up and racing about
South Africa had made him homesick for the sight of the g