the regular tide of emigration, and serves to make the
land known. If you asked a State-owned railway to gamble on the chance
of drawing tourists, the Commissioner of Railways would prove to you
that the experiment could never succeed, and that it was wrong to risk
the taxpayers' money in erecting first-class hotels. Yet South Africa
could, even now, be made a tourists' place--if only the railroads and
steamship lines had faith.

On thinking things over I suspect I was not intended to appreciate the
merits of British Columbia too highly. Maybe I misjudged; maybe she was
purposely misrepresented; but I seemed to hear more about 'problems'
and 'crises' and 'situations' in her borders than anywhere else. So far
as eye or ear could gather, the one urgent problem was to find enough
men and women to do the work in hand.

Lumber, coal, minerals, fisheries, fit soil for fruit, dairy, and
poultry farms are all there in a superb climate. The natural beauty of
earth and sky match these lavish gifts; to which are added thousands of
miles of safe and sheltered waterways for coastal trade; deep harbours
that need no dredge; the ground-works of immense and ice-free ports--all
the title-deeds to half the trade of Asia. For the people's pleasure and
good disport salmon, trout, quail, and pheasant play in front of and
through the suburbs of her capitals. A little axe-work and
road-metalling gives a city one of the loveliest water-girt parks that
we have outside the tropics. Another town is presented with a hundred
islands, knolls, wooded coves, stretches of beach, and dingles, laid
down as expressly for camp-life, picnics, and boating parties, beneath
skies never too hot and rarely too cold. If they care to lift up their
eyes from their almost subtropical gardens they can behold snowy peaks
across blue bays, which must be good for the soul. Though they face a
sea out of which any portent may arise, they are not forced to protect
or even to police its waters. They are as ignorant of drouth, murrain,
pestilence locusts, and blight, as they are of the true meaning of want
and fear.

Such a land is good for an energetic man. It is also not so bad for the
loafer. I was, as I have told you, instructed on its, drawbacks. I was
to understand that there was no certainty in any employment; and that a
man who earned immense wages for six months of the year would have to be
kept by the community if he fell out of work for the other six. I was
no