rs."

"That," she answered, "is not democracy; it is revolution." She was
thinking of those Old World hard-and-fast divisions of society into
royalty, aristocracy, commons, peasantry.

"It is not revolution," I explained. "It is rebirth! When you send
your _emigre_ out to us, he is a made-over man."

But it is not given to all _emigre's_ to become great capitalists or
great leaders. Some who have the opportunity have not the ability, and
the majority would not, for all the rewards that greatness offers,
choose careers that entail long years of nerve-wracking, unflagging
labor. But on a minor scale the same process of making over takes
place. One case will illustrate.

Some years before immigration to Canada had become general, two or
three hundred Icelanders were landed in Winnipeg destitute. From some
reason, which I have forgotten,--probably the quarantine of an
immigrant,--the Icelanders could not be housed in the government
immigration hall. They were absolutely without money, household goods,
property of any sort except clothing, and that was scant, the men
having but one suit of the poorest clothes, the women thin homespun
dresses so worn one could see many of them had no underwear. The
people represented the very dregs of poverty. Withdrawing to the
vacant lots in the west end of Winnipeg,--at that time a mere
town,--the newcomers slept for the first nights, herded in the rooms of
an Icelander opulent enough to have rented a house. Those who could
not gain admittance to this house slept under the high board sidewalks,
then a feature of the new town. I remember as a child watching them
sit on the high sidewalk till it was dark, then roll under.
Fortunately it was summer, but it was useless for people in this
condition to go bare to the prairie farm. To make land yield, you must
have house and barns and stock and implements, and I doubt if these
people had as much as a jackknife. I remember how two or three of the
older women used to sit crying each night in despair till they
disappeared in the crowded house, fourteen or {xiii} twenty of them to
a room. Within a week, the men were all at work sawing wood from door
to door at a dollar and a half a cord the women out by the day washing
at a dollar a day. Within a month they had earned enough to buy lumber
and tar paper. Tar-papered shanties went up like mushrooms on the
vacant lots. Before winter each family had bought a cow and chickens.
I sha