to do was to borrow Buck’s dog, who had been duly brought over with the calf, and left on the mountain.  No old man Butler did not go hunting alone, but waited till Buck came back from town.  Buck sold the calf for a dollar and a quarter and not for seventy-five cents as was falsely asserted by interested parties. Then the two went after the fox together.  This much learned, everybody breathes freely, if life has not been complicated in the meantime by more strange counter-marchings.

Five or six sleighs a day we can understand, if we know why they are abroad; but any metropolitan rush of traffic disturbs and excites.

LETTERS TO THE FAMILY

1908

These letters appeared in newspapers during the spring of 1908, after a trip to Canada undertaken in the autumn of 1907.  They are now reprinted without alteration.

THE ROAD TO QUEBEC. 
A PEOPLE AT HOME. 
CITIES AND SPACES. 
NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY. 
LABOUR. 
THE FORTUNATE TOWNS. 
MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC. 
A CONCLUSION.

* * * * *

THE ROAD TO QUEBEC

(1907)

It must be hard for those who do not live there to realise the cross between canker and blight that has settled on England for the last couple of years.  The effects of it are felt throughout the Empire, but at headquarters we taste the stuff in the very air, just as one tastes iodoform in the cups and bread-and-butter of a hospital-tea.  So far as one can come at things in the present fog, every form of unfitness, general or specialised, born or created, during the last generation has combined in one big trust—­a majority of all the minorities—­to play the game of Government.  Now that the game ceases to amuse, nine-tenths of the English who set these folk in power are crying, ’If we had only known what they were going to do we should never have voted for them!’

Yet, as the rest of the Empire perceived at the time, these men were always perfectly explicit as to their emotions and intentions.  They said first, and drove it home by large pictures, that no possible advantage to the Empire outweighed the cruelty and injustice of charging the British working man twopence halfpenny a week on some of his provisions.  Incidentally they explained, so that all Earth except England heard it, that the Army was wicked; much of the Navy unnecessary; that half the population of one of the Colonies practised slavery, with torture, for the sake of private gain, and that the mere name of Empire wearied and sickened them.  On these grounds they stood to save England; on these grounds they were elected, with what seemed like clear orders to destroy the blood-stained fetish of Empire as soon as possible.  The present mellow condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa is proof of their honesty and obedience.  Over