It was an experience to move in the midst of a new contempt.  One understands and accepts the bitter scorn of the Dutch, the hopeless anger of one’s own race in South Africa is also part of the burden; but the Canadian’s profound, sometimes humorous, often bewildered, always polite contempt of the England of to-day cuts a little.  You see, that late unfashionable war[3] was very real to Canada.  She sent several men to it, and a thinly-populated country is apt to miss her dead more than a crowded one.  When, from her point of view, they have died for no conceivable advantage, moral or material, her business instincts, or it may be mere animal love of her children, cause her to remember and resent quite a long time after the thing should be decently forgotten.  I was shocked at the vehemence with which some men (and women) spoke of the affair.  Some of them went so far as to discuss—­on the ship and elsewhere—­whether England would stay in the Family or whether, as some eminent statesman was said to have asserted in private talk, she would cut the painter to save expense.  One man argued, without any heat, that she would not so much break out of the Empire in one flurry, as politically vend her children one by one to the nearest Power that threatened her comfort; the sale of each case to be preceded by a steady blast of abuse of the chosen victim.  He quoted—­really these people have viciously long memories!—­the five-year campaign of abuse against South Africans as a precedent and a warning.

[Footnote 3:  Boer ‘war’ of 1899-1902.]

Our Tobacco Parliament next set itself to consider by what means, if this happened, Canada could keep her identity unsubmerged; and that led to one of the most curious talks I have ever heard.  It seemed to be decided that she might—­just might—­pull through by the skin of her teeth as a nation—­if (but this was doubtful) England did not help others to hammer her.  Now, twenty years ago one would not have heard any of this sort of thing.  If it sounds a little mad, remember that the Mother Country was throughout considered as a lady in violent hysterics.

Just at the end of the talk one of our twelve or thirteen hundred steerage-passengers leaped overboard, ulstered and booted, into a confused and bitter cold sea.  Every horror in the world has its fitting ritual.  For the fifth time—­and four times in just such weather—­I heard the screw stop; saw our wake curve like a whiplash as the great township wrenched herself round; the lifeboat’s crew hurry to the boat-deck; the bare-headed officer race up the shrouds and look for any sign of the poor head that had valued itself so lightly.  A boat amid waves can see nothing.  There was nothing to see from the first.  We waited and quartered the ground back and forth for a long hour, while the rain fell and the seas slapped along our sides, and the steam fluttered drearily through the escapes.  Then we went ahead.