pillars—­acres of mosaic—­steel grilles—­’might be a cathedral.  No one ever told me.’  ’I shouldn’t worry over a Bank that pays its depositors,’ I replied soothingly.  ’There are several like it in Ottawa and Toronto.’  Next he ran across some pictures in some palaces, and was downright angry because no one had told him that there were five priceless private galleries in one city.  ‘Look here!’ he explained.  ’I’ve been seeing Corots, and Greuzes, and Gainsboroughs, and a Holbein, and—­and hundreds of really splendid pictures!’ ’Why shouldn’t you?’ I said.  ’They’ve given up painting their lodges with vermilion hereabouts.’  ’Yes, but what I mean is, have you seen the equipment of their schools and colleges—­desks, libraries, and lavatories?  It’s miles ahead of anything we have and—­no one ever told me.’  ’What was the good of telling?  You wouldn’t have believed.  There’s a building in one of the cities, on the lines of the Sheldonian, but better, and if you go as far as Winnipeg, you’ll see the finest hotel in all the world.’

‘Nonsense!’ he said.  ‘You’re pulling my leg!  Winnipeg’s a prairie-town.’

I left him still lamenting—­about a Club and a Gymnasium this time—­that no one had ever told him about; and still doubting all that he had heard of Wonders to come.

If we could only manacle four hundred Members of Parliament, like the Chinese in the election cartoons, and walk them round the Empire, what an all-comprehending little Empire we should be when the survivors got home!

Certainly the Cities have good right to be proud, and I waited for them to boast; but they were so busy explaining they were only at the beginning of things that, for the honour of the Family, I had to do the boasting.  In this praiseworthy game I credited Melbourne (rightly, I hope, but the pace was too good to inquire) with acres of municipal buildings and leagues of art galleries; enlarged the borders of Sydney harbour to meet a statement about Toronto’s, wharfage; and recommended folk to see Cape Town Cathedral when it should be finished.  But Truth will out even on a visit.  Our Eldest Sister has more of beauty and strength inside her three cities alone than the rest of Us put together.  Yet it would do her no harm to send a commission through the ten great cities of the Empire to see what is being done there in the way of street cleaning, water-supply, and traffic-regulation.

Here and there the people are infected with the unworthy superstition of ‘hustle,’ which means half-doing your appointed job and applauding your own slapdasherie for as long a time as would enable you to finish off two clean pieces of work.  Little congestions of traffic, that an English rural policeman, in a country town, disentangles automatically, are allowed to develop into ten-minute blocks, where wagons and men bang, and back, and blaspheme, for no purpose except to waste time.

The assembly and dispersal of crowds, purchase of tickets, and a good deal of the small machinery of life is clogged and hampered by this unstable, southern spirit which is own brother to Panic.  ‘Hustle’ does not sit well on the national character any more than falsetto or fidgeting becomes grown men.  ‘Drive,’ a laudable and necessary quality, is quite different, and one meets it up the Western Road where the new country is being made.