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 not to be deceived by golden pictures set before me by interested parties (that is to say, by almost every one I met), and I was to give due weight to the difficulties and discouragements that beset the intending immigrant.  Were I an intending immigrant I would risk a good deal of discomfort to get on to the land in British Columbia; and were I rich, with no attachments outside England, I would swiftly buy me a farm or a house in that country for the mere joy of it.

I forgot those doleful and unhumorous conspirators among people who fervently believed in the place; but afterwards the memory left a bad taste in my mouth.  Cities, like women, cannot be too careful what sort of men they allow to talk about them.

Time had changed Vancouver literally out of all knowledge.  From the station to the suburbs, and back to the wharves, every step was strange, and where I remembered open spaces and still untouched timber, the tramcars were fleeting people out to a lacrosse game.  Vancouver is an aged city, for only a few days previous to my arrival the Vancouver Baby—­i.e. the first child born in Vancouver—­had been married.