It is said that when the little riot broke out in Vancouver these ‘heathen’ were invited by other Asiatics to join in defending themselves against the white man.  They refused on the ground that they were subjects of the King.  I wonder what tales they sent back to their villages, and where, and how fully, every detail of the affair was talked over.  White men forget that no part of the Empire can live or die to itself.

Here is a rather comic illustration of this on the material side.  The wonderful waters between Vancouver and Victoria are full of whales, leaping and rejoicing in the strong blue all about the steamer.  There is, therefore, a whalery on an island near by, and I had the luck to travel with one of the shareholders.

‘Whales are beautiful beasts,’ he said affectionately.  ’We’ve a contract with a Scotch firm for every barrel of oil we can deliver for years ahead.  It’s reckoned the best for harness-dressing.’

He went on to tell me how a swift ship goes hunting whales with a bomb-gun and explodes shells into their insides so that they perish at once.

’All the old harpoon and boat business would take till the cows come home.  We kill ’em right off.’

’And how d’you strip ’em?’

It seemed that the expeditious ship carried also a large air-pump, and pumped up the carcass to float roundly till she could attend to it.  At the end of her day’s kill she would return, towing sometimes as many as four inflated whales to the whalery, which is a factory full of modern appliances.  The whales are hauled up inclined planes like logs to a sawmill, and as much of them as will not make oil for the Scotch leather-dresser, or cannot be dried for the Japanese market, is converted into potent manure.

‘No manure can touch ours,’ said the shareholder.  ’It’s so rich in bone, d’you see.  The only thing that has beat us up to date is their hides; but we’ve fixed up a patent process now for turning ’em into floorcloth.  Yes, they’re beautiful beasts.  That fellow,’ he pointed to a black hump in a wreath of spray, ‘would cut up a miracle.’

‘If you go on like this you won’t have any whales left,’ I said.

’That is so.  But the concern pays thirty per cent, and—­a few years back, no one believed in it.’

I forgave him everything for the last sentence.

A CONCLUSION

Canada possesses two pillars of Strength and Beauty in Quebec and Victoria.  The former ranks by herself among those Mother-cities of whom none can say ‘This reminds me.’  To realise Victoria you must take all that the eye admires most in Bournemouth, Torquay, the Isle of Wight, the Happy Valley at Hong-Kong, the Doon, Sorrento, and Camps Bay; add reminiscences of the Thousand Islands, and arrange the whole round the Bay of Naples, with some Himalayas for the background.