At every step of my journey people assured me that I had seen nothing of Canada.  Silent mining men from the North; fruit-farmers from the Okanagan Valley; foremen of railway gangs, not so long from English public schools; the oldest inhabitant of the town of Villeneuve, aged twenty-eight; certain English who lived on the prairie and contrived to get fun and good fellowship as well as money; the single-minded wheat-growers and cattle-men; election agents; police troopers expansive in the dusk of wayside halts; officials dependent on the popular will, who talked as delicately as they walked; and queer souls who did not speak English, and said so loudly in the dining-car—­each, in his or her own way, gave me to understand this.  My excursion bore the same relation to their country as a ’bus-ride down the Strand bears to London, so I knew how they felt.

The excuse is that our own flesh and blood are more interesting than anybody else, and I held by birth the same right in them and their lives as they held in any other part of the Empire.  Because they had become a people within the Empire my right was admitted and no word spoken; which would not have been the case a few years ago.  One may mistake many signs on the road, but there is no mistaking the spirit of sane and realised nationality, which fills the land from end to end precisely as the joyous hum of a big dynamo well settled to its load makes a background to all the other shop noises.  For many reasons that Spirit came late, but since it has come after the day of little things, doubts, and open or veiled contempts, there is less danger that it will go astray among the boundless wealth and luxury that await it.  The people, the schools, the churches, the Press in its degree, and, above all, the women, understand without manifestoes that their land must now as always abide under the Law in deed and in word and in thought.  This is their caste-mark, the ark of their covenant, their reason for being what they are.  In the big cities, with their village-like lists of police court offences; in the wide-open little Western towns where the present is as free as the lives and the future as safe as the property of their inhabitants; in the coast cities galled and humiliated at their one night’s riot (’It’s not our habit, Sir!  It’s not our habit!’); up among the mountains where the officers of the law track and carefully bring into justice the astounded malefactor; and behind the orderly prairies to the barren grounds, as far as a single white man can walk, the relentless spirit of the breed follows up, and oversees, and controls.  It does not much express itself in words, but sometimes, in intimate discussion, one is privileged to catch a glimpse of the inner fires.  They burn hotly.

‘We do not mean to be de-civilised,’ said the first man with whom I talked about it.

That was the answer throughout—­the keynote and the explanation.