efficient school management, the schools of Winnipeg are probably unsurpassed in any country, and the same is true of many other places in the Province.  Two Winnipeg schools bear the names of Selkirk and Isbister.  The University of Manitoba, with its seven affiliated colleges and twelve hundred and forty candidates in 1909 for its several examinations has its seat at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, and one of the colleges is on the very lot where Lord Selkirk stood and divided up their lands to the Colonists.

[Illustration:  Alexander Isbister, LL.B.  Red River Patriot and Benefactor of University of Manitoba.]

One of the most continued and aggressive struggles which Lord Selkirk’s Colonists maintained was seen in the efforts put forth to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, and after the manner of their fathers.  Their perseverance which showed itself in the erection of old Kildonan Church in the year immediately after the destructive flood of 1852, bore fruit in succeeding years.  They were always a religious people.  No one can even estimate what their religious disposition did in a miscellaneous gathering of people who had, being scattered over the posts of the fur traders, been in most cases, without any religious opportunities whatever, before their coming to settle on Red River.  The sturdy stand for principle which the Selkirk Colonists made created an atmosphere which has remained until this day.  The well-nigh forty years of religious life of Manitoba has been marked by a good understanding among the several churches, by an energetic zeal in carrying church services in the very first year of their settlement to hundreds of new communities.  The generosity of the people in erecting churches for themselves in maintaining among themselves their cherished beliefs, is in striking contrast to the new settlements of the United States.  In the new Western States the religious movements fell behind the Western march of the immigrant.  In the Canadian West from the very day that old Verandrye took his priest with him, from the time when the first Colonists brought a devout layman as their religious teacher with them, from the hour when the stalwart Provencher came, from the era when the self-denying West visited the Indian camps and Settlers’ camp alike, from the time when the saintly Black came as the natural leader of the Selkirk Colonists, and during the forty years of the development of Manitoba, the foundations have been laid in that righteousness which exalteth a nation.

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CHAPTER XXX.

How strange and wonderful is the web of destiny, which is being woven in our national, provincial and family life, which we poor mortals are simply the individual strands.