On the other hand, compared to punishments for property violations, the protection of women and children is ridiculously inadequate.  A man abducting a girl is liable to sentence of five years; a man stealing a cow, to sentence of fourteen years.  Counterfeiting coin is punished by life imprisonment.  Misusing a ward or employee is punished by two years’ imprisonment.  This remissness is no index to a subordinate position by women in Canada.  It is rather simple testimony to the fact that before the influx of alien peoples certain types of crime were unknown.

There is little of sex unrest in Canada.  In fact, sex as sex is not in evidence, which is a symptom of wholesome relationships.  Perhaps I should say there is little of that feminine discontent and revolt so strident in older lands.  This I attribute to two facts:  an overplus of men, and boundless opportunity and freedom for the expenditure of unused energies.  In certain sections of England, women over-balanced men before the war as ten to one.  What the over-balance will be after the war, one can only guess.  When women who want to marry are not married, or married to types different from themselves—­which must happen when the sexes are in disproportion—­unhappiness must result.  Woman is at war, she knows not with what.  When women who are full of energy and ability have nothing to do, there is bound to be unhappiness.  In Canada a woman has perfect freedom to do anything she chooses.  Her opportunity is limited only by her own personality.  What she wills, she may, if she can.  If she can’t, then her quarrel must be with self, not with life.  Children can not choose their parents; but a woman can choose the parent of her child; and when her choice is high and wide and happy, it bodes better for the race than when conditions have forced her into an alliance that must be more or less of an armed truce on a low plane.

As an example of the fairness of marriage laws in Canada, if a fur-trader marry an Indian woman—­according to the custom of the tribe, simply taking her to wife without ceremony, she is his legal heir, and her children are his legal heirs.  This was established in a famous trial in the courts of Quebec.  A trader became contractor and politician.  When prosperity came, he discarded his Indian wife and married an English girl.  On his death the Indian wife and children sued for his estate.  It was awarded to them by the courts and established a precedent that guaranteed social status to the children of such unions.  This is one of the things that easterners can not comprehend.  I have never heard the opprobrious phrase “squaw man” used on the Canadian frontier; and descendants of the MacKenzies, the Isbisters, the Hardistys, the Strathconas, the Macleans, the MacLeods—­blush, not with shame but pride, in acknowledging the Indian strain of blood.