Men pitched their homesteads to the winds and trekked penniless for the mines.  Women bought mining shares for a dollar that were not worth ten cents.  Clerks, railroad hands, seamstresses, waitresses—­all were infected by the mania.  In vain the wheat provinces pointed out that one single year’s wheat crop would exceed in value all the gold mined in the North in fifty years.  Nothing could stem the madness.  You could pave Kootenay with the fortunes lost there or go to Klondike by the bones of the dead bleaching the trail.

But behold the unexpected Effect!  Adventurers from all the earth rushing to the gold mines passed over unpeopled plains of seeming boundlessness.  Land in the western states was selling at this time at from seventeen dollars in the remote sections to seventy-five dollars an acre near markets.  Here was land in these Canadian plains to be had for nothing but the preemption fee of ten dollars and three years’ residence.

“I didn’t take up a homestead meaning to farm it,” said a disappointed fortune seeker to me on the banks of the Saskatchewan.  “I did it because I was dead broke, and it seemed to me the easiest way to make three thousand dollars.  I could earn three dollars a day well-driving, and then at the end of my homestead term sell this one hundred and sixty acres for three thousand dollars.”

Do you appreciate the amazing optimistic confidence of this bankrupt argonaut?  We could not sell that land for fifty cents an acre.  To use the words of a former Minister of the Interior, “We could not bring settlers in by the scruff of the neck and dump them on the land.”  (There had been fewer than two thousand immigrants the year that minister made that apology for hard times to an audience in Winnipeg.) But this penniless settler had seen it happen in his own home state of Iowa.  He had seen land increase in value from nothing an acre to ten dollars and twenty dollars and seventy-five dollars and one hundred dollars, and he sat him down on the bare prairie in a tar-papered shanty to help the same process along in Canada.  He never had the faintest shadow of a doubt of his hopes materializing.  He had gambled on the gold and he had lost; and behold him casting another throw of the dice in the face of Fate, and gambling on the land; and please note—­he won out.  He was one of the multitude who won out of the land what they had lost on gold—­who plowed out of the prairie what they had sunk in a hole in the ground in a mine!

Another twist of the capricious Wheel of Fate!  We didn’t send Clifford Sifton down from the West to boom Canada.  We didn’t know a boom was coming.  Nobody saw it.  Clifford Sifton was one of the youngest Cabinet Ministers ever appointed in Canada.  There was a fight on between the Province of Manitoba and the Dominion government as to the right of the province to abolish separate schools.  Had the province exceeded its rights?  The dispute