opinion will be so strong that there will be a national movement to
bring together the idle people and the idle land. We are paying a high
price for our tuition, but we must admit that the war is a great
teacher.

There is a growing sentiment against the holding-up of tracts of land
by speculators waiting for the increase in value which comes by the
hard work of settlers. Every sod turned by the real, honest settler,
who comes to make his home, increases the value of the section of land
next him, probably held by a railway company, and the increase makes
it harder for some other settler to buy it. By his industry the
settler makes money for the railway company, but incidentally makes
his own chance of acquiring a neighbor more remote!

The wild-lands tax which prevails in the western provinces of the
Dominion, and which we hope will be increased, will make it
unprofitable to hold land idle, and will do much, if made heavy
enough, to liberate land for settlement.

As it is now, people who have no money to buy land have to go long
distances from the railroad to get homesteads, and there suffer all
the inconveniences and hardships and dangers of pioneer life, miles
from neighbors, many miles from a doctor, and without school or
church; while great tracts of splendid land lie idle and unimproved,
close beside the little towns, held in the tight clasp of a
hypothetical owner far away.

Western Canada has a land problem which war conditions have
intensified. But people are beginning to talk of these things, and the
next few years will see radical changes.