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