then run for free meals at the soup kitchen. There aren't any soup
kitchens out here, and when they found they had to work before they
could eat, they cleared out and gave the country the blame. Men who
are out of work half the time at home get into the habit of depending
on charity keeping them. When you are a hundred miles from a railroad
town, there isn't any charity to keep you out here; you have to hustle
for yourself. But there is a different class of Englishmen coming now.
The men coming now have worked and want to work."

And yet--at another point a hundred miles from settlement I came on a
woman who belonged to that very type that ought never to emigrate. She
was a woman picked out of the slums by a charity organization. She had
presumably been scrubbed and curried and taught household duties before
being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces
in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but
she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the
slum marks--bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining
eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous
phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she had lived in her
shanty three years and it was still bare of comfort as a biscuit box,
to explain why the Dominion regards this type as unsuitable for
pioneering. The American or Canadian wife of a frontiersman would have
had skin robes for rugs, biscuit boxes painted for bureaus, and chairs
hand-hewn out of rough timber upholstered in cheap prints. But the
really amazing thing was the condition of her children. They were fat,
rosy, exuberant in health and energy. They were Canadians. In a
decade they would begin to fill their place as nation makers. Back in
England they would have gone to the human scrap heap in hunger and
rags. Ten years of slums would have made them into what their mother
was--an unfit; but ten years of Canada was making them into robust