It comes in all right,
doesn't it?'
About the time the noble original was put up in England Drake might have
been sailing somewhere off this very coast. So, you see, Victoria
lawfully holds the copyright.
I tried honestly to render something of the colour, the gaiety, and the
graciousness of the town and the island, but only found myself piling up
unbelievable adjectives, and so let it go with a hundred other wonders
and repented that I had wasted my time and yours on the anxious-eyed
gentlemen who talked of 'drawbacks.' A verse cut out of a newspaper
seems to sum up their attitude:
As the Land of Little Leisure
Is the place where things are done,
So the Land of Scanty Pleasure
Is the place for lots of fun.
In the Land of Plenty Trouble
People laugh as people should,
But there's some one always kicking
In the Land of Heap Too Good!
At every step of my journey people assured me that I had seen nothing of
Canada. Silent mining men from the North; fruit-farmers from the
Okanagan Valley; foremen of railway gangs, not so long from English
public schools; the oldest inhabitant of the town of Villeneuve, aged
twenty-eight; certain English who lived on the prairie and contrived to
get fun and good fellowship as well as money; the single-minded
wheat-growers and cattle-men; election agents; police troopers
expansive in the dusk of wayside halts; officials dependent on the
popular will, who talked as delicately as they walked; and queer souls
who did not speak English, and said so loudly in the dining-car - each,
in his or her own way, gave me to understand this. My excursion bore the
same relation to their country as a 'bus-ride down the Strand bears to
London, so I knew how they felt.
The excuse is that our own flesh and blood are more interesting than
anybody else, and I held by birth the same right in them and their lives
as they held in any other part of the Empire. Because they had become a
people within the Empire my right was admitted and no word spoken; which
would not have been the case a few years ago. One may mistake many signs
on the road, but there is no mistaking the spirit of sane and realised
nationality, which fills the land from end to end precisely as the
joyous hum of a big dynamo well settled to its load makes a background
to all the other shop noises. For many reasons that Spirit came late,
but since it has come after the day of little things, doubts, and open
or veiled contempts, there is less danger that it will go astray among
the boundless wealth and luxury that await it.
