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Mr. Sifton did was to secure agricultural settlers in large numbers, look after them upon arrival and locate them upon suitable lands. Steps had then to be taken to see that they were not left without any prospect of communication and facilities for transporting their products.

As to the work of getting settlers, the whole plan may be summed up in one sentence. They were procured by constant publication and advertising of the natural advantages of Western Canada as a field for settlement. A systematic and determined effort was made to convince the people of the world that Northwestern Canada was the best available place for intending settlers to locate. This was done by the use of every possible means of publicity, newspapers, circulars, pamphlets and publications of every description. The one rule that was followed in all publications was that no writer or agent was permitted to overstate the truth. It is somewhat remarkable that after eight years of this systematic campaign it is not known that there is a single case in which a settler has come to Canada and afterwards complained that the Government publications had misrepresented the facts.

It is considered that the money which has been expended has been economically and profitably expended because it will bring about an enormous development in the near future and in no other way could the attention of the world have been convincingly directed to the agricultural resources of the country. The Sifton settlement policy has been carried on upon the principle that the land itself is of no value to the Government or to the people as a political aggregation. The value of the land consists in its power to profitably support a population, and it is regarded as being vastly more important to have a prosperous settler upon a quarter section of land producing a certain amount of natural wealth year by year than to sell the land to some person who will pay interest upon the capital sum represented by its supposed value at such a

price as under ordinary circumstances could be procured, that is, at the beginning of the movement, from two dollars to six dollars per acre. There is no doubt that the phenomenal increase in the prosperity of Canada during the last few years has been due to the rapid development of the West as it is actually taking place and also in a considerable degree to the confidence in the future growth of the country engendered by the success of its settlement policy and the results which business men expect to flow from it in the future. By that I mean that the business men have engaged in extensive enterprises and resting confidently on their belief as to what will take place in the future they have, no doubt, gone further than they would have gone, were it not for their belief in the rapid expansion of Canadian commerce likely to take place as a result of the agricultural production of the Northwest.

The settlers have been the best advance agents for the Government. These have been uniformly contented and satisfied, if they have ever done any farming and known what good soil is, the discontented ones being a few remittance men who have never succeeded until their incomes ceased and they had to "root" or "die."

It has been said that soon there will not be a wheat farm more than nine miles from transportation. Over $300,000,000 has been authorized to be spent on new railroads, all of which has grown out of the Sifton colonization plan, by which the inhabitable and cultivable areas of Canada have been practically doubled, and in which its population in another quarter of a century will have been multiplied by ten.

The net result of the Sifton immigration policy, now administered with great force and ability by Frank Oliver, the present Minister of the Interior, is that the tide of immigration, which began from practically nothing, has developed from the United States alone to five thousand a month. And now the ten years show 300,000 Americans who have

become Canadian farmers, with 325,000 from Great Britain and 260,000 from the rest of the world. This because the Canadian Government was not afraid to put the machinery of Government behind the task, to make it a national concern. But this is not all. This work has been stronger and more far-sighted than at first it seems. It has been a strong factor in helping to correct a wrong world-tendency,-the movement away from the soil. It is not only in the acres they have made produce; it is not only in the men and wealth this work has brought to Canada; it is not only in the growing cities and railroads and national prosperity which have followed the realization of this program. They have laid the foundations for a healthy and normal and wholesome civilization, in checking the tendency away from the soil. In every civilized nation there has been an alarming tendency from the farm to the factory. Not only has the national character been deteriorating in congested industrial centers, but the world is on the point of making more goods than it can consume. A world-glut of goods is due about the time Japan and China, with their hordes of cheap labor, are in the field, equipped-and then a worldpanic. One thing only can check this tendency, though this will not solve the whole international problem. That is the return to the soil. And nearly half the population of all Canada are tilling the soil. While this proportion remains, and while there are but few large and congested and reeking centers of industrialism, where millions live on inherited wealth or on their wits, and other millions are herded together with a tenure on life through the precarious law of supply and demand-Canada, next to the soil, must be strong and sane and free.

Canadian statesmanship has made a notable and worthy contribution to the cause of world progress. But what is Great Britain doing to meet the challenge of Canadian statesmanship? What are the English statesmen doing to match

the splendid policies of Sir Wilfred Laurier, of Mr. Sifton and Mr. Oliver? To the plain, average sense of the plain, average man, it ought to go without saying that so long as there is an empty British acre capable of producing bread, there ought not to be an empty British stomach clamoring vainly for it. If Great Britain were ruled with the intelligence of Japanese statesmanship, the empty hands of England and the empty lands of Canada would somehow get together-and that in no haphazard, blind drift of fortuitous concourses of impecunious human atoms, but by intelligent foresight and oversight and plan and will.

There are at present twice as many people in England in a state of chronic destitution as there are people in all Canada, and it does not seem to have occurred to Great Britain that there is any vital relation between these two facts.

It has not been long since there were gigantic demonstrations in London of both men and women out of work and out of bread, who sent vast committees to Mr. Balfour, asking relief. This worthy statesman showed the palms of both hands and sent them away to shift for themselves-and to starve saying nothing could be done, while English banks were rolling with uninvested wealth and British lands across seas were growing bunch-grass for wandering herds which could be used for raising food for the foodless and workless millions of mankind.

It so happens that on the day of this writing the despatches from London are full of a threatened railroad strike. They state that Mr. Bell, M.P., and secretary of the Railway Servants' Society, made the statement that there are over 100,000 men employed by the railroads of the United Kingdom who are paid less than five dollars a week. The railway managers declare they are receiving so many applications for these prospective empty jobs that their clerks cannot handle the mail. And yet there is a long editorial

in the same paper on the unequaled prosperity of Great Britain. Is there not something wrong here? Something radically-perhaps wickedly-wrong? Does it not take one's breath out of one's mouth, while shouting for the continued supremacy of Anglo-Saxon civilization, to think that here is the apex of it, the crown and glory of it this benign, divine laissez-faire-100,000 British workmen receiving less than five dollars a week and countless thousands who must be worse off, if they are ready to take their jobs?

Is it not worth drifting England's while to do something in so simple a problem of common humanity and commonwealth, when one stone will kill two birds so obviously and so easily?

Here is the problem. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has stated it from the British standpoint and he has, of course, done his duty as Premier of Great Britain. There is nothing more to do. Thirteen million English people being ground to powder between the benign millstones of economic laissez-faire. Only he has not stated it this way. That is the end of it. Let them grind. The weak must perish. The strong must win. The race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Reason is divorced from statecraft, and Chance, the blind God, must rule the world-excepting Germany and Japan-whose statesmen know better than to sacrifice to an exploded academic idea a potential industrial army of 13,000,000 people.

England is facing a stormy future with her enemies waxing strong, and in her own congested haunts is growing up a

deteriorating race-millions of men and women whose standard of living their rulers refuse to raise, whose labor they refuse to protect, who are being driven to the wall by the organized races of mankind. On the other hand hundreds of millions of fertile British acres are awaiting the plough and the seed and the toil. Who will help them together? Not Mr. Balfour. Not the present Premier. Not laissez-faire-"every fellow for himself" England. They must beg for bread, and, what is more pitiable, they must beg for work. And what is even yet more pathetic-tragic-they must beg for work which their brethren must starve to quit. If there is no divine reason in the world, there should be no constructive reason in politics. It is the philosophy of atheism and anarchyindividualism. Things may happen. They must never be brought about. The destinies of the destitute and helpless must be left to the whimsical movements of a blind, unreasoning chance.

No wonder the twentieth century stretches arms out to Canada and constructive nation-building, where, in the vast evolutionary movement, intelligence and will are themselves elements of the cosmic process by which the work of a hundred years is done in one year-and done better.

Let England do something constructive, putting into the hands of British subjects-not allowing to go by default to the Japanese-the splendid resources of Canadian prairie and forest and fishery and mine. FRANK VROOMAN.

Victoria, B. C.

A POSSIBLE WAY OUT.

BY HON. LUCIUS F. C. GARVIN.

TO DOUBT the Constitution of the United States is open to improvement. It is highly probable that certain amendments to that instrument, if submitted to the people, would receive a majority vote. Unquestionably the election of United States Senators directly by the people of the several states would be endorsed. Very likely, in view of the position already taken by many of the states, the substitution of popular election for appointment of judges of the Supreme Court would also be approved. It is well-known, however, that the alteration of the National Constitution in any particular is an extraordinarily difficult matter.

But, without emphasizing the difficulty of making any changes, it is well worthy of full consideration whether the admitted failures in practical operation of our form of government may not be corrected without any amendment whatsoever of the nation's organic law.

In the first place, a great deal is still to be said in favor of the general plan adopted by the wise men who formed the National Constitution. The convention of 1787 was characterized necessarily by compromise, in which, many think, the democratic principles of the Declaration of Independence were sacrificed.

But sound reasons may even now be given for the powers conferred upon the several departments of the government and for the methods of selecting the officials who compose those departments.

For example: something is to be said in favor of having the upper and lower branches of Congress elected in a wholly diverse manner. Manifestly the election of senators by the voters of a state, and of representatives by the voters of Congressional districts, would constitute the two bodies much more alike than does the present arrangement.

Again, the direct election of a President, instead of his election by an electoral college, might lead, even more than at present, to the suppression of the minority vote in many of the states.

Finally, the appointment by the President, with the consent of the Senate, of United States judges, has given a very able judiciary, perhaps one more capable relatively than has resulted from the nomination of state judges by party conventions and their election by party vote.

The question therefore arises, May it not be possible to retain the acknowledged advantages of the present system and at the same time remove those features which have proved so highly objectionable?

This, I believe, can be done more quickly, and perhaps as perhaps as effectually, without making any change whatsoever in the Federal Constitution.

The place for reform legislation to begin is with the election of the national House of Representatives. It will be observed that the method of selecting all the other high officials of the government is fixed very definitely by the organic law.

For President, "each State shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress," etc.

For judges, the President "shall nominate, and by and with the consent of the Senate shall appoint judges of the Supreme Court."

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For Senators: "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years."

Turning now to the method of electing representatives in Congress, it will be

found that a far greater latitude is allowed. Thus: "The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states; and the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for the electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature. Also, "the times, places and manner of holding elections for . representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such requisitions."

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In other words, the manner of electing representatives in Congress by the people of the several States is wholly determinable by Federal law.

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The election, therefore, not of President, not of Federal judges, not of United States Senators, but of members of Congress, is the one organic reform which can be affected by legislation without any change of the National Constitution.

In the smallest States, which have but one member each, the present method of choosing him is the best. Like the Governor, he represents a majority of all the qualified electors who care to visit the polls and vote. But when we turn to the larger States, which elect from two to thirty-seven representatives, the voters of the respective States are not represented duly in Congress. The only way in which the people of a State can be fairly represented in a legislative body is by giving to each group of voters holding political opinions in common its proportional share of that body. It has been well said that a legislature should be like an exquisite mirror reflecting in miniature the leading political sentiments of the people.

The National House can be made truly representative of the people of the several States by the enactment by Congress of the following law, a modification of a bill proposed in the Fiftysecond Congress by Hon. Tom. L. Johnson of Ohio.

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Section 1. The members of the House of Representatives shall be voted for at large in their respective States.

"Section 2. Any body of electors in any State, which polled at the last preceding Congressional election one per cent. of the total vote of the State, or which is endorsed by a petition of voters amounting to one per cent. of such total vote, may nominate any number of candidates not to exceed the number of seats to which such State is entitled in the House, and cause their names to be printed on an official ballot.

"Section 3 Each elector shall be entitled to vote for one person and no more; and the votes given to candidates shall count for the tickets to which the candidates belong, a candidates belong, a well as individually for the candidate.

"Section 4. The sum of all the votes cast for all candidates in any State shall be divided by the number of seats to which such State is entitled, plus one, and the quotient to the nearest unit shall be known as the quota of representation.

"Section 5. The sum of all the votes cast for the tickets of each party or political body nominating candidates shall be severally divided by the quota of representation and the units of the quotients thus obtained will show the number of representatives to which each such body is entitled; and if the sum of such quotients be less than the number of seats to be filled the body of electors having the largest remainder after division of the sums of the votes cast, by the quota of representation, as herein specified, shall be entitled to the first vacancy, and so on until all the vacancies are filled.

"Section 6. The candidates of each body of electors nominating candidates and found entitled to representation under the foregoing rules, shall receive certificates of election in the order of the votes received, a candidate receiving the highest number of votes the first certificate, and so on; but in case of a tie,

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