has been grown and harvested on the Peace River. Even if that experiment could be repeated, it would still be an open question whether it would not be more profitable to grow something else- oats or potatoes. Wheat, it is said, like all other cereals and fruits, grows to greatest perfection near its northern limit; but the nearer the northern limit the greater the risk of failure. Manitoba No. 1 Hard is probably the best wheat in the world; but crops sometimes fail even in Manitoba, which is very near the northern limit. Further north, or higher up, the quality remains excellent, but the failures are more frequent. It does not follow, however, that wheat should be grown where wheat can be grown. It would be nothing short of a national calamity were good oat land, such as lies between Calgary and Edmonton for instance, converted into poor wheat land. It may be true, as is said, that one good wheat crop in three pays the farmer; but it can never pay a community to take such risks. Three good oat or potato crops are worth more to the nation.

Nor is it only in the West that this wheat boom would occur. In Ontario and the Eastern Provinces, which have been harder hit by the opening of the West than the United Kingdom has, even the abandoned farm may again become wheat producing. There is in Canada, as there used to be in the United Kingdom, an invincible prejudice in favour of wheat. The farmer who does not grow wheat is regarded as failing in his duty to the community, which suffers in dignity when it has to import wheat, even from other provinces of the same nation. Some years ago a politician whom chance had made Prime Minister of New Brunswick established a bounty on wheat by giving a bonus to grist mills; and the arguments he used to recommend his policy were all to the effect that New Brunswick owed it to its own selfrespect to grow wheat instead of buying it from the Manitoba farmers. The prejudice is deep rooted and it has taken years of effort on the part of the Agricultural Department to make any impression. But not all the persuasive eloquence of Professor Robertson, the real head of the Department and the cause of its efficiency, has been able to extirpate the prejudice. A preferential tariff on wheat will undo much of the work that Professor Robertson has accomplished. The aim of all his effort seems to be to encourage mixed farming; and mixed farming will be positively discouraged by a preference. One would like to know but that is impossible-what the real opinion of Professor Robertson is on a preferential duty on wheat. It would be worth more, in the understanding of the situation, than the cabled wisdom of any dozen selected Canadian politicians. Unfortunately, permanent officials do not make public statements on matters of policy,

The writer had the good fortune to be in the West of Canada during the summer and harvest season of the first of the present series of bumper crops in 1901. Everywhere men talked wheat, and all grievances were forgotten. The question of railway rates and the extortions of the elevator companies, in cther years so fruitful a subject in conversation, roused no interest. The Canadian West had a big thing and knew it. In that year the Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba made the remark that the solid nature of Manitoba's prosperity was better witnessed by the way she had come through the bad year of 1900 than by the confidence of 1901. The year 1900 was a most disastrous season. Wheat was scarce, poor in quality, and low in price; but Manitoba came well through the depression. The reason was that a beginning had been made with mixed farming and that the prosperity of the rather despised Mennonites, who were the leading exponents of mixed farming, saved the province from bad times.

It is true in agriculture as it is in manufacturing industry, that too much concentration and specialisation is a great risk, and sooner or later ends in disaster. No community can safely carry all its eggs in one basket; and mixed farming is to agriculture what diversification of industry is to manufacturing. Exclusive devotion to wheat growing is for the Canadian West, at the northern limit of that cereal, too great a risk. The solid prosperity of a nation cannot rest on such a narrow foundation.

But a preference will cause men to forget these things. Wheat only will be grown. There will be a great boom; but the accident of a season may overthrow confidence. It must never be forgotten that a boom leaves a community much worse off than if it had never occurred. The bursting of a boom means more than the sweeping away of fictitious values. It leaves a community bankrupt of energy and enterprise for years; it leaves a community in which gambling has destroyed the sense of the value of honest work. The preferential wheat boom will burst like other booms; and when it does, then will come Canada's second thought about the preference. The first thought is joyous acceptance; the second will be accompanied by gritting of the teeth. Then will revive some of the ideals of the past.

Hewers of wood and drawers of water was once a familiar phrase in her politics. The voice of the oppressed manufacturer will be heard in the land, and the convinced Protectionist will begin to renew his partial studies of the trade question. Two things should never be forgotten-(1) that Canada is a great believer in Canada first, and (2) that Canada is Protectionist in sentiment,

JOHN DAVIDSON.

DID THINGS GO BETTER BEFORE OUR TIME?

WHEN this question is put to me I answer "No." Things did not go better before my time-nor that of the working class who were contemporaries of my earlier years. My answer is given from the working class point of view, founded on a personal experience extending as far back as 1826, when I first became familiar with workshops. Many are still under the impression that things are as bad as they well can be, whereas they have been much worse than they are now. When I first took an interest in public affairs, agitators among people were as despondent as frogs who were supposed to croak because they were neglected.

They spoke in weeping tones. There were tears even in the songs of Ebenezer Elliot, the Corn-Law Rhymer, and not without cause, for the angels would have been pessimists, had they been in the condition of the people in those days. I myself worked among men who had Unitarian masters-who were above the average of employers even they were as sheep dogs who kept the wolf away, but bit the sheep if they turned aside. But Trades Unions have changed this now, and sometimes bite their masters (employers they are called now), which is not more commendable. Still, multitudes of working people, who ought to be in the front ranks as claimants for redress still needed, yet hang back with handkerchief to their eyes, oppressed with a feeling of hopelessness, because they are unaware of what has been won for them, of what has been conceded to them, and what the trend of progress is bringing near to them.

Of course if there has been no betterment in the condition of the people, despair is excusable-but if there has, despair is as unseemly as unnecessary. Every age has its needs and its improvements to make, but a knowledge of what has been accomplished should take despair out of men's minds. To this end I write of changes which have taken place in my time.

I was born in tinder-box days. I remember having to strike a light in my grandfather's garden for his early pipe, when we arrived there at five o'clock in the morning. At times my fingers bled as I missed the steel with the jagged flint. Then the tinder proved damp where the futile spark fell, and when ignition came a brimstone match filled the air with satanic fumes. He would have been thought as much a visionary as Joanna Southcott, who said the time would come when small, quick lighting lucifers would be as plentiful and as cheap as blades of grass in a

town. How tardy was change in olden time! Flint and steel had been in use 400 years. Philip the Good put it into the collar of the Golden Fleece (1429). It was not till 1833 that phosphorus matches were introduced. The safety match of the present day did not appear until 1845. The consumption of matches now is eight per day for each person. To produce eight lights, by a tinder-box, would take a quarter of an hour. With the lucifer match eight lights can be had in two minutes, occupying only twelve hours a year, while the tinder-box process consumes ninety hours. Thus the lucifer saves nearly eighty hours annually, which, to the workman, would mean an addition of nearly eight working days annually.

In tinder-box days the nimble night burglar heard the flint and steel going, and had time to pack up his booty and reach the next parish, before the owner descended the stairs with his flickering candle. Does any one now fully appreciate the morality of light? Extinguish the gas in the streets of London and a thousand extra policemen would do less to prevent outrage and robbery than the ever-burning, order-keeping street light. Light is a police force-neither ghosts nor burglars like it. Thieves flee before it as errors flee the mind when the light of truth bursts on the understanding of the ignorant.

Seventy years ago the evenings were wasted in a million houses of the poor. After sundown the household lived in gloom. Children who could read, read, as I did, by the flickering light of the fire, which often limited for life the power of seeing. Now the pauper reads by a better light than the squire did in days when squires were county gods. Now old men see years after the period when their forefathers were blind.

Then a social tyranny prevailed, unpleasant to the rich and costly to the poor, which regarded the beard as an outrage. I remember when only four men in Birmingham had courage to wear beards. They were followers of Joanna Southcott. They did it in imitation of the apostles, and were jeered at in the streets by ignorant Christians. George Frederick Muntz, one of the two first members elected in Birmingham, was the first member who ventured to wear a beard in the House of Commons; and he would have been insulted had not he been a powerful man and carried a heavy Malacca cane, which he was known to apply to any one who offered him a personal affront. Only military officers were allowed to wear a moustache; among them-no one, not even Wellington, was hero enough to wear a beard. The Rev. Edmund R. Larken, of Burton Rectory, near Lincoln, was the first clergyman (that was as late as 1852) who appeared in the pulpit with a beard, but he shaved the upper lip as an apology for the audacity

of his chin; George Dawson was the first Nonconformist preacher who delivered a sermon in a full-blown moustache and beard, which was taken in both cases as an unmistakable sign of latitudinarianism in doctrine. In the bank clerk or the workman it was worse. It was flat insubordination not to shave. The penalty was prompt dismissal. As though there were not fetters about hard to bear, people made fetters for themselves. Such was the daintiness of ignorance that a man could not eat, dress, nor even think as he pleased. He was even compelled to shave by public opinion.

When Mr. Joseph Cowen was first a candidate for Parliament, he wore, as was his custom, a felt hat (then called a "wideawake"). He was believed to be an Italian conspirator, and suspected of holding opinions lacking in orthodox requirements. Yet all his reputed heresies of acts and tenets put together did not cost him so many votes as the form and texture of his hat. He was elected-but his headgear would have ruined utterly a less brilliant candidate than he. This social intolerance now shows its silly and shameless head no more. A wise Tolerance is the Angel, which stands at the portal of Progress, and opens the door of the Temple.

Dr. Church, of Birmingham, was the first person who, in my youth, contrived a bicycle, and rode upon it in the town, which excited more consternation than a Southcottean with his beard. He was an able physician but his harmless innovation cost his practice. Patients refused to be cured by a doctor who rode a horse which had no head, and ate no oats. Now a parson may ride to church on a bicycle and people think none the worse of his sermon; and, scandal of scandals, women are permitted to cycle, although it involves a new convenience of dress formerly sharply resented.

In these days of public wash-houses, public laundries, and water supply, few know the discomfort of a washing day in a workman's home, or of the feuds of a party pump. One pump in a yard had to serve several families. Quarrels arose as to who should first have the use of it. Sir Edwin Chadwick told me that more dissensions arose over party pumps in a day than a dozen preachers could reconcile in a week. Now the poorest house has a water tap, which might be called moral, seeing the ill-feeling it prevents. So long as washing had to be done at home, it took place in the kitchen, which was also the diningroom of a poor family. When the husband came home to his meals, damp clothes were hanging on lines over his head, and dripping on to his plate. The children were in the way, and sometimes the wrong child had its ears boxed because, in the