After breakfast my chief spent the rest of the morning trying to sell the horses, but found no buyers. No one would accept them even as a gift. He was always very reticent as to how he did dispose of them, and I never discovered their fate. While he was thus engaged I succumbed to the wiles of a real estate agent who led me out on the prairie, laboring through the snow along certain rectangular rows of stakes, the heads of which we could just see, and which he informed me indicated the business section of the future metropolis of the Canadian Northwest. I admired the wintry landscape, wondered at the length of the rows of pickets, and was captivated by the agent's enthusiasm and eloquence; but, although those fine business lots were only $200 apiece, I did not buy.

That evening a Pullman train came in from the west. In the three months that had elapsed since we passed the end of the steel, the railway had been completed and put on an operating basis as far as Swift Current, 190 miles to the west. On that train we got berths to Winnipeg, and thence proceeded to Ottawa via Chicago.

Since that early trip I have crossed the Canadian Northwest several times by rail, and have watched its development with more than ordinary interest. Today it is covered by a network of railways, and there are scores of cities and towns where in 1882 the prairie dog, the gopher, and the badger were the only squatters. Its fertile soils have made it one of the great granaries of the world, and the handling of its produce is one of the pressing problems in world transportation. Its population is rapidly increasing, and out of it have been created two great provinces as additions to the Canadian Confederation, each of them twice the size of California. Manitoba's boundaries have been extended till it now has a sea coast of over 300 miles on Hudson's Bay, with a deep-water harbor at Churchill. The coal fields of Alberta are second to none on the continent, and have been actively exploited for more than three decades. The people are homogeneous, intelligent, and vigorous, and are

devoted to the political ideals of the great empire of which they have so recently become a part, and whose institutions they have so firmly established on a new soil. To have seen the beginnings of this great expansion of empire, to have traversed the land in its pristine condition before the invasion set in, was my first great adventure, an experience which I look back on with that peculiar pleasure that arises from participation in events which are unique as well as great. I had seen a piece of the New World, as new as was New England when the Pilgrim fathers landed. I had seen it as it will never be seen again, and I have the feeling that my youth was in a certain sense synchronous with the youth of the world, before it was filled up with people.

NOSTALGIA

CRISTEL HASTINGS

Oh, I have seen the blue of summer skies
Reflected on the bosom of the sea,

When snowy sails that filled and fled the wind
Were as a glimpse of happiness to me.

But now a curving shore line only means
An aching longing for a land I knew

And loved. While gulls that follow ships all bring

Me tales of home where skies are full as blue.

CUBAN ELECTION EVILS

CHARLES E. CHAPMAN

The legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the Cuban government are notoriously corrupt or inefficient, usually both, moreover, this condition of affairs is generally recognized and deplored, except by the political class, which profits from it. Why, then, do not the people make a clean sweep of their rulers through use of the ballot? This question might be asked seriously outside of Cuba, but hardly in that republic itself. The people do not overturn the politicians because the latter will give them no chance to do so. All that the people may do, at the best, is to choose among candidates that are perhaps equally bad, and sometimes not even this much of a privilege is accorded them.

Social and economic conditions in Cuba make political life very different from what it is in the United States. As in most Hispanic lands, so, too, in Cuba, the native-born 'better class' elements have had but indifferent success in competing with foreigners in business. There are, indeed, some noteworthy exceptions, but they are in the decided. minority. Americans do most of the 'big business,' with Englishmen contributing a prominent share, while Spaniards carry on a great part of the retail trade of the island. A number of Cubans have their place in agriculture on a large scale, especially in the sugar industry, but they are usually in a position subordinate to the American-owned mills. So the great majority of the educated Cubans feel that they have no alternative save to go into one of the professions (law, medicine, teaching, arms, literature, journalism, engineering, architecture) or into politics. Often, indeed, they combine the two, the better to make both ends meet;

for the pickings in the professions are not sufficient to enable all who are in them to live on a moderately good scale.

Such a combination is almost a necessity, for there is a wide separation of classes in Cuba, with very little of the middle-class element that is the back-bone of a country like the United States. The well-born Cuban would on no account engage in manual labor. He has reached a stage where he will consider a good business position, but even business has not yet attained to a very high place in the social scale. Certainly, the humdrum life in the lower ranks of business, with its slow progress toward a remotely possible affluence, has, for the Cubans, nothing to compare with politics, not even with the light-paying, but highly respected small government job. The game of politics, with all its risks-even risk of death in troubled times-appeals to the Hispanic love of adventure. For the more fortunate it points the royal road to wealth, a wealth that may run far into the millions, on a financial capital of less than a 'shoestring.' To be sure, riches can be obtained only through utilizing one's opportunities for corruption, but so firmly rooted is the Spanish colonial practice of "government for the sake of the office-holders" that almost no social stigma is involved in graft, and there is hardly any need for concealment. It is the traditionally expected thing, and merely evidences the fact that the man who engages in it is "not a fool."

The successful politician has more than himself and his own immediate family to look out for. He must do what he can to see that all his relatives and his wife's relatives get jobs that will at least yield them a living wage, or more if possible. The curse of nepotism is an important evil of Hispanic life. In Cuba it has frequently happened that a president has appointed, not one, but several of his relatives to some of the highest posts of government. President Zayas (1921-1925) has been especially notorious for this. Other politicians do what they can in proportion to their opportunities. And father, brother, son, uncle, nephew, far distant cousins, and various "in-laws" are all members of 'the family' in Cuba. Besides, one may also help a friend