Every man in Canada is supposed to be liable for military training if called on, but the number of men annually drilled is about fifty thousand. Hitherto a man appointed from the Imperial Forces has been the commanding general in Canada. It need scarcely be said that if Canada is to hold her own in Imperial plans, if she is to become a power in the struggle for ascendency on the Pacific, her equipment both as to land forces and marine are ridiculously inadequate. They are the equipment of a member in Imperial plans who is skulking his share.
Provincial courts are, of course, administered by provincial officers; but these are appointed by the Governor-General advised by the Cabinet of the federal party in power. The Lieutenant-Governor of the province is appointed by the Governor-General advised by the party in power. He is paid by the Dominion. Judges of superior courts must be barristers of ten years' good standing at the bar of their provinces. All judges and justices of the peace must have some property qualification. Rascals with criminal records are not railroaded into judgeships in Canada. I know of a judge in San Francisco who until the advent of the woman vote literally held his position by reason of his alliance with the white slavers. I know of another judge in New York who held his position in spite of a criminal record by reason of the fact he could get himself elected by the disreputable gangs. These things are virtually impossible under the Canadian system. In the future the system may prove too rigid. At the present time it works and keeps the courts clear of political influence.
Juries are not so universal in Canada as in the United States. In civil cases, where the points of law are complicated, the tendency is to let the judge guide the verdict of the court.
III
There is one feature of Canadian justice which sentimentalists deplore. It is that the lash is still used for crimes of violence against the person and for bestiality. This is not a relic of barbarism. It is the result of careful thought on the part of the Department of Justice—the thought being that it is useless to speak to a man capable of bestiality in terms not articulate to his nature; and the fact remains that criminals of this class seldom come back for second terms of punishment for the same sort of crimes.
If you ask why few homicides are punished in the United States, and few escape in Canada—I can not answer. Political expediency, party heelers, technicalities—the dotting of an i, the crossing of a t, the omission of a comma—have no effect whatsoever on Canadian justice. The courts are never defied, and the law takes its course.
The law not only takes its course relentlessly but the pursuit of crime literally never desists. This feature of Canadian justice is a rude sharp shock to the unruly element pouring in with the new colonists. A Montana gunman blew into a Canadian frontier town and in accordance with custom began "to shoot up" the bar rooms. In twenty-four hours he awakened from his spree under sentence of sixty days' hard labor. "Let me out of this blamed Can-a-day," he cursed. "Who'd 'a' thought of takin' any offense from touchin' up this blamed dead town?"
A Texas outlaw succeeded in inducing a young Englishman of the verdantly bumptious and moneyed sort to go homestead hunting with him. The Indians saw the two ride into the back country. In spring only the Texan came out. I forget what his explanation of the Englishman's disappearance was. In any other country under the sun, who would have ridden two hundred miles beyond nowhere to investigate the story of an outlaw about a young fool, who had plainly been a candidate for trouble? But an old Indian chief meandered into the barracks of the nearest Mounted Police station, sat him down on the floor and after smoking countless pipes let drop the fact that two settlers had "gone in" and only "one man—he come out." That was enough. Two policemen were detailed on the case. They rode to the abandoned homesteads. In the deserted log cabin nothing seemed amiss, but some distance away on a bluff a stained ax was found; yet farther away a mound not a year old. Beneath it the remains of the Englishman were found with ax hacks in the skull. It was now a year since the commission of the crime and the murderer was by this far enough away. Why put the country to the expense of trailing down a criminal who had decamped? Those two young Mounted Policemen were told to find the criminal and not come back till they had found him. They trailed him from Alberta to Montana, from Montana to the Orient, from China back to Texas, where he was found on a homestead of his own. Now the proof of murder was of the most tenuous sort. One of the Mounted Policemen disguised himself as a laborer and obtained work on an adjoining homestead. It took two years to gain the criminal's confidence and confession. The man was arrested and extradited to Canada. If I remember rightly, the trial did not last a week, and the murderer was hanged forthwith.
Instances of this kind could be retailed without number, but this one case is typical. It is something more than relentlessness. It is more than keeping politics out of the courts. It is a tacit national recognition of two basic truths: that the protection of innocence is the business of the courts more than the protection of guilt; that having delegated to the Department of Justice the enforcement of criminal law, Canada holds that Department of Justice responsible for every infraction of law. The enforcement is greatly aided by the fact that criminal law in Canada is under federal jurisdiction. An embezzler can not defalcate in Nova Scotia, lightly skip into Manitoba and put both provinces to expense and technical trouble apprehending him. In the States I once was annoyed by a semi-demented blackmailer. When I sent for the sheriff—whose deputy, by the way, hid when summoned—the lunatic stepped across the state border, and it would have cost me two hundred dollars to have apprehended him. As the culprit was a menace more to the community than to me, I went on west on a trip to a remote part of Alberta. I had not been in Alberta twenty-four hours before the chief constable called to know if this blackmailer of whom he had read in the press, could be apprehended in Canada. The why of this vigilance on one side of the line and remissness on the other, I can no more explain than why American industrial progress is so amazingly swift and Canadian industrial progress is so amazingly slow.
There is very little wish-washy coddling of the criminal in Canada. While in the penitentiary he is cared for physically, mentally and spiritually. When released, he is helped to start life afresh; but if he keeps falling and falling, he is put where he will not propagate his species and hurt others in his back-sliding.