From the Report of the Parochial Department, under the heading, Council on Rural Schools: "In one Western diocese the Sunday School caravan similar to the mission van has proved of great value to the work of rural schools."
From the above it will be seen that the caravan scheme supplies a felt need, and as ex-students of St. Christopher's and ex-service girls have volunteered, the only hindrance is lack of funds.[8]
As showing the approval which this work has received from the Church's representatives, I may add that the Bishops of Saskatchewan and Calgary have both invited me to work a van in their dioceses in 1922.
It was a bitter disappointment to me to be unable to talk over the results of our work with Aylmer Bosanquet, for it was she who originated the scheme, and she would have delighted in the details of its working. But she was in British Columbia when I returned from the prairie, so all I could do was to write her a full report, and keep her in touch with all the developments of the work. She soon grew too weak to write herself, but her interest never flagged, and she dictated most encouraging and stimulating letters. She passed away on Shrove Tuesday, February, 1921.
She was a true missionary, with a gracious and loving personality. She had a definite call and followed it. This led her to exchange a life of luxury for one of hardship, and to expend much of her wealth in the service of God. She laboured unceasingly, and with a vision which seemed to leave a living impress on all with whom she came in contact, and inspired them to greater heights of devotion and service. As the lessons of childhood are indelibly engraven on the mind, there must be many prairie children who will bless her name in after life for the imprint she left upon them. She had a statesmanlike grasp of the trend of events, and lived to do a wonderful work in Western Canada, pointing to lofty ideals and raising the standard of public opinion in this young and growing country, not only from the Church point of view, but also from the Imperial standpoint.
She has been one of the glorious instruments used in helping to bring about God's purpose, that "the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea."
APPENDIX
I.
The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf was started under the directorship of Dr. G. E. Lloyd[9] in order to remedy the great shortage of teachers in Western Canada. It aims at enlisting Englishwomen who are not merely taking up teaching as a livelihood, but who are "willing to do something beyond what they are paid to do, for the sake of Church and Empire." Their object is the building up of character and the development of loyalty to the Empire, and they are to go specially to the prairie schools among the foreign population (now called the New Canadians), many of whom cannot speak English. The problem is—What can be done to make the un-English settlers British in sentiment? Wherever immigration spreads over the new territory, there, in two or three years' time, appear the little country schools, built by the settlers out of the rates and taxes, or from bonds guaranteed by the Provincial Government. All the children of the district, from four miles on either side, go to that school. In Saskatchewan alone three hundred new schools were built in 1915, five hundred the year before, and more than six hundred in the year before the War. Not only do these hundreds of new schools need teachers, but there is a continual thinning of the ranks as teachers go on to other professions or the women teachers marry. Many of the leading men in Canada have taught in these little one-teacher schools at the beginning of their career—such men as Sir Robert Bordon, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Sir Sam Hughes, and Sir George Forster.