The sun can be very hot on the prairie, and it was very hot that afternoon when I did at last set out for a two-miles' tramp to the barracks. Nobody was walking that way except myself, and nobody was even riding. There was a fine dust about, and I needed brushing as well as pressing before I reached my destination. When I did get there, the courteous welcome of the second-in-command caused me to forget that the way had been long, or that anything greatly mattered except to hear about the North-West Mounted Police from the officer who was good enough to show me all round, from the horse-hospital to the prison cells. The latter were the least inviting part of the barracks, and I decided on the spot that if I committed a crime I would not select the North-West of Canada for the scene of it.
I doubt if Canada, or England, has anything to be prouder of than the North-West Mounted Police. Some of their deeds have been told from time to time—that of the mounted policeman, for example, who brought a homicidally-disposed maniac down hundreds of miles from the frozen country, saved his charge from frost-bite, and lost his own reason in the process; that of the corporal who went into the camp where Sitting Bull sat armed with all his braves about him, and gave him a quarter of an hour to clear over the border. But under a hundred less-known acts the same spirit has run—the spirit of the one representative of justice triumphant over incredible odds.
'It's made possible,' said my guide, 'partly because we have men who regard every capture they're told off to make as a matter of personal honour, partly because people know that if a man commits a crime, we get him in the end. We go on till we do. Sitting Bull knew that if he killed our corporal we'd hang him and every man with him. So he went.'
All kinds of men are represented in the mounted police, but this officer told me that the recruit they liked best to get was 'the young man with blood in him,' from an English public school or university, as much as from anywhere; fond of riding and shooting, and not lost when he is acting alone hundreds of miles from headquarters. The district patrolled, remember, by five hundred men is not much smaller than Europe minus Russia. Wanting that kind of man, the authorities see to it that, in barracks at all events, he is comfortable, and very little in the way of the accommodation for these police could be improved upon.
The most historic part of the barracks is that window through which Louis Riel stepped out—to drop with the rope round his neck. I was shown it hurriedly. It is the capture of their man, not his execution, that is these policemen's pride. Their record shows that almost always they take him alive, with no struggle—a strange thing, and one more proof of the reputation the police have built up for themselves. 'What is the use of struggling with these men?' seems to be the natural thought in the mind of the pursued; and no doubt much bloodshed is saved as a result of it. I learnt a lot of stray Canadian facts that afternoon. I learnt that the immigrants known under the somewhat vague heading of 'Galicians' are at present considered the leading toughs, owing to their habit of using their knives at random. Galicians mean roughly all those who come from central Europe, and would, of course, include Letts. So that it is not, apparently, merely the climate of England that induces in these particular aliens a homicidal mania. It would be interesting to know the opinion of a North-West Mounted Policeman on 'the Battle of London.' Another thing I learnt was that a hundred miles a day is no unusual distance for one of these policemen to cover on horseback, and that of all the districts patrolled by them that in the neighbourhood of the North Pole is most sought after. They do not believe in English stirrups and girths any more than they believe in the British truncheon. They do believe in sobriety. The man with the drinking habit cannot continue, so I was told, a mounted policeman.
As I walked back into Regina, I remember seeing in one of the principal streets a second notice which struck me as quaint. The notice was:—
'Please do not spit on the side-walks.'
The quaintness of it consisted in the last three words. 'Please do not spit' one could understand. I should like to see that notice up almost anywhere in Canada, since the habit it deprecates is almost universal. It is worst, perhaps, in a smoking compartment, where it is difficult to get one's legs away from the neighbourhood of spittoons. I have sat for hours feeling all the emotions of the son of William Tell while the apple was still balanced on his head, and his father was in the act to shoot. But it is an uncivilised, unhealthy, absolutely unnecessary habit anywhere. That is why, for a public authority to suggest that it may be done, provided it is not done on the side-walks, is quaint. It should either be ignored or penalised. When one reads, as one does so often in the papers, of the ravages made by tuberculosis in Canada, it almost looks as if offenders should be penalised. Certainly they should not be politely requested to spit a few inches more to the left or the right. And why provide them with spittoons?