The need for the filling in of Alberta is one of the reasons why Calgary has sprung up so quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-aged, can remember camping in Calgary in tents. There was only one place to dance in, and ranchers used to take turns at entering it. Now Calgary is a stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important. There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not succeed. I suppose that prosperity has overtaken it at such a pace that it has not had time as yet to consider its responsibilities. A town which permits one of its best hotels to place three double beds in one bedroom—and perhaps as many as nine guests in the three double beds—may already be great, but it has not realised its greatness.
Calgary differs from the prairie towns which lie between it and Winnipeg, in that it is not really a prairie town, but a town on the edge of the prairie. It looks at the mountains; and it is built of the grey stone that is found near by; the Chinook winds that sweep it and make its climate comparatively mild, are mountain winds; and it stands on the Bow River, which is a mountain river, swift and clear, and blue with the blue that is melted from snowfields. This is none of your turbid streams like the Assiniboine or the Red River. All rivers must run to the plains at last, but the Bow River does not seem to belong to them, though it feeds them more than most. In the old days Calgary, such as it was, owed everything to the hills. The cattle-ranchers settled round there because the Chinook winds, scatterers of the snow, made outdoor grazing possible for their cattle during months when Manitoba and Saskatchewan were deep in frozen drifts. And since it was just at the foot of the mountains, the miners in the mountains used it as a supply centre. It is still a centre for ranchers and miners; but its real importance is that it has become the headquarters of that prairie which produced once, perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now yields the finest wheat in the world. If any statues are to be put up in the town—and it would be as well to wait for a native sculptor of talent—they should be the statues of the men who constructed the irrigation works.
Later on, but this is a smaller matter perhaps, I should like to see a statue put up to the man who will make it possible for the bars of Calgary to be allowed to remain open between the hours of 7 P.M. on Saturday, and 7 A.M. on Monday. At present they are shut during those hours, which means, I take it, that Calgarians, if admitted, would drink more than was good for them. The person therefore, to whom the suggested statue should be raised, would be the man who made the Calgarian attitude towards the drink question more civilised. I know that the problem is not peculiar to Calgary or to Canada. It may even be that Canada for a new country does more to solve it than most. I recollect than when I got back to England, one of the first things that caught my eye was an interview given to a local paper by a leading Hertfordshire man, who had also just returned from travelling through Canada. He assured the interviewer that, having been from end to end of Canada, he had never once seen a man the worse for liquor. It must have been a delightful, but perhaps unique experience. I had not his good fortune, and having talked with many decent Canadians, seldom fanatics, and rarely indeed total abstainers, who nevertheless deplored the prevalence of the drink evil in the West, I cannot think that that Hertfordshire traveller's happy blindness is a thing to be imitated. Drink takes another form—perhaps a less vicious one—in a new country; but it ruins more good men than it does in an old one.
CHAPTER XVI
THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION
There is vague talk at times about the Americanisation of Canada. Very dismal people talk about its Americanisation by force of arms. Minor pessimists think the change will come about peaceably. How can the Canadians—they ask—continue to assert themselves for ever against the constant influx from the other side?
Monsieur André Siegfried, in that most lucid and excellent book, Les Deux Races en Canada, considers this question a little, but the very fact that he has called the book Les Deux Races en Canada, shows that he considers the question premature. The two races he treats of are not the Canadians and the Americans, but the French Canadians and the Canadians who are not French. Certainly these two peoples are at present, and must for a considerable time to come, be considered the two main races of the Dominion. They are still for all practical purposes separate without being hostile; and it is quite possible that one of these may Canadianise the other before any real Americanisation makes itself felt. Should the French Canadians get the upper hand, it is pretty certain that American influence would get a set-back of perhaps centuries. Yet English writers as a rule never seem to consider this contingency. Perhaps if they did, they would begin to think that they would rather see Canada Americanised than Gallicised.
Still the Americanisation may happen, and it is at least an interesting possibility. Let us consider the task that lies before the Americans. They will have to absorb—
(1) The French Canadians.