IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT.
As far as fruit-raising is concerned, the 'dry' men appear to have the advantage. Their contention is that they can turn off the water so as to leave their trees dry for the winter when frost at wet roots is so fatal; while they can turn the water on whenever it is wanted for swelling the fruit. In addition, the dry belt country gets a longer season of sunshine, which is more favourable for the growth of the earlier and finer dessert apples. It seems curious that none of our finest-flavoured apples, such as Cox's Orange Pippin or Ribston Pippin, seem to come to perfection in Canada; and I found British Columbian fruit-growers very anxious that English people should appreciate this fact, and also get to know which are the British Columbian apples most worth asking for in England, as though some of the older orchards are still growing comparatively worthless apples, the new ones are being planted only with a few best kinds, which are as wine to water. One of these best kinds, by the way, is called Wine-sap; two of the other selectest varieties being Jonathan and Winter Banana. The latter is said to have a strong banana flavour. It is worth the English public's while, if it is going in largely for British Columbian apples, to encourage only the growing of the best, and that is to be done by demanding only the best from our own greengrocers by name. It is just as simple to plant a good apple tree as it is to plant a bad one, and there is no reason why the world in general should not eat only the best apples. So long as people are contented to look only at the colour of the fruit, which is no criterion whatever, and to pay their greengrocers' price for an unnamed sort, the best apples will not be for sale, and one will go on being provided with highly-coloured samples that taste like inferior turnips.
The weather picked up in the morning, and I was able to see some of the beauties of the great Fraser River, though I somehow missed the Chinamen washing for gold, Indians spearing salmon, bright red, split salmon drying on frames, Chinese cabins and Indian villages with their beflagged graveyards, which are said to be visible from the car windows. Perhaps I was talking too much.
CHAPTER XXVII
A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY
A diminutive Japanese who picked up my fairly heavy trunk, slung it over his shoulder and walked down the platform with it as though it were nothing but a shawl, was the first person I met in Vancouver, reminding me that that land-locked sea below was the Pacific, which white men do not own but only share with the brown and yellow Orientals. I wonder—will the day come when the latter want an ocean all to themselves? And are there, in view of this contingency, plans of this intricate coast among the Japanese naval archives? They knew the other side pretty well before the war began with Russia, and they are not a people to leave things to chance. The yellow men have known the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver as long as the white men, and put in a great deal of work there and eaten much humble pie, and also realised by the constant rise in their wages—ten times anything their own country offers—that the white man is strangely lost without them. They had no flair for colonising half a century ago, when the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but they have it now.
Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The ground sloping to the shut sea, girt with those huge, straight trees that give a sense of luxuriance to this northern Pacific coast which no tropic country can excel, is a perfect situation for a big city. Vancouver is a big city. It is so big that many people are afraid for its immediate future. They say that it is already far bigger than it has any right to be, and that by the dubiously beneficent aid of innumerable real estate men, it is increasing at a pace that is bound to end in disaster. The slump had been expected in 1909, it was expected last year, it is expected this year. Some year it will come; and if I were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant of Vancouver, I should then head a deputation which had for its purpose the dumping in the sea of a large number of the real estate agents who swarm hungrily in the place. There is a big street entirely filled with their offices, and the mark of them is everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that encyclopædic work Canada in the Twentieth Century, jeers at the English for their distrust of the real estate man, who, he thinks, serves a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to the real estate man, says Mr. Bradley, if you want to buy land, than to the bar loafer. There is a great deal in that. In individual cases they are excellent men. But, collected together in vast numbers, as in Vancouver, they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer never can, and that is by so magnifying the importance of the buying and selling of land, that people take to it in exchange for work, and falsely imagine that enormous prosperity is coming to a place which is in reality doing nothing but changing its land at fancy and speculative prices, expecting the prosperity somehow and some day to follow of itself.
I suppose Seattle, with less justification, is in very much the same case. Both, besides being ports with great expectations, happen to be the last place, so to speak, in their respective countries; and there is something magnetic in the attraction of a last place. Thither drifts that very considerable population which, by getting on geographically, almost persuades itself that it is getting on materially. Having attained the limit, it stays there and does as little as it can. Such people give a city a false air of greatness, and are, in fact, a surplus population with nothing to do but bid up land against one another.