III
Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, was the Prince's farthest north. He arrived there on Friday, September 12th, to receive the unstinted welcome which, long since, we had come to know was Canada's natural attitude towards him. As we crossed the broad main street to the station, the sight of the vast human flower-bed that filled the road below the railway bridge made one tingle at the thoroughness with which these towns gathered to express themselves.
Canada, as I may have hinted already, has a way of leading strangers astray concerning herself. In Eastern Canada we were told that we would find the West "different." From what was said to us, there was some reason for expecting to find an entirely new race on the Pacific side of Winnipeg. It would be a race further removed from the British tradition, a race not so easy to get on with, a race not moved by the impulses and enthusiasms that stirred the East.
And in the West? Well, all I can say is that quite a number of Western men shook me by the hand and told me how thankful I must be now that I had left the cold and rigid East for the more generous warmth of the spacious West. And hadn't I found the East a strange place, inhabited by people not easy to get on with, and removed from the British tradition—and so on...?
This singular state of things may seem queer to the Briton, but I think it is easily explainable. In the first place, Canada is so vast that her people, even though they be on the same continent, are as removed from immediate intimacy as the Kentish man is from the man in a Russian province. And not only does great distance make for lack of knowledge, but the fact that each province is self-contained and feeds upon itself, so to speak, in the matter of news and so on, makes the citizen in Ontario, or Quebec, or New Brunswick, regard the people of the West as living in a distant and strange land.
The Canadian, too, is intensely loyal to Canada; that means he is intensely jealous for her reputation. He warned us against all possibilities, I think, so that we should be ready for any disappointment.
There was not the slightest need for warning. Whether East or West, Canada was solid in its welcome, and, as far as I am able to judge, there is no difference at all in the texture of human habit and mind East or West. There is the same fine, sturdy quality of loyalty and hospitality over the whole Dominion. Canada is Canada all through.
Edmonton is a fine, lusty place. It is the prairie town in its teens. It has not yet put off its coltish air. It is Winnipeg just leaving school, and has the wonderful precocity of these eager towns of the West. It is running almost before it has learnt to walk.
While full-blooded Indians still move in its streets, it is putting up buildings worthy of a European metropolis. It has opened big up-to-date stores and public offices by the side of streets that are yet the mere stamped earth of the untutored plain.
Along its main boulevard, Jasper Avenue, slip the astonishing excess of automobiles one has learnt to expect in Canadian towns. A brisk electric tram service weaves the mass of street movement together, and at night over all shines an exuberance of electric light.