CHAPTER XIV. 



SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF VICTORIA. 



IT is not much more than a generation ago that the Colonial 

 Secretary of the day, when replying to one of the first questions 

 ever put in the Commons concerning the newly-hatched colonial 

 bantling British Columbia, remarked that its population consisted of 

 a " motley inundation of immigrant diggers." It was language 

 that befitted the mouthpiece of a policy that was fast estranging 

 the Mother Country from her much disparaged colonial offsprings. 

 Happily, we have changed all this, and not a day too soon, for if 

 ever there was a colony that by the force majeure of its 

 geographical position, was being driven into the arms of 

 Britain's formidable rival on the North American Continent, 

 it was the then infinitely remote and isolated British Columbia. 



Wedged in between Alaska to the north, and Washington, 

 Idaho, and Montana to the south, peopled to a considerable 

 extent by go-ahead sons of the " greatest country in the world," 

 neglected by the Mother Country, slighted by the Naval and 

 Colonial Office authorities, totally ignored by British capital and 

 by globe-trotters, the nimble Yankee dollar than which there is 

 no more insidiously active coin was quietly working its sweetly 

 innocent little victory. How near it came to add one more 

 bloodless conquest of territories to the long list which have 

 made the United States what they are, only those on the spot 

 at the time could realise. 



