58 The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



inent in many club-circles and had indeed invaded and been 

 received in social circles, hitherto the exclusive preserves for 

 the traditional well-born, their sole title to admission being the 

 fact they had or seemed to have, made 'coups' through stock 

 gambling or the advances in real estate, such being due on the 

 one hand to normal commercial expansion and the rapid influx 

 of population to the cities and on the other to a kind of adver- 

 tising economically as indefensible as a Louisiana lottery or a 

 Gowganda Silver prospectus. 



The general tone of society to it all seemed indicated by its 

 laughing indifference to any criticism of the situation, when 

 everyone seemed to say: "Why, if people like to be fooled, why 

 not fool them?" while the lawyer who had grown wealthy 

 through his conveyancing and commissions and the newspaper 

 managers who had flourished through highly paid gambling 

 advertisements, both nonchalantly answered with the cynical 

 legal quibble "Caveat emptor"- -"Let the buyer beware," as if 

 they had successfully solved for themselves the most intricate 

 moral problem and done all their duty as respectable members of 

 the community and citizens of a country which had a right to be- 

 come "chesty" as being the latest and last great "Bonanza" 

 struck since California or the Rand. 



But Joseph Keeler was much too practical a man of the world 

 to become embittered against a situation, which had been in- 

 strumental perhaps in producing unfortunate results in his own 

 house, and turned philosophically to the problem of what means 

 were the most likely to improve, if not remove, conditions so 

 dangerous to commercial and natural prosperity and so pro- 

 ductive of social and moral declension. 



What was perfectly apparent to him was that the removal of 

 the population of Canada from rural to urban centres, as was 

 shown by the recent census, and the enormous and dispropor- 

 tionate increase of the cities through immigration as compared 

 with that in rural districts could only have one result so far as 

 the production of the food of the people was concerned. Thus 

 he found the following: 



