WINTER QUARTERS 91 



but received his education, took his degree, and 

 read for the Bar in Eastern Canada. Directly 

 he had fully qualified as a barrister he went to the 

 North- West full of the energy and sympathy of the 

 born pioneer. After fifty years in Canada he is 

 more typically British than any other prominent 

 man in Canada, but he is " best man " among 

 friends and adversaries throughout the dominion. 

 In Mr. Haultain the spirit of British tradition 

 and that Canadian spirit of the morning which 

 breathes out of the North- West is one spirit ; he is 

 one of the very sound human links between the 

 Mother Country and the Daughter Nation. 



To the development of the Prairie Provinces he 

 gave his best ; his youth, thought, energy, oppor- 

 tunities of wealth making ; but when the electorate 

 for whose coming this far-seeing leader of men made 

 ready the Prairie Provinces found that he would 

 not lend himself to the hallucination of the loaves 

 and fishes of Reciprocity, they returned him with 

 just six followers to the Chamber of Legislature for 

 which he had thought and fought, and which he 

 won for Saskatchewan. But in Canada to-day innate 

 appreciation for the essence of personality is filtering 

 through that resistant pavement of the national 

 devotion to dollars which marks the prominent 

 trait in the present phase of development in Canada. 

 Two persons stand particularly for the term of this 

 illusive and indefinable quality — Sir Wilfrid Laurier 

 and Mr. Haultain. So that quite unconsciously the 

 new country gives the " best man " the best it has 

 to give. 



I was eager to know something of Canadian 

 politics and to hear Mr. Haultain speak, so finding 



