172 LABRADOR 
on the coast. All the rest is spent on summer post-offices, 
and providing for sick fishermen. Five hundred dollars 
a year appears to be the amount granted to make Labra- 
dor habitable in winter. 
As the revenue from its inhabitants direct is certainly 
$150,000 per annum, and the indirect revenue from the 
fishery so large, this does not seem fair. The Labrador 
people must purchase every supply from Newfoundland, 
from a rifle, a trap, a net, to flour, pork, and potatoes. 
I have seen a cargo of potatoes turned back home from 
the boundary at Blane Sablon because they were grown 
in Prince Edward Island, and the taxation was far too high 
for the settlers at Forteau and Red Bay to be able to 
afford them. Yet they could get no potatoes from New- 
foundland, could grow none, suffered from hunger for want 
of vegetables in spring, and some were being fed every 
year on government flour during the long winter months. 
The testimony of hundreds of my friends who live in 
Labrador, among them men who have lived in the United 
States, England, Scotland, Canada, Norway, and elsewhere, 
is that Labrador is by no means a bad country to settle 
in, but it is handicapped by having too little government 
encouragement given to people to live there. 
The reindeer project, backed only by the Canadian 
government and by private friends, I shall leave to another 
chapter. 
One other great drawback to settling is the impossibility 
of either getting grants of land or buying land with good 
title in Labrador. This partly arises from the unsettled 
question of ownership. For nobody knows the boundary 
between Newfoundland and Canada. Grants of timber 
