Then The Towns That Are To-Day The Only
Names In The Wilderness, Yes, And Some Of Those Places Marked
On the map
as Hudson Bay Ports, will be cities, because - but it is hopeless to make
people understand that
Actually and indeed, we do possess an Empire of
which Canada is only one portion - an Empire which is not bounded by
election-returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the South - an
Empire that has not yet been scratched.
[Footnote 1: See pp. 187-188.]
Let us return to the new towns. Three times within one year did fortune
come knocking to the door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that
town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in the days when the
steam-tram ran off the rails twice a week; and once at Spokane Falls.
But in the roar of the land-boom he did not hear her, and she went away
leaving him only a tenderness akin to weakness for all new towns, and a
desire, mercifully limited by lack of money, to gamble in every one of
them. Of all the excitements that life offers there are few to be
compared with the whirl of a red-hot boom; also it is strictly moral,
because you do fairly earn your 'unearned increment' by labour and
perspiration and sitting up far into the night - by working like a fiend,
as all pioneers must do. And consider all that is in it!
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