There is a great deal in this, though one has to remember that those riches will take many years to develop. The drawback to the immediate development of Vancouver Island is that it is covered with enormous timber. Reciprocity with the States is likely to give a fillip to the lumber industry, and the clearing of the land will then go on far quicker than { 275} hitherto. True, lumbermen do not actually clear the land; they leave the stumps behind them, and all the poorer trees. But they undoubtedly open the land up. Moreover, the revival of Esquimalt as a naval base will revive the prestige of Victoria, and create more work, besides inducing railwaymen to press on into the island.
I stopped there on my way back, partly to see the town itself, partly because I wished to see Mr. Richard M'Bride. The town disappointed me just a little. It commands a magnificent view of the mountains on the mainland, and the country all round is beautiful. But the villas and gardens, which one hears so much praised, struck me as a little commonplace. Perhaps it is that I like a town to be a town and a garden to be a garden; whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city, grateful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed to the utilitarian towns of the West, but altogether lacking in architectural fineness. The Parliament Buildings are good, and would be very good if those responsible for their maintenance would remove the inscription 'Canada' from across the front of them. In its coloured lettering it looks like the icing-sugar mottoes you see inscribed on birthday cakes.
But let a more enthusiastic pen than mine (again I fall back on that local pamphlet) describe Victoria as it appears to Victorians.
'If there are sights more beautiful than the Olympian Mountains from Beacon Hill, or the windings of the Gorge as the waters come in from the sea between waving battlements of plumy firs, then eyes have not seen them. If there is a sweeter song than the skylark's matin melodies high up from Cadboro Bay, then ears have not heard it. If there be more bewildering loveliness than clusters about the shaded and flower-gemmed gardens of Victorian homes looking seaward, then poets have not written it in imperishable numbers, nor minstrels celebrated it in well-remembered song. If there be a city of dreams, even the fabled Atlantis of antiquity, or vision of Babylonian towers set in hanging gardens, and redolent of strange odours of musk and myrrh, or fairy casements opening out to perilous seas forlorn, then never one approached in splendour this jewel of all time, ringed by the azure seas and sentinelled by everlasting hills.... A bird's song drops like the sudden peal of a bell. Outside are broad boulevards, grey with powdery macadam, stretching towards the bustling city; highways of progress and { 277} modernity, now scrolled by the flight of a whizzing automobile, now echoing with the staccato sound of hurrying hoof-beats. Inside are flowers and brooding hedges, the sheen of close-cropped grasses and sun-lacquered tree-trunks--rest, peace, and sweet seclusion.'