A white spot in the distance attracts us, as twilight thickens. Riding over, we find it a very small tent—inhabited by a very large man, who cannot stand upright till he comes out of it. “Good enough for me,” he says with a laugh. “When I’m not sleeping I want to be out working. I started plowing the day I got here, and now look at that”—pointing to his fifty acres of new breaking. “The house can wait till I bring my folks up from Iowa next April. Then we’ll run up a house together in a brace of shakes.”
“Why did you leave Iowa? Don’t they call it the finest agricultural State in the Union?”
“So it is, but no better than this’ll be. And anyway I’d only a rented farm, and I wanted one of my own. My next neighbor here came from down there too, and he had a good farm; but his boys were big enough to want farms too, and land prices went soaring out of sight, so he sold out for enough to stock half-a-dozen new farms up here.”
“You won’t find it strange to become a Canadian?”
“There’s nothing strange about it. Friend of mine down there said to me, ‘I ain’t going to have no king riding over me!’—Well, there’s some folks think no ways good but their own ways; and that’s the worst kind of ignorance. I told him the King was just a president, and brought up to the business, as no in-and-out president ever was. We have to elect a new one every four years, and you just elect a new one when you see there’s need. I know history, and I know how you give a bad king the air, and choose a new one and tell him to go ahead and be the sort of king you want and teach his son to do likewise—which he takes mighty good care to do. He’s just as much the people’s choice as ours is, and then some! And the best of it is, chosen and brought up as he is like that, you’ve always got a president that’s never been a party man and never can be, so all parties can trust him. Mighty sensible plan, seems to me.
“Then your king never goes against his people and parliament. He hasn’t anything like the power of our president. Once a president gets in, he appoints what ministers he likes—the House hasn’t a word to say about it though the Senate has—and there they are, planted for four years no matter what happens, congress or no congress. Here in this Dominion of Canada, your Prime Minister is the only man that has anything like the power of our president, and even he has to do what parliament says—or get out. Talk about self-government! They’ve got it in England, and you’ve got it in Canada, a sight more of it than we have.