So that, on the whole, we may, I think, satisfy ourselves that there are a few men and women of courage and enterprise left amongst our poor race, of which we hear so many murmurings.

We like to think that amongst them we may class some of the men and women who have made Canada.

Chapter V

T

Lord Strathcona: A Sketch

O write the life of the late Lord Strathcona would be to write the history of modern Canada. Few persons, either living or dead, have been more intimately associated with its development, and fewer still have laboured as Lord Strathcona laboured for the prestige of the country which he loved. He lived at a critical moment in Canada's story, and such critical moments have ever found, in the development of the world by Anglo-Saxon races, the necessary man, the strong individual, the leader, whether soldier or civilian, fit to carry great matters through and to carry them through greatly.

Yet these leaders have seldom been the men who would have been chosen by a consensus of public opinion for their suitability to the task before them. The need arises and the unexpected man appears.

Lord Strathcona's figure is not an isolated one in the page which it adorns. It would be invidious. to mention him above the name of his famous cousin, Lord Mountstephen, or of his able colleague, Sir William van Horne. But his recent death has inspired a fresh interest in the life of the veteran who has passed away, and if a biographical sketch is in some sort a funeral oration, the sad honours of the occasion belong to him alone. The honour must necessarily be inadequate and the meed of praise wholly imperfect, because the future

alone will show how invaluable to his country was the service of such a man as the late Lord Strath

cona.

The harvest of Lord Strathcona's life, in so far as recognition went, came late. Most people are inclined to regard him as a brilliant man, always before the eyes of the world, always successful, not born perhaps to any great position, but coming into his own, and deservedly a successful man from the first. Lord Strathcona was forty-eight years old before he was made even Chief Factor in a fur company, and he was forty-eight when he leapt with all the vigour of youth into fresh activities bearing responsibilities for which he appeared to have had but little training, and into positions of importance for which he was always equal although not ostensibly prepared.

His preparation, indeed, for the life of ceaseless public work before him was one of the most curious and most unusual that we believe has ever fallen to a man's lot. We have heard of men being snowed up for a winter. Donald Alexander Smith, as he was then, was snowed up for thirty winters. And we have heard of men being lost to their relatives and their friends for the space of a few years. When Donald Smith bade his home and his people farewell, the farewell was an eternal one; he never saw his parents after he quitted Scotland at the age of eighteen. In Labrador he was almost without postal communication with the rest of the world, and he lived amongst trappers, Indians, and fur traders, and saw no one else at the very age when young manhood is most disposed for enjoyment, and in face of the fact that his limited opportunities did not, to use the common expression, seem to lead to anything."

At home, it might reasonably seem that the young man would have had better chances, for he had had a sound education and his thrifty parents were prepared to make sacrifices for the boy whom they thoroughly believed in.

"Donald will surprise them yet," his mother used to say sturdily when all her ambitions for her son were overthrown by his choosing to sail for Canada rather than to study law.

They will be proud of my Donald yet," she repeated when still another opening came for the young man in the form of an offer of a desk in the house of his merchant uncles, the Grants, of Manchester, kindly men of good repute, who have been immortalised as the Cheeryble Brothers by the pen of Charles Dickens. But Donald had adventurous blood in his veins. Two of his uncles had travelled far and done excellent pioneer work, and, who knows, the story of their lives may have fired the determined youth to launch out into the deep rather than hug the shores of his native land and enjoy its calm

waters.

There is nothing particularly arresting in the figure of a Scottish boy in the middle classes sailing for the West as many others have done before him. The heroic side of it lies in the fact that for thirty years he never turned back. Yet the discontent which every boy must feel at a hard lot and a solitary existence must have been felt by him as acutely as by any other; his surroundings were infinitely more austere, and it is conceivable to suppose that his courage often failed him and that the longing to return home must at times have been well-nigh unendurable. Thirteen years in the silence of Labrador might well have broken down the determination of most young men. One might even say

that it would have been excusable had mind as well as courage given way. Yet we find him at the age of eighteen settling down at a lonely fur-trading station, and here for thirteen years silence falls upon him like a fog. Hardly ever did his own voice pierce the silence. Donald Smith was a quiet Scotsman who disliked talking about himself, and only here and there will be found old friends of his to whom he spoke of his life in the lonely land.

There was only one post in the year to Labrador, but every week Donald wrote to his mother. The letters must have lain beside him unposted for months after they were written, but at least they formed an outlet for self-expression and affection on the part of the solitary boy. Perhaps the punctually written letter was the result of a promise made before leaving home, and his mother may have asked him to write every week, as is the custom of mothers. He himself uttered a pathetic need when he told an old friend that when he used to get too homesick he always wrote home. One can imagine the routine of the life which included the writing of a weekly letter, and still more characteristic of the man is the well-authenticated story that he always had the Times for a year sent out to him, and each day the sheet was laid upon his breakfast table and was diligently read by him. The news was a year old, but the next year's issue lying upon the top of the orderly pile was never even glanced at by him-a small act of restraint and self-discipline which, no doubt, was not without its bracing effect upon the young fellow's character.

It is not idle to wonder whether, in seeking for a man to do imperial work for a great nation, a more unlikely spot could have been found than mistveiled, remote, inaccessible Labrador, where in a