Mr. M'Bride confined his conversation with me to British Columbia--a big enough subject for a short interview. I wished to know if the survey of the province was being carried out as quickly as possible. In a vast country like British Columbia, it seems one of the most important things. The right to acquire land must be made simple and certain. Mr. M'Bride declared that surveying was going on as fast as men and money could do it, and referred me to the surveyor-general for details. I wish I could go further into the subject, but there is no space for it here. Then we got on to education, and Mr. M'Bride asked me to assure the working men of England that the education facilities of British Columbia were as fine as any to be got anywhere. { 280} Perhaps this is so, though I heard some criticism of the public schools from another eminent Victorian. It is easier, perhaps, to be enthusiastic than to be unanimous about any given system of education. To take but one small point, the co-education of boys and girls is a thing upon which people are not agreed even in British Columbia.
I was on the steamboat, ready to start for Vancouver, when the great fire of 1910 broke out in the town. With a considerable wind blowing it seemed to me not improbable that the whole of Victoria would be burnt down that night, and I had sufficient of the journalistic instinct to leave my things to go on by the boat and to go back myself to watch the blaze. Luckily the wind dropped and the fire was kept to one quarter, and I rather regretted my haste when I found myself stranded in Victoria at three o'clock in the morning. Still, it was worth while to have been there, if only to observe the working of the Canadian mind in a crisis of this sort. In England you would have heard ejaculations of horror and much sympathy expressed with those who were bound to suffer by the fire. The Victorian crowd took it quite differently. 'This'll create more work,' said one { 281} man fervidly. 'Just what the town needed,' said another enthusiast. 'We'll be able to have a better-looking street there after this. Those shops weren't good enough.' I even heard some of the men who had rushed out of their burning offices talking keenly and proudly of the sort of buildings they'd have to start putting up next day--much better buildings. Presumably they were insured, but even so men in the old country would have been a little shocked and perturbed, and regretful of the old rooms they were accustomed to. I fell asleep, when I had found a hotel, almost oppressed by the optimism of Canada.