A diminutive Japanese who picked up my fairly heavy trunk, slung it over his shoulder and walked down the platform with it as though it were nothing but a shawl, was the first person I met in Vancouver, reminding me that that land-locked sea below was the Pacific, which white men do not own but only share with the brown and yellow Orientals. I wonder--will the day come when the latter want an ocean all to themselves? And are there, in view of this contingency, plans of this intricate coast among the Japanese naval archives? They knew the other side pretty well before the war began with Russia, and they are not a people to leave things to chance. The yellow men have known the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver as long as the white men, and put in a great deal of work there and eaten much humble pie, and also realised by the constant { 259} rise in their wages--ten times anything their own country offers--that the white man is strangely lost without them. They had no flair for colonising half a century ago, when the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but they have it now.
Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The ground sloping to the shut sea, girt with those huge, straight trees that give a sense of luxuriance to this northern Pacific coast which no tropic country can excel, is a perfect situation for a big city. Vancouver is a big city. It is so big that many people are afraid for its immediate future. They say that it is already far bigger than it has any right to be, and that by the dubiously beneficent aid of innumerable real estate men, it is increasing at a pace that is bound to end in disaster. The slump had been expected in 1909, it was expected last year, it is expected this year. Some year it will come; and if I were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant of Vancouver, I should then head a deputation which had for its purpose the dumping in the sea of a large number of the real estate agents who swarm hungrily in the place. There is a big street entirely filled with their offices, and the mark of them is { 260} everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that encyclopædic work _Canada in the Twentieth Century_, jeers at the English for their distrust of the real estate man, who, he thinks, serves a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to the real estate man, says Mr. Bradley, if you want to buy land, than to the bar loafer. There is a great deal in that. In individual cases they are excellent men. But, collected together in vast numbers, as in Vancouver, they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer never can, and that is by so magnifying the importance of the buying and selling of land, that people take to it in exchange for work, and falsely imagine that enormous prosperity is coming to a place which is in reality doing nothing but changing its land at fancy and speculative prices, expecting the prosperity somehow and some day to follow of itself.