“No,” say I, “we were a nation of newcomers; and we are not much more now, for what is half a century in the lifetime of a country? Besides, we had pulled up stakes somewhere else to come here; so it seemed the simplest thing to pull them up again and go somewhere else. We had to learn the good habit of ‘sticking it.’ Some men here are simply nomads, throw-backs to our pre-historic hunting tribe, and they will go on moving for ever. Perhaps when they have sampled the whole of this continent and find they can’t get farther west than the Farthest West, they may try the Farthest East and settle in China till they are ready to start a fresh migration on the track of their early ancestors, through Asia to Europe again!
“Perhaps they will find the perfect climate, somewhere. I have sampled all sorts of climate in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and never found one that escaped fierce criticism from the inhabitants. I met a man the other day who had thought to find it in Southern California,—‘lie on your back and let the fruit drop into your mouth,’ you know. He had come back a wiser man. And he showed me a story by an eminent American author, in the most popular magazine of his country, describing a personal experience at Los Angeles. Here are his very words:
“‘Three days and nights of dry suffocation; gasping for breath in the stinging, scorching, withering, enervating heat; days of shrill, shrieking, moaning wind that smites you hip and thigh; of excruciating and shriveling blasts from the blistering pit of that vast shameless inferno, the deadly desert, where dead things lie and bleach, and poisonous reptiles bask on the sun-baked rocks; days when your skin is pelted and prickled with invisible bullets of alkaline dust; when depression reigns, vitality ebbs, and nerves are set on edge.’
“Every climate may have a fit of sulks or temper now and then; but ours at its worst never inflicts anything like that. It may put an extra edge on our appetite, but not on our nerves. It is a magnificent nurse of hardy, healthy men and women.
“We can always find plenty to grumble at, if we think grumbling will improve our digestions, wherever we go. You remember the sporting offer that the Premier of this Province made to one of his people who said he was ‘fed up and wanted to quit’—‘Tell me when you’ve found a better place and I’ll lend you the fare.’ When the man had studied up conditions in every country in the geography, and taken a glance at Mars, he turned back quite cheerfully to his own Western farm and hitched up his team for the fall plowing.”