Yes, the high standard of living we have to set before ourselves, and before the people we ask to join us, is a high standard of working, a high standard of learning and thinking, with a high standard of family life and public spirit. In these we shall enjoy a high standard of living indeed.
“The wife is right,” says her husband, laughing, as I look to see how he is taking all this. “I wouldn’t say so if she starved us, or sent the children to school in rags, would I? But it seems to me, the more she has to do, the better she gets things done. Planning does it, I reckon—just thinking and planning.”
“Use your brains and save your hands, eh?”
“That’s the size of it. Next time the Prince of Wales comes out to his ranch, you send him along, and I reckon she’d cook him a four-course dinner on a chip-and-a-half of firing, if he was keen on style, which he doesn’t seem to be. Of course we’ve got a fireless cooker; she planned it from one she saw in a paper, and little Jim made the box. But, listen! There they are.”
Melodious sounds are echoing through the woods—“Comin’ through the rye,” sung in unison by two robust young voices, and jingling tug-chains for accompaniment.
With that music echoing in our ears, and the “three cheers” of the whole happy family as we take off, we sail away down the middle of the Province to the South.
There’s the Okanagan Valley, with its beautiful houses, set gem-like in their gardens, looking out on battalions, brigades, whole army corps of apple and cherry and plum and peach and apricot trees, knee-deep in vetch and alfalfa; on spreading fields of tomatoes, onions and celery, and potatoes; all watered from the mountain streams close by. And this is only one, though the chief, among the fruit valleys of this rich and corrugated Province.
“They used to laugh at us,” an English orchardman says, “and what they called our ‘style’—‘Piccadilly in the Wilds,’ and all that—but we know how to work.” No, if we ever laughed we stopped when we saw 3,400 men—3,400 from a total population of 15,000—pouring out of this valley to fight for our common cause. When those thousands hurried off to the War, those who were left doubled up and did their work for them, as far as human beings could. . . . Of the 590,572 men in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, we do not forget that 200,569 came from these four Western Provinces, besides 2,327 from Yukon. British Columbia sent 51,438, Alberta 45,146, Saskatchewan, 37,666, and Manitoba 66,319.