CHAPTER XV

IN CALGARY

Alberta is at present the _débutante_ of the Dominion.

Countries, like cities, used to grow up and, if we stick to our metaphor, 'come out' anyhow. It is true there were people called statesmen who had at times bright ideas concerning the commonweal which they tried to put into practice, and sometimes succeeded in putting into practice, with not unsatisfactory results. But the commonweal they had in mind was a limited one. It was not truly 'common,' either in respect of the people whose weal was considered, or in respect of the weal it was desired to affect. Statesmen, in fact, thought usually only of a particular section or part of the population of their country and also thought only of a particular aspect of that section's welfare--usually either its soul or its prestige; very rarely its material prosperity.

Things have not altogether changed. Things {139} don't. Statesmen still consider particular classes rather than the nation as a whole, and their notions of what weal means are still limited notions. But there is this difference. That aspect of the commonweal which can be referred to somewhat vaguely as material prosperity now bulks very large in their minds, and, as a result of it, the idea is beginning to prevail that not only can cities be planned before they are built, but that whole provinces can and should be encouraged to grow in certain thought-out directions.

In the old world the new idea is likely to work slowly and somewhat obscurely. Cities and countries have already grown up there in the old-and-anyhow style; and grown-up things, like grown-up people, are not easily changed. In England, for example, we may think that large properties are a mistake; but they will not, with anything that can be called celerity, be turned into small holdings. So with our cities. There they are--fully grown and fully stocked with vested interests. The possessors of those interests cannot see in any proposed change the vast improvement that the non-possessors see in it. The most that can be expected in England in the immediate future is that, slowly and imperceptibly, certain {140} outrageous mistakes of the past will be remedied, and that where new developments are essential, they shall be the result of ideas, rather than of confusions. The Town-Planning Bill is, I imagine, a case in point. The most conservative people are beginning to see that in itself an idea is not a vicious thing and may even produce a good result.

In the new world (and perhaps in the German Empire too) the notion of planning the future of town or country instead of leaving it to luck is having much swifter and more demonstrable effects. On the Canadian plains, as I have pointed out, towns are being laid out largely with an eye to their future. The same thing is being done for the countryside. It, too, is being planned with an eye to its future. It is not growing up just anyhow; it is being made to grow in particular directions.

How much this is the idea of statesmen, of the public officials, that is to say, of the Dominion; and how much it is due to the managers of private companies and enterprises, historians will some day be able to decide. I incline to the view that at present the big railway companies represent far the most influential force in Canada, and that they, without any of the outward paraphernalia of office, {141} are deciding what Canada is to be for a good many years to come.

Naturally they work from what may be called the railway point of view. Their notion of a Canadian commonweal takes the form, therefore, of a country in which a settled and prosperous population lives along the lines of the railroads, and is so distributed that there shall be no uninhabited spaces through which the running of trains will cease to be a paying proposition. There are bound, of course, to be some intervals of the kind. The highlands of Ontario form such a gap in the system of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That gap is not easy to fill: Alberta is.

A few years ago Alberta was far from being a profitable country through which to run trains. Cattle-ranching maintained the thinnest of populations, and the leagues of sunburnt plains east of Calgary seemed to offer few chances to a more numerous class of settler. Any one who had prophesied then that they would shortly be crowded with wheat-farmers would have been laughed at. But they are being crowded, comparatively crowded, now. And the credit for this must be given those who started the Bow River irrigation works. No doubt there are other reasons for the rise of Alberta. The {142} discoverers of new wheats have helped it; so have the American farmers who, by spoiling the land across the line, created a demand for new land. But the irrigation works are the main factor, and when the Octopus, as the Canadian Pacific Railway is not uncommonly called, is had up for judgment, these and many other of their achievements will help them to make a stout defence. True, it is their own land they are irrigating; it is passengers and freight for themselves that they want to secure; but, whatever the motive, they are advertising and causing to be populated and cultivated hundreds of square miles on either side of their own particular land which might otherwise have lain waste for many years.

It may be said--Where is the plan in this? Where is it any different from the schemes of any railway country in the old world. The difference is that in the old world as a rule the railway company follows trade, and runs only through populous parts where that trade is to be got; whereas in Canada, railway companies lay their lines through the desert, so to speak, and then start to fill it in an orderly and profitable manner. Alberta at present is being planned into existence. It is not booming simply on its own merits, great though these {143} may be. It lay fallow for many years. For all one knows, other parts of Canada may have more of a future. But they are not being boomed as Alberta is, because the time has not yet come when they must, in the opinion of the railway companies, be filled in.

The need for the filling in of Alberta is one of the reasons why Calgary has sprung up so quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-aged, can remember camping in Calgary in tents. There was only one place to dance in, and ranchers used to take turns at entering it. Now Calgary is a stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important. There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not succeed. I suppose that prosperity has overtaken it at such a pace that it has not had time as yet to consider its responsibilities. {144} A town which permits one of its best hotels to place three double beds in one bedroom--and perhaps as many as nine guests in the three double beds--may already be great, but it has not realised its greatness.

Calgary differs from the prairie towns which lie between it and Winnipeg, in that it is not really a prairie town, but a town on the edge of the prairie. It looks at the mountains; and it is built of the grey stone that is found near by; the Chinook winds that sweep it and make its climate comparatively mild, are mountain winds; and it stands on the Bow River, which is a mountain river, swift and clear, and blue with the blue that is melted from snowfields. This is none of your turbid streams like the Assiniboine or the Red River. All rivers must run to the plains at last, but the Bow River does not seem to belong to them, though it feeds them more than most. In the old days Calgary, such as it was, owed everything to the hills. The cattle-ranchers settled round there because the Chinook winds, scatterers of the snow, made outdoor grazing possible for their cattle during months when Manitoba and Saskatchewan were deep in frozen drifts. And since it was just at the foot of the mountains, the miners in the mountains {145} used it as a supply centre. It is still a centre for ranchers and miners; but its real importance is that it has become the headquarters of that prairie which produced once, perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now yields the finest wheat in the world. If any statues are to be put up in the town--and it would be as well to wait for a native sculptor of talent--they should be the statues of the men who constructed the irrigation works.

Later on, but this is a smaller matter perhaps, I should like to see a statue put up to the man who will make it possible for the bars of Calgary to be allowed to remain open between the hours of 7 P.M. on Saturday, and 7 A.M. on Monday. At present they are shut during those hours, which means, I take it, that Calgarians, if admitted, would drink more than was good for them. The person therefore, to whom the suggested statue should be raised, would be the man who made the Calgarian attitude towards the drink question more civilised. I know that the problem is not peculiar to Calgary or to Canada. It may even be that Canada for a new country does more to solve it than most. I recollect than when I got back to England, one of the first things that caught my eye was an {146} interview given to a local paper by a leading Hertfordshire man, who had also just returned from travelling through Canada. He assured the interviewer that, having been from end to end of Canada, he had never once seen a man the worse for liquor. It must have been a delightful, but perhaps unique experience. I had not his good fortune, and having talked with many decent Canadians, seldom fanatics, and rarely indeed total abstainers, who nevertheless deplored the prevalence of the drink evil in the West, I cannot think that that Hertfordshire traveller's happy blindness is a thing to be imitated. Drink takes another form--perhaps a less vicious one--in a new country; but it ruins more good men than it does in an old one.

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