Evening star., 1936-12-13
BY STEPHEN LEACOCK,

BY STEPHEN LEACOCK.
Author Of Economic Prosperity in the
British Empire
| - UNNY Alberta lies in such far
away corner of the map OF
| North America that it scarcely
- seems to matter. In Summer
its endless miles of ripening grain toss
and blow in the prairie breezes. Win
ter grips it into black silence. But the
soft Spring winds from the mountains
atone for it with April tears Of repent
ance. Too far away to matter. Yet
even in Alberta straw may show the
direction of the coming continental
wind.
History the province never had. The
early explorers walked over it and past
it, looking for something else. Vast
herds of buffalo moved up and down
in their season from somewhere to
nowhere and back again. The Hud-
son Bay Co. posts were as rare and
lonely as solitude itself; the Indians
so few that you could ride 500 miles
so wrote Lieut.. Butler in l87l-and
never see one.
The settlement of the province, for
those of us over so, is not history; it's
just yesterday. We can remember
every step-the plains, the unknown
Rockies. the Canadian Pacific Rail-
way, the mounted police, the boom,
the American invasion. the bust
| Nor has the province, in a sense,
any geography. The Rocky Noun
tains, darkening the sunset, are not
Alberta, but the end Of it; not the
| picture. but the frame. The valley
of the River of Peace, varied and un-
dulating Gods last country, has too
few people yet to count. The Alberta
of the social credit and the prosperity
certificate lies out on the great flats,
once prairie. now grain. 1t is all cut
up in the rectangular pattern of the
Western survey into sections and
townships and ranges. There is no
geography in that. A European
peasant may carry through life the
love of his valley and his mountains,
but the Alberta farmer cannot cry
over his meridian. A country cut like
cloth and sold by the square yard has
no geography.
Education Standardized.
More than that, the province Is
short-or rather. overlong-on ma
tionality. All the Albertans talk Eng
lish, or think they do: they all attend
the public school and the high school
and the college, and get an education
as standardized as the makeup of a
motor car. Their heads, if damaged.
can be duplicated in five minutes in
the East.
In its education and in its profess
sions, Alberta Is as much the child
of Ontario as Michigan Is of Massa-
chusetts. They have Rotary clubs,
Canadian clubs and Thanksgiving
day and Santa Claus, and even Hal
loween and Haggis. But trace out
where they came from, they and their
parents, and you find that the province
of 100000 people has got in it $1,000
Ukrainians and $4,000 Germans. OF
people whose parents speech was not
English and not American, there are
no less than 100000.
Then take away the Americans
who came in during the great invasion
of 1901-1911, and what's left? A
community in the making, but not yet
made. Alberta, in other words, is
what used to be termed in favorable
sense, a "melting-pot." The province
not being metallic or industrial, the
metaphor doesn't quite f1t; call it
stock farm-still in the favorable
sense.
Now, a province that has no par
ticular history or geography or ma
tionality and is just a community in
the making Is ready field for social
experiment-especially if it goes "bust"
and Is reckless enough to venture
anything And Alberta, to its own
great surprise, went "bust" not long
after the Great War, first gradually
and then with q smack.
Victim Of Specialism.
1t fell, a first victim to the spe-
cialism and mechanization Of industry
that Is making many country as lop-
sided as a lobster with one claw.
When Adam Smith taught the world
the wonder of making pins all day
by machinery he forgot to say what
you were to do with the pins. In
Alberta, when they first raised wheat
with vast gang plows that disappeared
over the horizon and came back as
threshing machines, all life was q
shout. Then came the question, who
was to eat the wheat? And the world
wheat market broke, and Alberta was
underneath it when 1t came down.
The farmers fought hard; they
pooled" themselves to get greater
economic power; but pooling poverty
is no fun. They "held" their grain:
the more they held it the less 1t was
worth. They drove out the older
parties-Liberals and Conservatives
and set up farmers parties" They
looked over the horizon toward "the
capitalists and banks and the tariff
industries of Montreal. The banks
they saw as instruments for coming
credit by putting q farmer under a
press and turning the handle; q tariff
is how his belt is tightened to make
him eat less, and what the banks
call their capital Is what he calls his
debts. AL wrong, Of course! Oh, yes;
very wicked!
In such distress all kinds of new
winds Of doctrine blew like thistledown
in the breeze. and one especially
seemed to blow as sweetly and as
softly rs the Chinook wind that melts
away the Winter-the doctrine Of
social credit! They recognized it as
soon as they heard 1t: 'Sociar'-that's
US; "eredit"-our own idea, and s25 .
month saeh-our svn thought