arallel."

And the words also of the frontier statesman already mentioned, the Hon.
Frank Oliver, of Edmonton:

"Ordinarily speaking no more wildly impossible undertaking was ever
staged than the establishment of Canadian authority and Canadian
law throughout the Canadian prairies by a handful of Mounted
Police. The population consisted chiefly of warring tribes of
Indians, of whom the Blackfeet Confederacy was the most important,
the most warlike and the most intractable. Next to the Indians in
numbers were scattered settlements of half-breeds, who lived by the
chase; no less warlike although more tractable than the Indian.
Then a few white and half-breed traders and missionaries; and last
and best, the commencement of white settlements at Prince Albert
and Edmonton. An imaginary line separated Canada from the United
States for a distance of 800 miles. South of that line, strategic
points were garrisoned by thousands of United States soldiers; an
almost continuous condition of Indian warfare prevailed; and the
white population in large measure ran free of the restraints of
established authority. There had been an overflow of 'bad men' from
Montana into what is now Southern Alberta and South-Western
Saskatchewan, who repeated in Canada the exploits by which they had
made Montana infamous. In large measure, world opinion took for
granted that lawlessness must accompany pioneer conditions.
Canada's Mounted Police Force was the challenge to that idea."

And as evidence of the way in which the police backed Canada's challenge
nothing finer is written than the following in a letter to me some time
ago from Governor Dr. R. G. Brett of Alberta, who has been on the
frontiers for nearly forty years:

"The manner in which so small a force kept down the liquor traffic,
controlled the savage tribes of Indians, protected the lives and
property of the settlers, affords an illustration of paternal
administration that is probably without parallel in the world's
history."

These are tributes from men who know. And Governor Brett goes on to
commend the idea of a history of the Police when he adds:

"Every Canadian cannot but be a better citizen after reading the
history of the lives of the modest heroes, whose devotion to duty
and even-handed distribution of justice have commanded the