five dollars to forty
dollars to Englishmen. If the Englishmen will be satisfied with two
and three per cent., where the American demands and makes twelve to
twenty per cent.--the investment may make satisfactory returns; but it
is hard to conceive of enormous tracts two and three hundred miles from
a railroad bought for fruit lands at twenty-five dollars an acre.
Fruit without a market is worse than waste. It is loss. When
questioned, these English investors explain how raw fruit lands that
sold at twenty-five dollars an acre a few years ago in the United
States to-day sell for five hundred dollars and one thousand dollars an
acre. The point they miss is--that these top values are the result of
exceptional conditions; of millionaires turning a region into a
playground as in the walnut and citrus groves of California; or of
nearness to market and water transportation; or of peculiarly finely
organized marketing unions. If the rich estates of England like to
take these risks, it is their affair; but they must not blame Canada if
their investment does not give them the same returns as more careful
buying gives the Canadian and American.

Not all investments are of this extravagant character. Hundreds of
thousands of acres and city properties untold have been bought by
English investors who will multiply their capital a hundredfold in ten
years. I know properties bought along the lines of the new railroads
for a few hundred dollars that have resold at twenty thousand and
thirty thousand and fifty thousand. It is such profits as these that
lure to wrong investment.

Horse and cattle ranching has appealed to the Englishman from the
first, and as great fortunes have been realized from it in Canada as in
Argentina. However, the day of unfenced pasture ground is past; and in
reselling ranches for farms, many English investors have multiplied
their fortunes. In the outdoor life and freedom from conventional
cares--there has been a peculiar charm in ranch life. In no life are
the grit and efficiency of the well-bred in such marked contrast with
the puling whine and shiftlessness of the settler from the cesspool of
the city slums. I have gone into a prairie shanty where an
Englishwoman sat in filth and rags and idleness, cursing the country to
which she had come and bewailing in cockney English that she had come
to this; and I have gone on to an English ranch where there presided
some young Englishman's sister, who h