om of opportunity for each man
to work out the best in him. It is an even wager that the average
Canadian coming to the United States is unaware of any difference in
his freedom, and the average American coming to Canada is unaware of
any difference in his freedom. Both people have fought and bled for
freedom and treasure it as the most sacred thing in life.

But this is not so of thirty-three per cent. of Canada's immigrants who
do not speak English, much less understand the institutions of freedom
to which they have come. If they had been worthy of freedom, or
capable of making right use of it, they would have fought for it in the
land from which they came, or died fighting for it--as Scotchmen and
Irishmen and Englishmen and Americans have fought and bled for freedom
wherever they have lived. A people unused to freedom suddenly plunged
in freedom need not surprise us if they run amuck.

II

"This is mos' won'erful country," writes Tony to his brother in Italy.
"They let us vote and they pay us two dollars to do it."

"Yah, yah," answered a foreign mother in North Winnipeg to a
school-teacher, trying to recall why her young hopeful had played
truant. "Dat vas eelection--my boy, he not go--because Jacob--my
man--he vote seven time and make seven dollar." (The whole family had
been on a glorious seven-dollar drunk.)

"Does this man understand for what he is voting?" demanded the election
clerk of a Galician interpreter who had brought in a naturalized
foreigner to vote.

"Oh, yaas; I eexplain heem."

"Can he write?"

An indeterminate nod of the head; so the voter marks his ballot, and
his vote counts for as much as that of the premier or president of a
railroad.

For years Canadians have pointed the finger of scorn at the notorious
misgovernment of American cities, at the manner in which foreigners
were herded to the polls by party bosses to vote as they were paid.
The cases of a Louisiana judge impeached for issuing bogus certificates
of citizenship to four hundred aliens and of New York courts that have
naturalized ignorant foreigners in batches of twenty-five thousand in a
few months have all pointed a moral or adorned a tale in Canada.

Yet what is happening in Canada since the coming of hordes of ignorant
immigrants? I quote what I have stated elsewhere, an episode typical
of similar episodes, wherever the foreign vote herds in colonies. An
election was coming on in one of the western provinc