resent time it works and keeps the courts clear of political
influence.

Juries are not so universal in Canada as in the United States. In civil
cases, where the points of law are complicated, the tendency is to let
the judge guide the verdict of the court.

III

There is one feature of Canadian justice which sentimentalists deplore.
It is that the lash is still used for crimes of violence against the
person and for bestiality. This is not a relic of barbarism. It is the
result of careful thought on the part of the Department of Justice--the
thought being that it is useless to speak to a man capable of bestiality
in terms not articulate to his nature; and the fact remains that
criminals of this class seldom come back for second terms of punishment
for the same sort of crimes.

If you ask why few homicides are punished in the United States, and few
escape in Canada--I can not answer. Political expediency, party heelers,
technicalities--the dotting of an i, the crossing of a t, the omission of
a comma--have no effect whatsoever on Canadian justice. The courts are
never defied, and the law takes its course.

The law not only takes its course relentlessly but the pursuit of crime
literally never desists. This feature of Canadian justice is a rude
sharp shock to the unruly element pouring in with the new colonists. A
Montana gunman blew into a Canadian frontier town and in accordance with
custom began "to shoot up" the bar rooms. In twenty-four hours he
awakened from his spree under sentence of sixty days' hard labor. "Let
me out of this blamed Can-a-day," he cursed. "Who'd 'a' thought of
takin' any offense from touchin' up this blamed dead town?"

A Texas outlaw succeeded in inducing a young Englishman of the verdantly
bumptious and moneyed sort to go homestead hunting with him. The Indians
saw the two ride into the back country. In spring only the Texan came
out. I forget what his explanation of the Englishman's disappearance
was. In any other country under the sun, who would have ridden two
hundred miles beyond nowhere to investigate the story of an outlaw about
a young fool, who had plainly been a candidate for trouble? But an old
Indian chief meandered into the barracks of the nearest Mounted Police
station, sat him down on the floor and after smoking countless pipes let
drop the fact that two settlers had "gone in" and only "one man--he come
out." That was enough. Two policemen were detailed on