the case. They
rode to the abandoned homesteads. In the deserted log cabin nothing
seemed amiss, but some distance away on a bluff a stained ax was found;
yet farther away a mound not a year old. Beneath it the remains of the
Englishman were found with ax hacks in the skull. It was now a year
since the commission of the crime and the murderer was by this far enough
away. Why put the country to the expense of trailing down a criminal who
had decamped? Those two young Mounted Policemen were told to find the
criminal and not come back till they had found him. They trailed him
from Alberta to Montana, from Montana to the Orient, from China back to
Texas, where he was found on a homestead of his own. Now the proof of
murder was of the most tenuous sort. One of the Mounted Policemen
disguised himself as a laborer and obtained work on an adjoining
homestead. It took two years to gain the criminal's confidence and
confession. The man was arrested and extradited to Canada. If I
remember rightly, the trial did not last a week, and the murderer was
hanged forthwith.

Instances of this kind could be retailed without number, but this one
case is typical. It is something more than relentlessness. It is more
than keeping politics out of the courts. It is a tacit national
recognition of two basic truths: that the protection of innocence is the
business of the courts more than the protection of guilt; that having
delegated to the Department of Justice the enforcement of criminal law,
Canada holds that Department of Justice responsible for every infraction
of law. The enforcement is greatly aided by the fact that criminal law
in Canada is under federal jurisdiction. An embezzler can not defalcate
in Nova Scotia, lightly skip into Manitoba and put both provinces to
expense and technical trouble apprehending him. In the States I once was
annoyed by a semi-demented blackmailer. When I sent for the
sheriff--whose deputy, by the way, hid when summoned--the lunatic stepped
across the state border, and it would have cost me two hundred dollars to
have apprehended him. As the culprit was a menace more to the community
than to me, I went on west on a trip to a remote part of Alberta. I had
not been in Alberta twenty-four hours before the chief constable called
to know if this blackmailer of whom he had read in the press, could be
apprehended in Canada. The why of this vigilance on one side of the line
and remissness on the