er made that apology for hard times to an audience in Winnipeg.)
But this penniless settler had seen it happen in his own home state of
Iowa. He had seen land increase in value from nothing an acre to ten
dollars and twenty dollars and seventy-five dollars and one hundred
dollars, and he sat him down on the bare prairie in a tar-papered
shanty to help the same process along in Canada. He never had the
faintest shadow of a doubt of his hopes materializing. He had gambled
on the gold and he had lost; and behold him casting another throw of
the dice in the face of Fate, and gambling on the land; and please
note--he won out. He was one of the multitude who won out of the land
what they had lost on gold--who plowed out of the prairie what they had
sunk in a hole in the ground in a mine!

Another twist of the capricious Wheel of Fate! We didn't send Clifford
Sifton down from the West to boom Canada. We didn't know a boom was
coming. Nobody saw it. Clifford Sifton was one of the youngest
Cabinet Ministers ever appointed in Canada. There was a fight on
between the Province of Manitoba and the Dominion government as to the
right of the province to abolish separate schools. Had the province
exceeded its rights? The dispute was non-religious at first, but
finally developed into a bitter Catholic versus Protestant controversy.
Not all Protestants wanted non-religious schools; but when Catholic
Quebec said that Protestant Manitoba should not have non-religious
schools, a furious little tempest waxed in a furious little teapot.
The entrenched government of Sir John Macdonald, who had died some few
years previously, went down in defeat before Laurier, the Liberal, the
champion of Quebec and at the same time the defender of Manitoba
rights. Cardinal Merry del Val came from Rome, and the dispute was
literally squelched. It was never settled and comes up again to this
day; but the point was the champion of Manitoba, Clifford Sifton,
entered the Dominion Cabinet just as the Klondike boom broke.

He saw the backwash of disappointed gold seekers. He realized the
enormous possibilities of free advertising for Canada, and he launched
such a campaign of colonization for Canada as the most daring optimist
hardly dreamed. Agents were appointed in every hamlet and city and
town in the western states--especially those states like Iowa and
Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, where land was becoming high
priced. The personal testi