the visible signs of getting
on in the world are a bigger factor than anywhere else in Canada. The
prairies are mysterious and sublime. The West is plain big business.
Crerar represents the West rather than the prairies. He is
temperamentally a man of Ontario, where he was born; solidly businesslike
and persistent. He glorifies hard work. And he went West at a time when
the law of hard work was just coming to replace the old-timer's creed of
hanging on and waiting for something--usually a railway--to turn up. He
came up with the farmer of 60-cent wheat in a part of the country where
everything that the farmer had to buy in order to produce that kind of
wheat was high in cost. Cheap wheat and dear wherewithals have been to
T. A. Crerar and his kind Number One Hard experience. His axioms began
with the plough made under a high tariff. His code of ethics was evolved
from the self-binder, railroaded the long haul by systems that thrive on
the tariff. His community religion--not his personal, which one believes
has been pretty devoutly established--is embodied in the emotions of the
skyline elevator following the trail of the steel and the twist of the
box car.

One cannot mention these rudimentary western things without a species of
enthusiasm for the Westerner, and a consequent precarious sympathy with
the views of Mr. Crerar. Transplant yourself even for a year, as the
writer did twenty years ago, to the far northwest, and you begin in spite
of all your previously inrooted sentiments, to share the beliefs and talk
the language that lie at the basis of even so arrogant an organization as
the Grain Growers' Association and so inordinate an oligarchy as the
Canadian Council of Agriculture. A man cannot fight the paralyzing
combination of drouth, wet, early frost, rust, weevil, grasshoppers,
eastern manufacturers, high tariffs, centralized banks and bankrupt
octopean railways in the production of under-dollar wheat, without losing
much of his faith in the smug laws of economy laid down by men who buy
and sell close to the centres of production.

Now begins the work of the novelist, making _precis_ notes for his Crerar
masterpiece; investigating the prairie farm of 1900, anywhere between the
main line and the skyline. For the sake of space we copy his notes,
hastily sketched:

Low hill--General aspect, poplar bluffs, billowy landscape--Log and
mudchink shack; pole and sod roof--stable and shed ditto--Three or fo