Canada has had some curious experiences with colonization, especially with certain European religious sects. Among these were the Mennonites and the Doukhobors from Russia. The latter claimed to be descendants of Shadrach, Meshac, and Abednego, whom Nebuchadnezzar threw into the fiery furnace. They were an offshoot of the Greek Orthodox Church and lived by themselves beyond the Caucasus Mountains. In the early years of this century, when they were having trouble with the Czar’s government, Quakers in the United States and England helped them to emigrate. A grant of two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres of land was secured from the Canadian government, and some seven or eight thousand of these people were transported to Canada. They were located near Yorkton, northwest of Winnipeg, where they established communistic villages and patterned their existence on the life they had led in far-away Russia. [Illustration: Corn is now grown successfully far north of the United States. Once thought to be suitable only for wheat growing and cattle raising, the prairies of Alberta have become the centre of mixed farming in the West.] [Illustration: The part played by Canada’s railroads in colonizing her prairie provinces can hardly be overestimated. They maintain immigration agents abroad, and spend large sums in advertising the Dominion’s attractions.] [Illustration: In helping a settler get started, the Canadian Pacific Railway may provide him with a house and barn built on some of the land still available out of its grant of twenty-five million acres.] All went well for a time, but the Canadians soon discovered that the Doukhobors were subject to periodic outbreaks of religious fanaticism that had many intolerable features. At times, they were seized with the notion that it was a sin to utilize the labour of animals, and so they turned off all their live stock. At other times, they had the idea that it was wrong to use machinery, and they scrapped their farm tools. But what brought them into most serious conflict with the authorities were the pilgrimages they made to meet Christ on the prairie. It was their notion that they must not appear before Him on his second coming except in their natural condition of complete nakedness. At one time seventeen hundred men, women, and children marched into Yorkton stark naked. At another, six hundred Doukhobors wandered off naked in midwinter. On each occasion of this sort, the police had to round them up and confine them until they became sane enough to put on clothes and conduct themselves normally. Later they moved some of their colonies into British Columbia and many of them returned to Russia.