A rapid assimilation of peoples is, in fact, a law of social development in North America. But the working of that law has, in the case of the Dukhobors, been suspended; and I have been laying emphasis on the rule only that my readers may be able more clearly to appreciate the exception. I went to Verigin, the headquarters of the Quaker-like Russian vegetarians—the strange sect who were assisted to Canada by Count Tolstoy and a committee of European well-wishers, and who have since given some trouble to the Dominion authorities by declining to take the oath of citizenship and by perambulating the country naked in search of a Messiah. I found a few Dukhobors living in ordinary Canadian houses at Verigin proper, where the community has a range of offices, a warehouse, a brick-yard, a wheat elevator, and a flour-mill fitted with up-to-date machinery. Also there I found a handful of other nationalities (notably a Scotch family and a Roumanian family, who have both become Canadian), and they testified with two voices concerning the peculiar people in the midst of whom they dwell. But before referring to lines of cleavage in local opinion, I will briefly give my own superficial impressions of a community whose main principles have always engaged my sympathy. They decline, on grounds of conscience, to serve as soldiers, and I happen to regard warfare between civilised nations as a hateful folly, admitting the peaceful and rational alternative of arbitration. They also object to slay animals for food, or for any other purpose, and, being myself inclined to a non-flesh diet, I was not likely to quarrel with that item of their humanitarian creed, even though I personally am unable to rise to the ethical height of sparing the lives of vermin. Thus such things as I shall say about these non-Canadians will at least issue from a mind unpolluted by prejudice. The local section of the community (for other sections exist elsewhere in Canada) is distributed among several villages established within a short radius of Verigin. To one of those villages—Varnoe—I went on foot—or, rather, I went part of the way on foot; for a wagon overtook me on the road, and, addressing its two occupants (men who, by reason of their unanimated expressions and a Russian suggestion in the cut of their clothes, were easy to recognise as Dukhobors), I asked if they would kindly give me a lift. That my English was, however, thrown away upon them their expressionless faces clearly showed, so by pantomime I indicated the way by which I desired to profit by their indulgence. They vouchsafed no smile of acquiescence and no frown of refusal; so, without more ado, I scrambled into the vehicle, which promptly resumed its journey.