After five years in command of the Prince Albert district, which had been the critical storm centre around which the winds of the Riel rebellion had beaten fiercely, Inspector A. B. Perry, before changing to another command, makes another valuable contribution to the development of Western history when he writes some special paragraphs in regard to the future of the half-breeds. Game was disappearing and the occupation of freighting on the prairie was being rendered useless by the incoming of railways. Perry says, "The mass of the half-breed population must therefore turn their attention to other methods of making a living. They have no alternative: farming must become their occupation in earnest. The English and Scotch half-breeds have already done this successfully; but very few of French descent have yet made any real attempt at it." Perry was right. These people had the blood of the nomad and the volatile in their veins. Perry continues, "As farming is the inevitable pursuit of the French half-breeds, all who are friendly to them should agree in urging and encouraging them to remain on their present holdings, so that they may at once face their destiny and ultimately obtain the position of a self-supporting people. They should be treated with patience and aided generously, remembering that it is not easy for white men possessing all the advantages of education and civilization to change their occupation. Can the half-breed hunter or freighter be expected to be more apt in adapting himself to change? It would be an astonishing thing if they quietly and quickly adapted themselves to the work of a farm on which success is only obtained by hard, patient and continuous labour." And Perry goes on to advise special instruction for these people. And he concludes, "There is a tendency on the part of some to regard the problem of the future of these people as insolvable. Knowing their many sterling qualities I cannot despair, but believe their descendants will be prosperous and desirable citizens of our North-West Territory." Words like these could not be written by a man who contented himself with the routine duty of a policeman, but by a wide-awake Canadian who was anxious for the future of his country and his fellow-citizens, and it is because there were so many in the Force who saw these questions in the light of Canada's future that we have always placed the Mounted Police amongst the real nation-builders of this new Dominion.