The common carriers, therefore, tell us that our West is now beyond the Pacific; that the East has come into the West; that the Old World has come into the New; that the Latin methods of farming must supplant the Anglo-Saxon ways. Perhaps; but this will take some time. As against the likelihood of any early and sweeping national action in the matter, there remains chiefly the vis inertiæ of mental habit in the American farmer, who hitherto has not been acquainted with the doctrine of irrigation and reclamation. Vast tracts of California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas—large regions in what was once considered the irreclaimable desert of America, go to show that the Western-American can learn irrigation and can successfully carry on farming of that nature; but none the less, for the average American farmer, who has been accustomed to the wide-handed methods of his forefathers, this proposition will carry no immediate appeal. The proof of this latter statement lies in that very emigration into Canada to which attention has been called, and which constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena ever known in the history of the American West. These dwellers under the Stars and Stripes, these citizens of the land of the free, of the land supposed to offer the greatest extent of human opportunity to-day, are flocking across her borders with the purpose of establishing homes in an alien land, and under a flag from which in a century gone by they made deliberate and forcible desertion! They want the cheap lands, the wide acres, the great horizon of a West, even if they must find that West in land other than that which bore them! They do not want irrigated land that is worth one hundred dollars an acre, even though there be an unchanging and pleasant climate as an attraction thereto. They prefer a cold, bleak environment, a rude, hard life, with poorer markets, a looser touch with civilization, but with a bolder, a wider and freer individual horizon. There has been nothing in our history more pathetic than this. There has been nothing more cheerlessly disheartening in our history than the thought that we are exchanging thousands of men of this bold and rugged type, men who are willing and able to go out into the savage wilderness and lay it under tribute, for an equal number of thousands of shiftless and unambitious incoming population, who are willing to live on the droppings of the American table.