The improvements, gear, and interest due for two years would absorb $600, and the homestead would be obligated to that extent. That was a very good scheme, on paper, as most financial schemes are. But it lacked two essentials of success--the right selection of people, and the right initiation of them into the mysteries of wresting a living from an unknown soil, and a capricious, misunderstood climate. The rock upon which so many immigration schemes have split has been the belief that the most essential requirement of all was people with money of their own. A Scot is the last man in the world to depreciate the value of money; but nobody is better aware that money is not the principal thing, when a family is invited to emigrate to a strange land. Distant fields look green. Distant farm work is very apt to look romantic. It is a beautiful contemplation for a man, tired of an old-world city and its grinding occupation, to gaze across half the world, and see himself the centre of an exquisitely balanced estate--the lowing herd winding slowly o’er the lea; the rustling fields of golden grain in the still more golden, evening sunglow; and the occasional sallying forth to shoot the game which chiefly retards the plough. This vision of a new life, in a new world, has got seed-catalogue gardening beaten to a hum-drummery. It may go into a man’s history as a charming idyll of the mind, but it is likely to meet sudden death at a pair of calloused hands, a yoke of cattle who insist on running the wagon into the middle of a miry slough, and a plow which, striking a stone concealed in virgin soil, lifts its handle against an unoffending jaw. The West always needed people with the will to work, and an inherent attachment to the land, and not too proud to take guidance from those who had been through the mill. When money has gone and profitable experience hasn’t come; the will to work on the farm is likely to succumb to a desire to return to urban occupations, which, though they are good enough in themselves, are not Canada-builders, as farming is. The Manitoba North Western subsidiaries and allies settled a great many people on the plains about Birtle, on the incomplete co-operative plan. But many of the selections were not wisely determined, and inadequate measures were taken to see that they made the best of their chances when once they were installed. Nobody can tell the story of the ineffectual attempts of a green old country townie to make a prairie farmer of himself as well as the man himself can, when his sense of humour is sharpened by, and has survived the discipline, cruel as it has often been. I am rather proud of having been a good potato harvester as a boy in Scotland, but that isn’t training enough to qualify one to depict the romantic difference between the prophecy of a Government folder a generation ago, and the alternately perspiring and freezing job of trying to make it come true.