The Peopling of Saskatchewan.
THE EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT. (con't)
practical people. They wanted their children to be able to do business
with English speaking people on equal terms.
In contrast to the Finns, who were so eager for knowledge, may be
placed certain Slavs, referred to by Mr. McNutt in other pages, and who
had to be handled with much diplomacy to induce them to adopt the school
system. The present condition of education in the foreign settlements,
and the work being done to make good citizens and understanding Cana-
dians of the children will be found on the whole to be very encouraging
indeed. It is satisfactory to know that the Government, and, we may per-
haps add, the English speaking public, are fully alive to the importance
of this work, and as far as means and circumstances permit the best,
broadly speaking, that can be done is being done to achieve the object in
view and with, in the main, very gratifying results.
It has been said that the elder immigrants adapt themselves to a very
considerable extent to their new environment. Perhaps there is or rather
was no wider difference between the English speaking and the European
settler than in the status of their women. The foreign settler's wife was
not regarded as her husband's equal, and as far as we know she did not
want to be. She was capable of working in the fields, or perhaps in the
bush like a man, and was fully competent to handle horses, oxen and stock.
Instances were not unknown where a man with a vigorous wife and chil-
dren did mighty little himself, simply lording it over his industrious
family. We remember once standing talking with a Russian in his settle-
ment. The wife drove up in a double-boxed wagon. She had been to
town with a load of wheat. Her husband took no notice of her or her
team. She might have been non-existent. The woman unhitched the
horses, took them to the stable, and then started to prepare a meal, for her
lord and master and your humble servant of which she was not permitted
to partake until our royal masculine appetites had been appeased. In
the older settlements this state of things has undergone a gratifying
change, and in the newer ones the change is progressing. To take an-
other instance. In the early nineties the writer visited at the house of a
Russian German. The people were of a superior type, but the Russian, a
most kindly intelligent man, did not consider it necessary to introduce his
wife, and daughters, big girls in their teens. During my stay for all social
purposes the wife and girls counted not at all. The boys, two young fel-
lows, were on a different footing. It was some years before I was there
again. This time the old lady came to the door, shook hands and called
me by name. Her husband was not in, and I journeyed on to the eldest son's
place a mile or two on. Peter was now married to a Russian girl brought
up with the advantage of going to school. Peter received me cordially, like
an equal, and what was more pleasing so did his young wife. There was
nothing in her demeanor different from that of any other Canadian coun-
try girl. Peter and I went up to the old folks' after supper, and here the
girls, now grown up, saluted us without embarrassment, shaking hands,
and how-doing in a way that showed no sense of inferiority. Such was
Bibliography follows:
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