 200 CANADA frosts often ruined the grain before it had hardened. Destructive hailstorms, though in a far less degree, proved disheartening. The precise extent of this annual damage matters nothing. It was enough to make a noise in the world, and greatly influence that part of it interested in immigration. Nor was the average man in Old Canada generally enthusiastic about the North-West. It had hit him for the time rather hard, and helped to depreciate the value of his land, which the continuously low price of grain aggravated. Like his English counterpart, he was suffering from the competition of virgin soils in the Western American States, and from improved transportation all over the world. He had not yet adapted himself to another style of farming. He could no longer sell his farm if he wished to, at the standard price of a few years earlier, and very often not at all. Buyers looked westward, and perhaps his own son, helpmate, and successor, had gone West, or, disheartened by low prices, into business. Between 1881 and 1891 a dozen or fifteen good agricultural counties in Ontario actually declined in population. Yet the Canadian North-West, though it progressed steadily, did none too well. The first generation of settlers had to learn how to deal with a totally new country. The winters were terribly severe. The Canadians |  THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 201 were used to a zero, and often a ten and twenty "below," winter temperature, but the prairies went at times far lower than this. To the immigrant from Britain this was harder still. Most of the new settlers, too, were people of small means, and not able, or often not experienced enough, to protect themselves properly from the climate. When people are properly housed in warmed buildings and their stock in good barns, when they live near together, are within easy reach of a railroad or town, and have telephones and telegraphs, a winter like the North-West matters little, as there is no farm work to be done in it. But in the early days the settler had often no near neighbours, and neither himself nor his animals were well housed. He was sometimes forced to leave a wife and children alone while he made long and even perilous trips for trifling but necessary things. Women frequently went mad from the solitude of the prairie. But, above all, the price of grain remained low, and the cost of transport to the world's :markets was still so high that even with a good crop securely saved, it did not leave the prairie farmer enough profit to tempt outsiders, with half-a-dozen other fields to choose from, to a life, the hardships of which had been noised very much abroad. Farmers in Old Canada consoled themselves in their natural grievance against the North- |
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