THE DAILY PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BRITISH
COLUMBIA, TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1908

THE PROVINCE
W.C. NICHOL
TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1908
THE AMERICAN SETTLER.
The American invasion of the Northwestern prairies of Canada continues and
gives promise of increasing. The dispatched of Saturday last note the
acquisition of thirty sections of land in the Tramping Lake district west of
Saskatoon, as the result of a visit by a party of Americans, and the members of
the party are quoted as saying that they are but the advance guard of an army
of settlers headed for the fertile stretches of Saskatchewan.
To those interested in the speedy occupation of our great wheat producing
areas by an intelligent, industrious and thrifty population, and by a people
speaking our own language, possessing our own ideals, appreciating our own
institutions and practising our own customs, and to the full therefore
representing exactly the class of settlement we desire, nothing could be more
satisfactory than this American influx. And in addition to all these
qualifications as citizens they possess another which makes them especially
acceptable at this stage of western progress and development – they are all, or
nearly all, expert farmers, men who have been trained to the occupation and
who therefore can at once make the most of the opportunities offered them by
a rich virgin soil for the creation of wealth for themselves and the country.
And apart, too, from the value they will be to the country as producers of
wealth they will constitute a new element in the political life of the West, at
least of the middle West. These people, reared under as free institutions as we
can find anywhere in Canada, and accustomed to take a keen interest in the
administration of public affairs, will not be satisfied tamely to submit to the
arbitrary dictum which robbed the new provinces of their full powers, of their
perfect equality with the other members of the Confederation. Having
accepted the invitation to become Canadian citizens, and having taken the

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THE DAILY PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BRITISH
COLUMBIA, TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1908
oath of allegiance they will not be prepared to sit idly by and regard with
unconcern the Government of the country. They will insist on participating to
the full in the political issues which will arise and they will be resolute that the
provincial community of which they are members shall not be relegated to a
subordinate or unworthy position in determining the future of the Dominion.
Their loyalty to the country of their adoption will be an active and not a
passive loyalty and it will be all the better for that.
They will not tolerate conditions such as they find there at present whereby
the federal power is able to dispose of the public resources of those provinces
at its will and make the population support a system to education of a
mediaeval type. They will demand the fullest freedom in those matters – the
freedom for example which we in British Columbia enjoy but which we would
not long enjoy were the present federal administration able to rob us of it.
Nor will these new settlers in the Canadian middle west be content that the
political weight of the country should remain so decidedly in the East – that
the western half of the Dominion should have to bow to the will or the order
provinces and continue as a preserve for their commerce heedless of its own
interests and necessities, that its very development, too, should be made to
serve the basest purpose of party Government. With indifference to party
affiliations they will select men for parliament and the legislatures whose
allegiance will be principle rather than to names and who will insist the
Government shall be for the country and not for party.
We can perceive even now in Western Canada that disposition evinced
wherever the American settlements are strong and it would be impossible not
to and in it a promise for good. Without doubt a generation or two will see
party lines more strictly drawn than they will be by the new settlers but by
that time the West will have asserted herself and the political preponderance
will incline to the country west of Lake Superior to which the volume of
immigration is tending and where the wealth of Canada will chiefly be created.
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ANARCHISM IN INDIA.

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THE DAILY PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BRITISH
COLUMBIA, TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1908
One of the most far-seeing and courageous actions in Lord Lytton’s viceroyalty in India was his Press Act of 1878, which was intended to control the
insensate ebullitions of the native newspaper. Unhappily it furnished material
for the wild denunciations of Mr. Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign and
aroused the indignation of popular audiences who did not understand the
subject. When a Liberal Government came into power, the act was repealed,
and it may be fairly said that the consequences have been increasing
disastrous. That this is so is evident from the fat that, at last, a Radical
Secretary for India and a Viceroy who is under the orders of a Radical Ministry
have been forced to acknowledge that India is not England, and that the same
rule need not necessarily apply to the alums of Calcutta and to the
newspapers of London or Manchester. Lord Morley is the more to be honored
that he was one of the fiercest assailants of Lord Lytton’s policy, and that his
own sayings and writings are sure to be quoted against him by the white
baboons (spelled incorrectly in the article) in and out of Parliament. Six months
ago this firm action of the Indian Government would have been impossible
with a House of Commons constituted like the present one, but the situation
has become too serious; the lives of the leading members of the Indian
Government, to say nothing of the honor of the white women scattered up and
down the lonely districts of the various Presidencies, are in actual peril. And
when the Indian representatives on the Viceroy’s Council are forced to admit
the necessity of the Explosives Act, it is not likely that the ravings of English
Anarchists will be patiently listened to at home.
Nearly two months have elapsed since the atrocious outrage of Mizaffurpur,
when two English ladies were blown to pieces by a bomb as they were taking
their evening drive. In the interval the situation has grown appreciably worse;
there have been deliberate attempts at the assassination of more than one
official; an illicit factory of high explosives; fitter up on the most approved
Anarchistic patters, has been discovered while a portion of the native press is
calling on the Bengalis and Goorkhas “to light a sacrificial fire fed with blood.”
In the face of this crisis the ordinary law has broken down; prosecutions
under the Press Act have merely given a stimulus to the circulation of the
incriminated papers, and loaded the obscure revellers with popularity and
rupees. Nor are the existing penalties against the possession of explosives

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THE DAILY PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BRITISH
COLUMBIA, TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1908
sufficiently stringent, nor is the procedure for their discovery sufficiently
drastic. The two measures which were carried recently through the India
Council sitting at Simla, should render the Government once more masters of
a situation which seemed to be slipping from their grasp. The explosives Act is
apparently a simple extension to India of the statue which was passed for the
United Kingdom in 1883, and the unsparing use of which effectually stamped
out the dynamite campaign. The Newspaper Act is purely administrative. It
gives authority to the magistrate to deal in the most summary manner with
papers publishing criminal incitements and enables them to confiscate
printing presses on which such mater is produce, and to stop the issue of the
offending papers. There is to be no prosecution, no publicity, no spurious
martyrdom. The procedure is in the ----- the ordinary course of the law in its
dealing with public nuisances, save that the act gives an appeal to the High
Court to be exercised within fifteen days against a magistrate’s order for the
confiscation of a printing press.
In his speech to the Council, the Viceroy justified his conduct in proceeding by
legislation rather than by ordinance and at the same tine declared that if
either of the bills should prove to be ineffective, prompt measures would be
taken to strengthen it. It strikes us that the provisions of the Newspaper Act
might well be extended from the publication of criminal incitements to the
preaching of general action. But the most remarkable admission in Lord
Minto’s speech was the statement that India is not ripe for complete freedom
of the press and that it is unfair to her people that for daily information they
should be “dependent upon dependent upon unscrupulous caters of literary
poison.” Of all the attempts to acclimatise Western products in totally
unsuitable surroundings, perhaps the establishment of the “Liberty of
Unlicensed Printing” among Oriental has been the most mischievous. Those
who are acquainted with the more backward districts in other countries know
something of the unreasoning faith which is attached to any fiction, however
wild or improbable, that has once attained the dignity of print. In the East,
whether it be China or in Egypt or in British India, the little scrap of dirty
paper which is read aloud and passed from hand to hand is accepted as the
oracle of God, and is a little questioned, even among the comparatively
enlightened, as a Papal encyclical by devout Roman Catholics. The so-called

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THE DAILY PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BRITISH
COLUMBIA, TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1908
newspapers which compose the bulk of vernacular press in India are little
broadsheets whose mendacity is only equally by their ignorance, and it is
almost incredible that superstition for English traditions should have allowed
them to flourish unchecked save by the ponderous machinery of a state
prosecution.

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