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the curious reader as a mine of information. Dedicated to the Men and Women of the Soil,' it tells of pioneer trails along which the farmers of Western Canada fought their way to great achievements in co-operation.' Mr Moorhouse has dug deep, and brought up masses of stuff that must be pronounced genuine. Making full use of printed records, the author has supplemented this scanty material by personal contact and familiar intercourse with the pioneers of the Grain Growers' Associations in the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. It is largely from their lips that he has learned the story of their pressing needs, their purposes, their early mistakes, their continual struggle, their final success. Concerning each, he has some vivid anecdote to tell; and every anecdote helps to form an atmosphere of raw beginnings and primitive conditions, of which people who have not lived and worked in them can have no conception.

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I cannot resist giving a short sketch of the career of one old-timer, a man whose name deserves to be known in the land of his birth, a man who by patience and a dogged fortitude and contempt for immediate reward, through long years of penury, hardship, and a combination of almost incredibly adverse conditions, fought his way to victory at last, and in doing so conferred upon the land of his adoption benefits of a permanent and farreaching nature. This man is Seager Wheeler, of Rosthern, Saskatchewan, cereal-growing wizard, who has originated three or four new varieties of hardier, earliermaturing, heavier-yielding wheats, and has obtained yields of forty bushels per acre and more, on three inches of rainfall. Born of a sea-faring family in the Isle of Wight, news-boy for five years at a W. H. Smith & Son's book-stall, he joined an uncle in Saskatchewan about 1885. The uncle was not yet a millionaire, but he had a roof over his head. It was a sod roof; the rest of the house was made of logs.

"The first harvest at which he helped,' writes his biographer, 'was thirty acres of wheat. He and another man ths cut it with cradles and tied the sheaves by hand. The hay eof is was cut with scythes, and raked with hand-rakes. Grain was Moor sown broadcast and harrowed in with branches of trees.

Wheat-birds, blackbirds, and later on gophers, went after

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the wheat. They raced wild geese and crows to see w could get most of it.'

There followed for Wheeler the usual incidents a poor settler's life-two or three years of labour a farm-hand, a season or two on a railway constructi gang; and then, with just enough money saved to p down $10 for a homestead entry, and perhaps an inst ment on a team of horses and a plough, he took farming on his own account. From the very first was a pure seed enthusiast, a believer in careful farmi He would only sow the best seed on the best-prepar land. He picked over his seed grain by hand, kernel kernel, throwing out all impurities. In a period careless and hit-or-miss farming, where the accept practice was to throw any kind of seed on the large possible area, in the least possible time, and trust to lu for a yield, his neighbours looked upon him as cras With luck, they might reap a crop large enough on a la acreage to 'make a stake.' But what sort of a sta could Wheeler make, with the best possible crop, the thirty or forty acres which was all he had?

The strength of a character is measured by i resistance to the contagion of accepted ideas. Here consisted Wheeler's great originality. While everybo else trusted to luck, and gambled in wheat-growing wi the usual result of gambling in the long run, Wheel set to work to eliminate every element of chance, in see in seed-bed, in climate, in rainfall. Through years semi-starvation, he clung to his purpose with th obstinacy of a maniac. In those days, the worst enem was frost. 'Red Fife,' the best available spring whe of the period, did not ripen early enough. Two yea out of three the frost would destroy the crop a week two before it was ready to harvest. The first probler then, was to find a wheat of equal milling quality, equal or better yield, but ripening earlier. Wheeler st out to discover for himself the principles of seed-selectio and improvement. He was unaided, unknown, withou any resources except his energy, perseverance, an enthusiasm. He worked (says Mr Moorhouse) like th proverbial nigger! He was at it all day, and, when i got too dark to see, he went into his little bachelor shack

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lighted the tin lamp, got out his wheat selections and kept right on working half the night, minutely examining and sorting wheat kernels and tying wheat heads in tiny bundles and writing down comparisons and endless data.' There was a small mortgage on his farm. More than once, it was nearly sold over his head. It was years before he could afford to build himself a decent house.

His first real success was in obtaining a pure red strain of 'Preston' wheat, which had the merit of ripening earlier than 'Red Fife.' This was about 1907-10. Thereafter his progress in the field of scientific achievement was rapid; and prosperity followed, though with laggard feet. In 1911 he won with a sample of 'Marquis' wheat the world's championship and a prize of $1000 in gold offered by the C.P.R.-the largest amount of money that had so far come in his way. After that he acquired the regular show habit, and usually swept the board. It is chiefly due to these awards for all manner of field 3 produce, including old and new varieties of cereals, grasses, and potatoes, that his name has become a household word in Western Canada. But it will be remembered still more on account of the permanent contribution he made to the list of plants likely to thrive on a commercial scale in a rigorous climate with a short growing season, and the enormous improvement in methods of cultivation which enabled him to grow a good crop of wheat even in years of severest drought. In the end, he accomplished to the full what he had set out to do. He eliminated from wheat-growing the two most familiar gambling elements: he overcame the danger of frost by developing wheat strains that mature from fifteen to twenty days earlier than 'Red Fife,' and defeated the handicap of deficient moisture by his special summerfallow system.

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pass from Seager to other leaders of agriculturesuch as W. R. Motherwell, for several years Minister of le Agriculture in the Saskatchewan Provincial Government, founder in 1901 of the Territorial Grain Growers' Association; E. A. Partridge, who first conceived the ketides of a Farmers' Company to market the farmers' own be wheat, and started the Grain Growers' Grain Company in 1906; and Charles A. Dunning, the Leicester lad, who

devised the scheme of co-operative hail insurance, ar organised the Saskatchewan Co-operative Elevator Cr deserve a more than local fame.

Quite apart from physical or climatic risks-drough hail, frost, gophers, mosquitoes, bad roads, remotene from railways, and so on-the early pioneers were bes with enormous economic difficulties. They had 1 capital, and there was no local market for their produ They could get no price for oats or barley or whe or hogs or cattle, unless these goods could find an expo market. Fifteen or twenty cents a bushel was a comm price for oats, for which there was no export mark twenty years ago. Hogs were often worth no mo than five cents a pound dressed. In theory there w an export market for wheat, the price of which oug presumably to have been based upon the world-pric but the world-market could only be reached through tl elevators and the railways; and the elevators general managed to control the price in their own districts 1 more or less express agreements between themselve Besides arbitrary prices, the grain-growers suffered the hands of the local buyer through excessive dockag exorbitant storage charges, even short weights. Befor 1901 they were completely at the buyers' mercy. Th first step in the farmers' emancipation was taken in the year, when the just organised Territorial Grain Grower Association compelled the Railway Company to di tribute freight-cars as and when required to farmer who desired to load direct, instead of being forced t sell to the local elevator. There had never previousl been any real competition among buyers for the farmer grain; each elevator enjoyed a local monoply. Th monoply was now broken, but only for a time; it wa quite possible for separate elevators to combine unde one management. They were very soon combined and the old antagonism broke out again on a differen level.

The farmers' counter-stroke came in 1906, with the formation of the Grain Growers' Grain Company, a joint stock company composed wholly of farmers, with a capital of $250,000 in $25 shares, no member being allowed to hold more than four shares. It started business with a paid-up capital of $2500, supplemented

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by the unlimited liability of its enthusiastic promoters, whatever that might be worth, in a small Saskatchewan village, with Partridge as its first President.

To the critical student, the whole plan appears so destitute of all the acknowledged elements of success as to be farcical. The grain trade had long been a strongly organised business, supplied with ample capital, with the Winnipeg Grain Exchange as the focus of chains of whe local elevators. The Farmers' Company had no capital to speak of. The $250,000 were purely nominal; only about 10 per cent. had been paid up; the rest might or Ar might not mature. The executive officers knew something about growing grain, but they had no business training whatever; common-sense was their sole endowment. The og only real assets were the good-will of other farmers having pris wheat to sell, and their determination to stick together and see the thing through. Carrying war into old preTa serves of vested interests, they could expect no quarter, and got none. Vulnerable, owing to their inexperience, in half-a-dozen places, their unavoidable blunders left them open to attack on many sides. They committed a technical breach of the rules of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. The Exchange excluded them from memberI ship, and only reinstated them when the Manitoba Government threatened to suspend the Charter of the. Exchange. As heavy borrowers without security beyond the good-will of their business, they were at the mercy of their Bank; and the Bank, dominated by the elevator interests, suddenly requested them one day to close their accounts. The story of the first two or three years is one of hair-breadth escapes.

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Under the direction of T. A. Crerar, whom Partridge selected to succeed himself in the president's chair (1907), and co-operation and the Grain Company marched in step ine with each other; the success of the Company destroying the remnants of scepticism among farmers as to the possibility of close co-operation, and the spread of the hco-operative idea adding to the capital, increasing jo the clientèle, and widening the sphere of action of the ith Company. Henceforth the story of its grow this on allbein fours with the life history of any business supplying a art real need in a practically virgin field-a story of logical At development, of progressive aggregation, each step in