The World For Sale | Page 2

English
Canada; that is why the towns of Lebanon and Manitou had from the
first divergent views. Lebanon was English, progressive, and brazenly
modern; Manitou was slow, reactionary, more or less indifferent to
education, and strenuously Catholic, and was thus opposed to the
militant Protestantism of Lebanon.
It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny
is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the
wastes. I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central
figure of my story. He was highly educated, well born, and carefully
brought up. He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new
country--intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision. He had an
original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries,
he looked far ahead. Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in
old countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests.
Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be
extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and
principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities and
wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London. The difference,
however, between the old European town and the new Western town is

that differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical
form, as was the case in the life of Ingolby. In order to accentuate the
primitive and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine
from a race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that
of Lebanon or Manitou at any time. I chose a heroine from the gipsy
race, and to heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she
had come I made her a convert to the settled life of civilization. I had
known such a woman, older, but with the same characteristics, the
same struggles, temptations, and suffering the same restriction of her
life and movements by the prejudice in her veins--the prejudice of
racial predilection.
Looking at the story now after its publication, I am inclined to think
that the introduction of the gipsy element was too bold, yet I believe it
was carefully worked out in construction, and was a legitimate,
intellectual enterprise. The danger of it was that it might detract from
the reality and vividness of the narrative as a picture of Western life.
Most American critics of the book seem not to have been struck by this
doubt which has occurred to me. They realize perhaps more faithfully
than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are
by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and
North. Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia
drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western
towns, with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life.
For instance, a town like Winnipeg has sections which represent the life
of nearly every race of Europe, and towns like Lebanon and Manitou,
with English and French characteristics controlling them mainly, are
still as subject to outside racial influences as to inside racial
antagonisms.
I believe The World for Sale shows as plainly as anything can show the
vexed and conglomerate life of a Western town. It shows how racial
characteristics may clash, disturb, and destroy, and yet how wisdom,
tact, and lucky incident may overcome almost impossible situations.
The antagonisms between Lebanon and Manitou were unwillingly and
unjustly deepened by the very man who had set out to bring them
together, as one of the ideals of his life, and as one of the factors of his

success. Ingolby, who had everything to gain by careful going, almost
wrecked his own life, and he injured the life of the two towns by
impulsive acts.
The descriptions of life in the two towns are true, and the chief
characters in the book are lifted out of the life as one has seen it. Men
like Osterhaut and Jowett, Indians like Tekewani, doctors like
Rockwell, priests like Monseigneur Fabre, ministers like Mr. Tripple,
and ne'er-do-weels like Marchand may be found in many a town of the
West and North. Naturally the book must lack in something of that
magnetic picturesqueness and atmosphere which belongs to the people
in the Province of Quebec. Western and Northern life has little of the
settled charm which belongs to the old civilization of the French
province. The only way to recapture that charm is to place Frenchmen
in the West, and have them act and live--or try to act and live--as they
do in old Quebec.
That is what I did with Pierre in