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HE Royal Northwest Mounted Police force of Canada is a combination of all sorts and conditions of men blown together by the round-up of the winds of heaven. In the ranks we find Western bronco-buster, Eastern log-birler, lumberjacks, unaspirated Cockneys, CreeScot half-breeds, time-expired men from every branch of the imperial service, side by side with the French Canadian born "t'ree days below Kebek." years ago the roll-call of one troop included in its rank and file a son of a colonial governor, a grandson of a majorgeneral, a medical student from Dublin, an Oxford M.A., two troopers of the imperial forces, and half a dozen ubiquitous Scots. For many years a son of Charles Dickens did honorable service with this force, and there served beside him a runaway circus-clown and the brother of a Yorkshire baronet. Several of the full privates have tucked away in the bottom of their mess-kit medals won in South Africa, Egypt, and Afghanistan, but the lost legion of gentleman-rankers predominates, and it is Rugby and Cambridge out here on the unbroken prairies that set the fashion in mufti and manners.

A compelling factor making for dignity and decency in a border-country as big as Europe is this little band of red-coated riders, scarcely a thousand in number, spurring singly across the plains with sealed orders and turning up just when most wanted.

The beat of the Mounted Policeman is from Hudson Bay to the Pacific, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the frozen Arctic, and he does not take tips or sleep on duty; you cannot bluff him; you cannot

IN 1870 the Hudson's Bay Company gave up to the Canadian Government their exclusive rights in "Rupert's Land," the great prairie Northwest of Canada. The intrusion into the then unguarded Indiancountry of wolfers and illicit whiskytraders from the South made it necessary for Canada to send there some body of men empowered to protect the red man from the white man's cupidity, to enforce law and order on the frontier, and to try the unique experiment of making by moral suasion law-abiding British subjects out of warlike Sioux, Assiniboin, Blackfoot, Blood, and Ojibwas.

How far the little force has succeeded in its mission may be judged from the fact that Canada has never seen a lynching, that she has never had an Indian war (the nearest approach being the two ill-advised and soon-suppressed half-breed risings of Riel), and that, with one weak-kneed exception, there has been no hold-up of a train within Canadian borders.

An officer of the Mounted Police is not an exponent of the law; he is the law itself. When he rides his cayuse to foot-hill camp or threads on snow-shoes the worn north trails of the trapper, he goes clad with the

authority of courts. He preserves order, but he also makes arrests; he tries offenders in his own courts, and then escorts the man upon whom sentence has fallen to a prison of his own making, where the lawbreaker may be incarcerated for ten days or thirty years. Back of that slight, silent, steel-nerved rider is the strong arm of England and the whole of Canadian jurisprudence, and when he speaks, it is as one with authority. In extreme cases, when the death penalty has to be enforced, one Mounted Policeman may have to act as clergyman, executioner, and coroner.

"All this I swear without any mental evasion, equivocation, or secret reservation. So help me, God,"-with these impressive words do raw recruits and grizzled soldier enter the service of the Mounted Police and swear fidelity to His Majesty Edward VII. It is not prospective wealth that tempts a man to become an empire-builder in this mounted force of Greater Canada, "for hard is her service, poor her payment."

The newly recruited constable gets sixty cents a day, his term of engagement is five years, and he may look forward to reengagement on a second term, with a staffsergeant's pay of from $1.00 to $1.50 a day to work up to. Recruits must be between the ages of twenty-two and forty, active men of thoroughly sound constitution and possessed of certificates of exemplary character. They must be able to read and write either in English or French, understand horses, ride well, measure up to the minimum height of five feet, eight inches, have a chest measurement of thirtyfive inches, weigh not over 175 pounds, and be unencumbered with a wife.

WHAT IS DEMANDED OF THE TROOPER

THERE is scarcely a department of the Canadian Government service that is not assisted by these judges in red coats. As veterinaries they aid the Department of Agriculture by dipping every doubtful head of stock that comes across the border; they act as escorts to the officials carrying treaty-money to Indians at the time of the annual payment; they guard from theft. the crown timber reserves, and make complete weather reports for the Meteorological Office. Mounted Policemen are called upon to be physicians and gentle

nurses, bailiffs and interpreters. The patroling policeman, riding his lonely rounds, makes Piegan Indian and Swampy Cree keep each to his respective stampingground, calls upon Four Horses and Eagle Sitting Down to account for each new piebald pony, incidentally stamps out a prairie fire, prevents Mormons from marrying overmuch, and Doukhobors from eating grass.

Your Mounted Policeman sent out to make an arrest must not shoot first; he has no orders to bring in his prisoner "dead or alive." If he brings him in dead, he gets three months' imprisonment with hard labor; if he fails to bring him in, though he go single-handed into a hostile Indian camp or a gambling-hell on that errand, he is equally accorded "three months' hard." So the record of the force is one long bead-roll of divine tragedies, brave adventures, and impossibilities made facts.

The official blue-books of the R. N. W. M. P. issued by the Government at Ottawa are interesting chiefly because of what they do not say. One has to read the romance that lies between the lines of "I beg to report" and "I have the honor to be." The blue-book has its origin in the businesslike stub of the pencil with which Constable Smith or Sergeant No. 897, riding from Cree camp to settler's hut, jots down the condition of the crops, the state of the roads and bridges, the peculiar cattle-mark adopted by the last Ruthenian settler, the amount of gold that the prospector washes out of the sands of the Saskatchewan. The real constituents of the Mounted Policeman in the piping times of peace are rarely heard from. Many of the settlers of western Canada are foreigners; it is a land of distances and solitudes. Wherever in the lonely places a man and a woman with their little baggage of loves and sorrows have builded themselves a roof-tree and feel the children pulling at the skirts, there a thought of thanksgiving goes out to the solitary rider whose untiring vigilance holds them in safety.