PIONEERING IN CANADA.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 973, 30 March 1911, Page 4

PIONEERING IN CANADA.

The prospective brides who rushed the agencies in Loudon, as stated in the cable messages the other day, when it was announced that 50,000 brides were wanted for Canadian farmers, had probably read the glowing literature published in such quantities about the Dominion; but that there is a tragic side to the picture is shown by a story related by Mr John Lemmone, of Sydney, who recently travelled through the country with Madame Melba’s concert party. At Brandon, in Manitoba, the} visitors, driving out sight-seeing one day, were shown a handsome building which had failed of its original'purpose.a boys’ college, since the farmers so urgently needed the labour of their sous on the land that they could not send them to finish their education. The Government, taking over the college, devoted it to the purpose of a mental hospital; "and now,” continued Mr Lemmone, "it is filled with patients—none other than farmers’ wives, who have become insane through the loneliness of the prairie life. While their husbands are away the poor women must remain at home; the nearest neighbours are miles away, and for six months the place is a wilderness of snow—and nothing is more terrible in its desolation than the prairie under snow. No wonder they go out of their minds.” Such is the tragedy of life out west in Canada. Far better for the immigrants to have come to New Zealand, even to take up domestic service !