stefansson-wrangel-09-31-084v

130 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

Honourable Arthur Meighen, with whom I had previously-
been dealing.

I was also hampered by a naive faith in the inevitable
triumph of a good cause. It seemed to me the facts were
all with us and that people would eventually take the
time to look into them, whereupon they would flock to
our side. I thought this especially reasonable in a coun-
try like Canada, where within living memory the Prairie
Provinces have changed from the supposedly frozen wil-
derness of fifty years ago to the “bread basket of the
world,” and where the development of Alaska from
“Seward’s Ice Box” to an empire of wealth was about as
well known as it is in the United States. But I found
that both lessons have been lost upon the majority of
Canadian editors and that they seldom analogize from
the Manitoba or Alaska of yesterday to the "Frozen North"
in which they believe today. There are also those who
seem to realize the coming value of the remote north, but
who simply do not have the imagination to see their own
advantage in developments which probably will not yield
profits for twenty or thirty years. These people are
logical according to their lights in refusing to do anything
for posterity on the ground that posterity has never done
anything for them.

For years I had been writing long letters to the prime
ministers of Canada, to the ministers of the interior and
to other influential people setting forth in what appeared
to me conclusive terms the background of our northern
work. It was another piece of childlike simplicity to
feel that all I had to do now would be was to refer to this cor-
respondence which the new Government would find in
the files of their predecessors, and to rely on their reading
it and doing something about it. In a way I knew how