Where are your adventures to-day? Where are your pioneers, your explorers, your Hudsons, your Raleighs, your Cooks? Has the love of danger and the spirit of daring died away altogether in this twentieth century, like a grand old oak dies when choked by ivy, leaving only a gnarled and naked memory of its former beauty? Have the clinging tendrils of the money-hunger crushed all the dare-devil spirit from men's souls, so that now the most thrilling risk they dare to take is a mild flutter on the 3:30 winner at half-a-crown each way?

If it is not so, why is it that at this moment when the Colonies are crying out for men, and at home in England you have three million of them out of work, the driblet of emigrants to the El Dorado overseas is so shamefully meagre?

I know that on reading this hundreds of statisticians will frantically rush to their pens and ink with the purpose of proving me hopelessly wrong. They will bombard me with columns of figures, produce a barrage of information to the effect that the Colonies just now do now want immigrants, that they have no room for their own people, in fact, and generally demolish me with final proofs that the thing for young men and women to do who are jobless and hopeless in England is to sit down at home, draw the dole comfortably, and wait for something to turn up. Which is nonsense!

The thing these figure-wizards forget is that they are dealing with little cyphers in black on white sheets of paper. Whereas, I am arguing about men and women, flesh and blood and spirit, courage, high endeavour, fearlessness, enterprise and brawn. My emigrants--the kind the Colonies do want and make no secret of wanting--are what our vivid friends the Americans call 'go-getters'. They are prepared to meet difficulties and even hardships, they are clear-sighted visionaries with a definite goal ahead, and they intend to get to it if human muscle and sinew and human ingenuity can get them there. They are the spiritual descendants of the old pioneer who blazed the trail in the olden days across Africa, Australia and America.

Never before has the wider world offered such a variety of opportunities. Of course it does not want wastrels, won't-works and failures--it is not just a vast office, warming up comfortable seats for the folk the Old Country has no use for. But it does want men--real men and real women--and for them it holds out the most glittering rewards in money, fame and happiness.

Moreover, jobs to-day are easier than they were even a few years ago. Hewing of wood and drawing of water are no longer the beginning and end of a pioneer's life. There is room for professional men in their thousands, for traders, for business men, for manufacturers, for policemen, for porters, in fact, for every possible branch of labour. But these men must be the best of their kind and, unless they are still young enough and willing to learn, they must be efficient craftsmen or practitioners before they think of going overseas.

But once out there they can go ahead and achieve all the success they can possibly wish for. At home every trade and profession is so overcrowded that only men of exceptional ability can make (say) a thousand pounds a year. But one man I read of recently went from a little west country town to Australia four years ago, at the age of eighteen, took up a small Government concession of land on the usual condition that he cleared it in a specified time, cut and sold the timber from it, ploughed and sowed the fields, took in more land, began employing others, and now after these four years he has built himself a homestead and is not only very prosperous, but well on the road to becoming a rich man. But then he is a man--the sort of man to whom in the old days my League was always open. Despite the recent Australian financial and labour troubles, he made his way surely and steadily and gave the lie to the Dismal Jimmies who are always telling modern young people to stay at home and do nothing.

Take that other great country--Canada. Faith! there must be something very stimulating in the air of the great prairies, for I have met young men and women out there who came from the Old Country, but who had suddenly shed, as if by magic, the cloak of supineness and discontent which some of you are so fond of wrapping round you. You go over the great lakes in one of the luxurious C.P.R. boats, and I'll vow that you'll be struck at once with the smartness and the quiet, elegant manners of the young men and women who wait upon you in the dining-hall, the tea-room and your cabin. Unless you feel exceptionally morose you will enter into conversation with that fair-haired young steward who has such shapely hands and wears such nice clean linen. And he will tell you that he is a University student at Toronto, that his father is a barrister or doctor or parson in the Old Country with not enough money to spend on University education for his sons; so he--the eldest of the bunch--came out to Canada with a few pounds in his pocket, and pays his 'Varsity fees himself with money which he earns during vacation time at any job that comes his way.'

Then when you land from the boat, as likely as not, the porter who carries your bag and to whom you give a fifty cents' tip, is the son of an archdeacon or the grandson of an Earl; and the chambermaid at your hotel will turn out to be the daughter of that Lady Alice Something or the Hon. Mrs. Something-else whom you met in London society. These young people out there do not consider for a moment that by their work they have come down in the social world. In the rarefied atmosphere of the Rockies work of any sort or kind is just the means of earning money--money that can be expended in education or amusement or lightening the burdens of the old people at home.

I have been vastly amused recently by reading in your newspapers various letters of protest on the subject of domestic servants. They themselves--some of them--call their occupation degrading, and I am sorry to see that in this ridiculous attitude they are backed by educated women who should know better. Degrading? Heavens above! no work efficiently done for wage loyally earned can possibly be degrading. Whether you wear a becoming white cap or whether you don't, you are doing the one thing that ennobles every character and heightens self-respect--work. You might as well argue that there is degradation in wearing the King's uniform.

It is the spirit that enters a man's or woman's soul out there in the great primitive countries that we who love our tight little Island would like to see at home.

Suppose I--even I, your old friend the Scarlet Pimpernel--had to carve my fortune to-day. Suppose I was still very young, but without the wealth which enabled me to satisfy my craving for adventure by pitting my wits against the tigers of the French Revolution, what would I do to save myself from dying of ennui? Would I, do you suppose, sit down and draw my dole, making no effort to gain more from life than ease and two square meals a day? Would I be content never to risk my precious self a yard away from the apron-strings of my Mother Country? Faith! I trust not.

I'll tell you where I'd be. I'd pack myself off steerage on one of those emigrant ships which I have seen gliding so smoothly down the Clyde or the Thames; I'd crave leave to join that gallant company of youth who, when chances look unpromising over here, set their faces boldly towards the East, the West, the North of the South, to go out (as bravely as ever my friends Tony and Ffoulkes went out to France with me) to meet high adventure wherever it may be found, and to carry the pioneer spirit--the old spirit of Mother England--to the most distant corners of the earth.

Your ancestors--those sturdy soldiers of fortune of past centuries--must look with pride on their children's children, I'll warrant, when an emigrant ship sets off so gaily from the quayside. Maybe she is only a rusty old tramp, but to the ghosts of the trapper and trader of old she is as gallant as the Mayflower or the Revenge. Her passengers seem to you and to me no more than raw youths and disappointed men, but the spirit of Hawkins and Grenville call a welcome to the blood-brothers of their long-dead shipmates, to those who sought with them in the days that are gone the land of El Dorado that lay beyond the uncharted seas.

And at least the emigrants are better adventurers than many of their critics, who shiver and draw closer to their fireside at home, and shake doleful heads wisely over the chances and risks which those emigrants are ready to dare, but which the critics themselves are too supine and fearful to face.