Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1910 — LAW IN THE WILDERNESS. [ARTICLE]

LAW IN THE WILDERNESS.

What an Officer of Canada’* Mounted Police Stand* For. An officer of the mounted police is not an exponent of the law; he is the" law Itself. When he rides his cayuse *to foothill camp or threads on snowshoes 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 ,ln_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 for fen days or thirty years. .Back of that slight, silent, steel nerved rider is the strong arm of England and the whole of Cana-dian-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., says Agnes Deans Cameron in the Century. 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 60 cents a day, his term of engagement is five years, and he may look forward to re-ehgagdment on a second term, with a staft/sergeant's pay of from $1 to $1.50 a day to work up to. Recruits must be between the ages of 22 and 40, active men of - thoroughly sound constitution and possessed of certificates of exemplary 'character. They must be able to read and write in either English or French, understand horses, -ride well, "measure up to the minimum height of five feet eight Inches, haye a chest measurement of thirty-five inches, weigh not over 175 pounds, and be unincumbered with a wife.