April 8, 1961

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HARD TIMES AHEAD FOR GOLD TOWNS

WHEN WORD REACHED an underground shift coming to the surface at Sylvanite Gold Mines in northern Ontario last October that gold was selling briskly on the free market at $41.50 an ounce, the miners stood in the mud and cheered. “They were throwing their hats in the air that day,” recalls Ken Gray, Sylvanite’s weathered general manager.

WHAT THE NEW PARTY WANTS THAT TOMMY DOUGLAS HAS

SOME DAY between now and August a jaunty little spellbinder named Thomas Clement Douglas will decide whether to stand for nomination as leader of Canada’s first new national political movement in a quarter of a century. If Douglas does become a candidate, he will almost automatically be chosen to head the still unborn New Party in its first general election, probably in the spring of 1962. By RALPH ALLEN

SUICIDE

a disease that can be treated

CANADA IS LOSING thirteen hundred people a year through self-murder, say the coroners’ reports, but the actual number of suicides is probably much higher: many suicides, according to police and medical authorities, are disguised so as to appear to be natural deaths or accidents. By Catherine Jones

Holiday weekend in ATHENS

WHENEVER IN THE PAST I was asked in which city of the world I would like to spend a year’s vacation (in case I won the Irish sweepstake) I always chose without hesitation Paris. But after a weekend in Athens I've changed my mind. Until the day I arrived with my husband at the 5.OOO-year-old Greek capital I used to think of Athens as a remote Balkan city with historic ruins and museums and not much else. By MARIKA ROBERT

The summer of Barney's discontent

IN THE BEGINNING there were the three hounds: I still remember them vividly. Ed McNally, a Montreal artist and cartoonist of my acquaintance, realized a boyhood dream when he moved to the country, and the place he chose was Rockburn, a hamlet (it hasn't even got a post office) near the American border some 45 miles southwest of Montreal, where he bought him self a lovely pine-guarded stone house of Scottish masonry, surrounded by a dozen acres of land bordering a rampaging brook and already equipped with several dozen bearing apple trees. By Ken Johnstone

WHY BRITAIN HAS NO COLOR PROBLEMYET

“IF A FASCIST is a person who wants to keep Britain white then I am a fascist and proud of it.” The speaker is Colin Jordan, a Coventry schoolteacher who styles himself national organizer of the White Defense League. With the country’s traditional chief bigot, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, apparently running out of vitriol at sixty-four, Jordan is taking over the campaign to create a color problem and foment race hatreds. By LESLIE F. HANNON Maclean's overseas editor

COMMENT

EDITORIAL

THE SAFEST WAY TO MURDER a man in Canada is to entice him into the woods, shoot him with a rifle and report to the police that you thought he was a bear. I xperience shows that your chances of being prosecuted at all, let alone hanged. are extremely slight.

Life with a one-man gold mine

ANTOINE FAYOLLE lives in a small house in a western Quebec town called Rouyn, where he tends the vegetables in his garden with his wife, Jeanne, and every now and then goes north to dig some gold from his private mine. Fayolle came to Canada from France after World War I.

March 251961