—such as is occasionally met with south of the 'line '—should be set down at once as evidence of a wish that she should not falsify prophecy and disturb settled convictions by attaining to such development under her existing political conditions. In the statement that Canada 'would never amount to anything,' the wish has been, as a rule, father to the thought.
No country in the world has shown such increases in its trade and commerce during the past five years in proportion to the population. Within that period the figures for both exports and imports have nearly doubled.
But it is, of course, as the future granary of the Empire that Canada bulks most largely, on the material side, with the people of Great Britain. She has still some 250 million acres of the best agricultural land in the world to be taken up. There is a general consensus of opinion that it would be difficult to exaggerate the future of the Canadian North-West. A recent writer (Mr. A. G. Bradley) speaks of this great region as 'the home of the necessities, not the luxuries, of man; where beef, mutton, and pork, wheat, oats, and the main vegetables can all be produced of the highest quality, and in the greatest abundance; where the Northern races—nay, even Italians and Galicians for that matter—can thrive and flourish in an atmosphere conducive to their native vigour, and even stimulating to it.… There are very few sections of the United States that ever had such a prospect. … The northern limit of the farming belt, and of comfortable human settlement, has been indefinitely extended by a better knowledge of the country. Edmonton, hitherto a sort of northern ultima Thule will become a distributing point for vast regions far to the North and North-West, even to the fertile levels of the Peace River, where wheat is now known to grow as surely and as strongly as in Manitoba itself. Abundant water-power, ample timber, an almost universally flat, fertile, and extremely smooth-lying soil over a region half as big as Europe confronts us here.'
