Page:The empire and the century.djvu/431

industries. The province of Prince Edward Island is adapted for dairying through butter and cheese factories, but that business was going backward for want of information and education. In the year 1892, with the assistance of money given by the Dominion Government, one cooperative cheese factory was started at New Perth, in Prince Edward Island. The machinery was lent by the Government. An instructor was sent to organize the business and to arrange the locality into routes for the convenience of those supplying milk. The factory was managed as a Government dairy station, as an object-lesson for the education of the people in cooperative dairying. In the autumn of 1892 I took the liberty of exporting to London $3,600 worth of cheese manufactured at that station, and I can recall the remonstrances of some of the people against risking their cheese in any steamer. I got fault-finding letters asking me why I did not sell the cheese at home, or in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cheese was delivered in England, and was sold there for the top market price. Some of it, indeed, sold for sixpence per hundredweight more. I angled for that sixpence, and got it. Then, when the island people knew that they had got sixpence per hundredweight more for their cheese than was paid for any other Canadian cheese sold that day in London, it put new faith, hope, and courage into them. That was the beginning of the export of cheese from Prince Edward Island—to the value of $3,600. At the taking of the census in 1891, the four cheese factories in Prince Edward Island were put in the returns as having an output worth $8,448; ten years later, when the census of 1901 was taken, there were forty-seven cheese and butter factories, with an output valued at $566,824. There is an instance of the result of organization and education! There had been no increase in the number of acres of land occupied, and but little increase in the number of cows kept. The change had been in the quality of the intelligent labour applied to the conditions. The people now run their own factories,