Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/463

Rh strung like beads on a wire along the north shore of Lake Ontario. Gradually the rails were pushed east and west; east to Montreal and the French-Canadian towns on the lower St. Lawrence, and west to the Niagara peninsula and along the north shore of Lake Erie to the international boundary at Detroit. Then, when the scattered colonies of British North America were at last confederated in the Dominion of Canada, the Intercolonial—Canada's national railroad—was built from Halifax, on the Atlantic seaboard, to Levis, opposite the city of Quebec; subsequently being extended to Montreal.

Finally, with a courage and faith in the country's future which the succeeding years have fully justified, the Canadian Pacific railway was built (subsidized with twenty-five million dollars out of the treasury of the young Dominion, and twenty-five million acres of land), and Canada at last had a railway from ocean to ocean, throughout her entire length, making accessible the vast fertile plains of the northwest, with their incalculable agricultural wealth, and providing transportation facilities between eastern Canada and the new province of British Columbia. Up to the present time Canada has expended on her railways in the form of cash subsidies, irrespective of the value of land grants, and irrespective also of the cost of the Intercolonial ($77,000,000, including rolling stock) an aggregate—enormous in view of the comparatively small population of the country—of two hundred and forty million dollars.

When the first Canadian Pacific train crossed the prairies of western Canada, not quite nineteen years ago, that land of promise held only a handful of white settlers. To-day there are six hundred thousand, and new settlers are coming in increasing numbers every year. A few years ago men would have laughed to scorn the idea that western Canada might some day become the granary of the British empire. To-day it is accepted as a self-evident proposition, to be realized within a very few years. In 1904 this western country yielded, in spite of adverse conditions, 60,000,000 bushels of wheat valued at $40,000,000, besides other grains worth another $10,000,000. This year it is estimated that the wheat crop will pass the hundred million mark; and hard-headed business men, not given to idle boasting, confidently predict that within the next quarter of a century western Canada will produce half a billion bushels of wheat annually. The acreage this year under wheat will exceed four millions; but this constitutes but a fraction of the acreage actually available in Manitoba and the territories for profitable wheat raising. With an available acreage estimated at over one hundred millions, and a rapidly increasing population, he would be a bold pessimist who would deny the coming greatness of the Canadian west as a dominant factor in the world's wheat markets. Under such conditions, it is well that the government of