Page:The empire and the century.djvu/402

 production, treatment, and transportation, are the cornerstone of our prosperity. And when we speak of the future, while we dwell with some pride and satisfaction upon our resources of gold and silver, of iron, coal, and lumber, and do not minimize the great industries which naturally grow up in a country of such varied resources as Canada, it is to the wheat-fields of the North-West that we turn our eyes with a feeling that there will be no disappointment, no failure, no losing of the pay streak or the lode, that from the prairies a stream of wealth, ever increasing in volume, will flow through the arteries of commerce, and build up our commercial institutions on a scale far exceeding anything we have experienced in the past.

In Manitoba and the two new Provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta there are, roughly speaking, over 200,000,000 acres of land known to be fit for cultivation, and the population is at the present time about 750,000 souls. They cultivated last year altogether 5,250,000 acres. They produced 60,000,000 bushels of wheat, and 66,000,000 bushels of other grains. This year there will be 5,750,000 acres under cultivation. The rest awaits the plough. If 750,000 people cultivating 5,250,000 of acres of land produce 126,000,000 of bushels of grain, and there yet remains more than 190,000,000 of acres to be brought under cultivation, is it too much to say that within a few years the somewhat grandiloquent title of 'The Granary of the Empire' will be more than realized.

At the present time we are sending into these provinces annually from 130,000 to 150,000 people. They come as homeseekers, determined to go upon the land. Within two or three years, whether with or without capital, they almost invariably realize their desire, and take up land for themselves. They are coming without Government assistance, with no help except an almost perfectly organized system of reception and guidance and thoroughly efficient arrangements for transportation by steamship and railway lines. They