FOUNDATION FOR HOPE
I
Canada at the opening of the twentieth century has the same population
as the United States at the opening of the nineteenth century.[1] Has
the Dominion any material justification for her high hopes of a world
destiny? Switzerland possesses national consciousness to an acute
degree. Yet Switzerland remains a little people. What ground has
Canada for measuring her strength with the nations of the world?
Having remained almost stationary in her national progress from 1759 to
1859, what reason has she to anticipate a progress as swift and
world-embracing as that which forced the United States to the very
forefront of world powers? It takes something more than high hopes to
build empire. Has Canada a foundation beneath her high hopes? No
nation ever had a more passionate patriotism than Ireland. Yet Ireland
has lost her population and retrogressed.[2] Why will the same fate
not halt and impede Canada?
It may be acknowledged here that Canadians have no answers for such
questions and short shift for the questioner. They are too busy making
history to talk about it. It is only the woman insecure of her social
position who prates about it. It is only the nation uncertain of
herself that bolsters a fact with an argument. Canada is too busy with
facts for any flamboyant arguments. It is an even wager that if you
ask the average well-informed business man in Canada how many miles of
railways the Dominion has, he will answer on the dot "almost thirty
thousand." But if you ask if he knows that Germany, for instance, with
nine times denser population has barely twice as much trackage--no,
your Canadian business man doesn't know it. He is too busy building
his own railroads to care much what other nations are doing with
theirs. Likewise of the country's trade increasing faster almost than
the Dominion can handle it. He knows that imports have increased one
hundred and sixty-three per cent. in ten years, and that exports have
increased almost fifty per cent.; but he doesn't realize in the least
that the Dominion with seven million people has one-fourth as large a
foreign trade as the United States with a hundred million people.[3]
He knows that immigration has in ten years jumped from 49,000 a year to
402,000; but does he take in what it means that his country with only
five million native born is being called on to absorb yearly a third as
many immigrants as the United States with eighty million native
born?[4] He has been so busy handling the rush of prosperity that has
come in on him like a tidal wave that he has not had time to pause over
the problems of this new destiny--the fact, for instance, that in two
more decades the newcomers will outnumber the native born.
II
Unless the edifice be top heavy, beneath it all must be the rock bottom
of fact. Beneath the tide is the pull of some eternal law. What facts
is Canada building her future on? What pull is beneath the tide of
four hundred thousand homeseekers a year? What has doubled population
and almost doubled foreign trade?
It is almost a truism that the farther north the land, the greater the
fertility, if there be any fertility at all. There is first the supply
of unfailing moisture, with a yearly subsoiling of humus unknown to
arid lands. Canada is super-sensitive about her winter climate--the
depth and intensity of the frost, the length and rigor of her winters;
but she need not be. It should be cause of gratitude. Frost
penetrating the ground from five to twelve feet--as it does in the
Northwest--guarantees a subterranean root irrigation that never fails.
Heavy snow--let us acknowledge frankly snow sometimes banks western
streets the height of a man--means a heavy supply of moisture both in
thaw and rain. There is second the long sunlight. An earth tilted on
its axis toward the sun six months of the year gives the North a
sunlight that is longer the farther north you go. When the sun sets at
seven to eight in New York, it sets at eight to nine in Winnipeg, and
nine to ten in Athabasca, and only for a few hours at all still farther
north. It is the long sunlight that gives the fruit of Niagara and
Quebec and Annapolis its "fameuse" quality; just as it is the sunlight
that gives western fruit its finest coloring, the higher up the plateau
it is grown. It is the long sunlight that gives Number One Hard Wheat
its white fine quality so indispensable to the millers. So of barley
and vegetables and small fruits and all that can be grown in the short
season of the North. What the season lacks in length it gains in
intensity of sunlight. Four months of twenty-hour sunlight produce
better growth in some products than eight months of shorter sunlight.
These two advantages of moisture and sunlight, Canada possesses.[5]
What else has she? It doesn't mean much to say that Canada equals
Europe in area and that you could spread Germany and France and Austria
and Great Britain over the Dominion's map and still have an area
uncovered equal to European Russia. Nor does it mean much more to say
that in Canada you can find the climate of a Switzerland in the
Canadian Rockies, of Italy in British Columbia, of England in the
maritime provinces and of Russia in the Northwest. Areas are so great
and diverse that you have to examine them in groups to realize what
basis of fact Canada builds from.
Girt almost round by the sea are the maritime provinces--Nova Scotia,
Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick--in area within sixty-seven square
miles of the same size as England, and in climate not unlike the home
land.[6] Your impression of their inhabitants is of a quiescent,
romantic, pastoral and sea-faring people--sprung from the same stock as
the liberty-seekers of New England, untouched by the mad unrest of
modern days, conservative as bed-rock, but with an eye to the frugal
main chance and a way of making good quietly. They do not talk about
the simple life in the maritime provinces because they have always
lived it, and the land is famed for its diet of codfish, and its men of
brains. Frugal, simple, reposeful living--the kind of living that
takes time to think--has sent out from the maritime provinces more
leaders of thought than any other area of Canada. It is a land that
leaves a dreamy memory with you of sunset lying gold on the Bras d' Or
Lakes, of cattle belly-deep in pasture, of apple farms where fragrance
of fruit and blossoms seem to scent the very atmosphere, of fishermen
rocking in their smacks, of great ships plowing up and down to sea.
You know there are great coal mines to the east and great timber limits
to the north; you may even smell the imprisoned fragrance of the
yellowing lumber being loaded for export, but it is as the land of
winter ports and of seamen for the navy that you will remember the
maritime provinces as factors in Canada's destiny.
When gold was discovered in the Yukon and a hundred million dollars in
gold came out in ten years, the world went mad. Yet Canada yearly
mines from the silver quarries of the sea a harvest of thirty-four
million dollars, and of that amount, fifteen million dollars comes from
the maritime provinces.[7] Conservationists have sung their song in
vain if the world does not know that the fisheries of the United States
have been ruthlessly depleted, but here is a land the area of England
whose fisheries have increased in value one hundred per cent. in ten
years. It is not, however, as the great resource of fisheries that the
maritime provinces must play their part in Canada's destiny. It is as
the nursery of seamen for a marine power. No southern nation, with the
exception of Carthage, has ever dominated the sea; partly for the
simple reason that the best fisheries are always located in temperate
zones, where the glacial silt of the icebergs feeds the finny hordes
with minute infusoria; and the fisherman's smack--the dory that rocks
to the waves like a cockleshell, with meal of pork and beans cooking
above a chip fire on stones in the bottom of the boat, and rough grimed
fellows singing chanties to the rhythm of the sea--the fisherman's
smack is the nursery of the world's proudest merchant marines and most
powerful navies. Japan knows this, and encourages her fishermen by
bounties and passage money to spread all over the world, and Japanese
to-day operate practically all the fisheries of the Pacific. England
knows this and in the North Sea and off Newfoundland protects her
fishermen and draws from their ranks her seamen.
Japan dominates seventy-two per cent. of the commerce of the Pacific,
not through chance, but through her merchant marine built up from rough
grimed fellows who quarry the silver mines of the sea. England
dominates the Seven Seas of the world, not through her superiority man
to man against other races, but through her merchant marine, carrying
the commerce of the world, built up from simple fisher folk hauling in
the net or paying out the line through icy salty spray above
tempestuous seas. No power yet dominates the seas of the New World.
The foreign commerce of the New World up to the time of the great war
was carried by British, German and Japanese ships. Canada has the
steel, the coal, the timber, the nursery for seamen. Will she become a
marine power in the New World? It is one of her dreams. It is also
one of England's dreams. No country subsidizes her merchant liners
more heavily than Canada[8]--in striking contrast with the parsimonious
policy of the United States. It is Canada's policy of ship subsidies
that has established regular merchant liners--all liable to service as
Admiralty ships--to Australia, to China, to Japan and to every harbor
on the Atlantic.
Whether heavy subsidies to large liners will effect as much for a
merchant marine for Canada as numerous small subsidies to small lines
remains to be seen. The development of seamen from her fisheries is
one of the dreams she must work out in her destiny, and that leads one
to the one great disadvantage under which Canada rests as a marine
power. She lacks winter harbors on the Atlantic accessible to her
great western domain, whence comes the bulk of her commerce for export.
True, the maritime provinces afford those harbors--Saint John and
Halifax. A dozen other points, if need were, could be utilized in the
maritime provinces as winter harbors; but take a look at the map! The
maritime provinces are the longest possible spiral distance from the
rest of Canada. They necessitate a rail haul of from two to three
thousand miles from the west. What gives Galveston, New Orleans,
Baltimore, Buffalo preeminence as harbors? Their nearness to the
centers of commerce--their position far inland of the continent,
cutting rail haul by half and quarter from the plains. Montreal has
this advantage of being far inland; but from November to May Montreal
is closed; and Canadian commerce must come out by way of American
lines, or pay the long haul down to the maritime provinces. There can
be no doubt that this disadvantage is one of the factors forcing the
West to find outlet by Hudson Bay--where harbors are also closed by the
ice but are only four hundred miles from the wheat plains. There can
also be no doubt that the opening of Panama will draw much western
commerce to Europe by way of the Pacific.
III
When one comes to consider Quebec under its new boundaries, one is
contemplating an empire three times larger than Germany, supporting a
population not so large as Berlin.[9] It is the seat of the old French
Empire, the land of the idealists who came to propagate the Faith and
succeeded in exploring three-quarters of the continent, with canoes
pointed ever up-stream in quest of beaver. All the characteristics of
the Old Empire are in Quebec to-day. Quebec is French to the core, not
in loyalty to republican France, but in loyalty to the religious ideals
which the founders brought to the banks of the St. Lawrence three
centuries ago. Church spire, convent walls, religious foundations
occupy the most prominent site in every city and town and hamlet of
Quebec. From Tadousac to Montreal, from Labrador to Maine or New
Hampshire, you can follow the thread of every river in Quebec by the
glitter of the church spires round which nestle the hamlets. No matter
how poor the hamlet, no matter how remote the hills which slope wooded
down to some blue lake, there stand the village church with its cross
on the spire, the whitewashed house of the curé, the whitewashed square
dormer-windowed school.
Outside Quebec City and Montreal, Quebec is the most reposeful region
in all America. What matter wars and rumors of wars to these habitants
living under guidance of the curé, as their ancestors lived two hundred
years ago? They pay their tithes. They attend mass. At birth,
marriage and death--the curé is their guide and friend. He teaches
them in their schools. He advises them in their family affairs. He
counsels them in their business. At times he even dictates their
politics; but when you remember that French is the language spoken,
that primary education is of the slimmest, though all doors are open
for a promising pupil to advance, you wonder whether constant tutelage
of a benevolent church may not be a good thing in a chaotic, confused
and restless age. The habitant lives on his little long narrow strip
of a farm running back from the river front. He fishes a little. He
works on the river and in the lumber camps of the Back Country. He
raises a little tobacco, hay, a pig, a cow, a little horse and a family
of from ten to twenty. When the daughters marry--as they are
encouraged to do at the earliest possible age--the farm is subdivided
among the sons; and when it will subdivide no longer, there is a
migration to the Back Country, or to a French settlement in the
Northwest, where another curé will shepherd the flock; and the
habitant, blessed at his birth and blessed at his marriage, is usually
blessed at his death at the ripe age of ninety or a hundred. It is a
simple and on the whole a very happy, if not progressive, life. Some
years ago, when hard times prevailed in Canada and the manufacturing
cities of New England offered what seemed big wages to habitants, who
considered themselves rich on one hundred dollars a year--a great
migration took place across the border; but it was not a happy move for
these simple children of the soil. They missed the shepherding of
their beloved curé, and the movement has almost stopped. Also you find
Jean Ba'tiste in the redwoods of California as lumber-jack, or plying a
canoe on MacKenzie River. The best fur-traders of the North to-day are
half-breeds with a strain of French Canadian blood.
If you take a look at the map of Quebec under its new boundaries up
into Labrador--it seems absurd to call a region three times the area of
Germany "a province"--you will see that only the fringe of the river
fronts has been peopled. This is owing to the old system of parceling
out the land in mile strips back from the river--a system that
antedated the railroads, when every man's train was a paddle and the
waterfront. Beyond, back up from the rivers, lies literally a
no-man's-land of furs plentiful as of old, of timber of which only the
edge has been slashed, of water power unestimated and of mineral
resources only guessed. It seems incredible at this late date that you
can count on one hand the number of men who have ascended the rivers of
Quebec and descended the rivers of Labrador to Hudson Bay. The forest
area is estimated at one hundred and twenty million acres; but that is
only a guess. The area of pulp wood is boundless.
Along the St. Lawrence, south of the St. Lawrence and around the great
cities come touches of the modern--elaborate stock farms, great
factories, magnificent orchards, huge sawmills. The progress of
Montreal and the City of Quebec is so intimately involved with the
navigation of the St. Lawrence route and the development of railroads
that it must be dealt with separately; but it may be said here that
nearly all the old seigneurial tenures--Crown grants of estates to the
nobility of New France--have passed to alien hands. The system itself,
the last relic of feudal tenure in Canada, was abolished by Canadian
law. What, then, is the aim of Quebec as a factor in Canada's destiny?
It may be said perfectly frankly that with the exception of such
enlightened men as Laurier, Quebec does not concern herself with
Canada's destiny. In a war with France, yes, she would give of her
sons and her blood; in a war against France, not so sure. "Why are you
loyal?" I asked a splendid scholarly churchman of the old régime--a man
whose works have been quoted by Parkman. "Because," he answered
slowly, "because--you--English--leave us--alone to work out our hopes."
"What are those hopes?" I asked. He waved his hand toward the
window--church spires and yet more spires far as we could see down the
St. Lawrence--another New France conserving the religious ideals that
had been crushed by the republicanism of the old land. Let it be
stated without a shadow of doubt--Quebec never has had and never will
have the faintest idea of secession. Her religious freedom is too well
guaranteed under the present régime for her to risk change under an
untried order of independence or annexation. The church wants Quebec
exactly as she is--to work out her destiny of a new and regenerate
France on the banks of the St. Lawrence.
A certain section of the French oppose Canada embroiling herself in
European wars. They do this conscientiously and not as a political
trick to attract the votes of the ultramontane French. One of the most
brilliant supporters Sir Wilfred Laurier ever had flung his chances of
a Cabinet place to the winds in opposing Canada's participation in the
Boer War. He not only flung his chances to the winds, but he ruined
himself financially and was read out of the party. The motive behind
this opposition to Canada's participations in the Imperial wars is,
perhaps, three-fold. French Canada has never forgotten that she was
conquered. True, she is better off, enjoys greater religious liberty,
greater material prosperity, greater political freedom than under the
old régime; but she remembers that French prestige fell before English
prestige on the Plains of Abraham. The second motive is an unconscious
feeling of detachment from British Imperial affairs. Why should French
Canada embroil herself and give of her blood and means for a race alien
to herself in speech and religion? The Monroe Doctrine forever defends
Canada from seizure by European power. Why not rest under that defense
and build up a purely Canadian power? The third motive is almost
subconscious. What if a European war should involve French-Catholic
Canada on the side of Protestant England against French-Catholic
France, or even Catholic Italy? Quebec feels herself a part of Canada
but not of the British Empire; and it is a great question how much
Laurier's support of the British in the Boer War had to do with that
partial defection of Quebec which ultimately defeated him on
Reciprocity; for if there is one thing the devout son of the church
fears more than embroilment in European war, it is coming under the
republicanizing influence of the United States. Under Canadian law the
favored status of the church is guaranteed. Under American law the
church would be on the same footing as all other denominations.
IV
When one comes to Ontario, one is dealing with the kitchen garden of
the Dominion--in summer a land of placid sky-blue lakes, and
amber-colored wooded rivers, and trim, almost garden-like farms, and
heavily laden orchards, and thriving cities beginning to smoke under
the pall of the increasing and almost universal factory. Under its old
boundaries Ontario stood just eighteen thousand square miles larger
than France. Under its new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay, Ontario
measures almost twice the area of France. France supports a population
of nearly forty millions; Ontario, of barely two and a half millions.
Both Ontario and France are equally fertile and equally diversified in
fertility. Along the lakes and clustered round Niagara is the great
fruit region--vineyards and apple orchards that are gardens of
perfection. North of the lakes is a mixed farm region. Parallel with
the latitude skirting Georgian Bay begins the Great Clay belt, an area
of heavily forested lands about seven hundred miles north to south and
almost a thousand diagonally east to west. On its southern edge this
hinterland, which forms the watershed between Hudson Bay and the St.
Lawrence, seems to be rock-bound and iron-capped. For years travelers
across the continent must have looked through the car windows across
this landscape of windfall and fire as a picture of desolation.
Surely, "here was nothing," as some of the first explorers said when
they viewed Canada from Labrador; but pause; not so fast! Here lay, if
nothing else, an area of timber limits seven hundred by one thousand
miles; and as the timber burned off curious mineral outcroppings were
observed. When the railroad was graded through what is now known as
Sudbury, there was a report of a great find of copper. Expert after
expert examined it, and company after company forfeited options and
refused to bond it. Finally a shipment was sent out to a smelter
across the border. The so-called "copper" was pronounced "nickel"--the
greatest deposit of the metal needed for armor plating known in the
world. In fact, only one other mine could compete against the Sudbury
nickel beds--the French mines of New Caledonia. Here was something,
surely, in this rock-bound iron region of desolation, which passing
travelers had pronounced worthless.
The discovery of silver at Cobalt came by an almost similar chance.
Grading an extension of a North Ontario railroad projected purely for
the sake of prospective settlers, workmen came on surface deposits of
"rose" silver--almost pure metal, some of it; and there resulted such a
mining boom and series of quick fortunes as had made Klondike famous.
And Cobalt and Sudbury are at only the southern edge of the unexplored
hinterland of Ontario. Old records of the French régime, daily
journals of the Hudson's Bay Company fur-traders, repeatedly refer to
well-known mines between Lake Superior and James Bay; but fur-traders
discouraged mining; and this region is less known to-day than when
coureur de bois and voyageur threaded river and lake and leafy
wilderness. Ontario, like Quebec, is only on the outer edge of
realizing her own wealth.
V
We sometimes speak as though Canada had had her boom and it was all
over. She has had her boom, and the boom has exploded, and it is a
good thing. When inflation collapses, a country gets down to reality;
and the reality is that Canada has barely begun to develop the
exhaustless mine of wealth which Heaven has given her. Ontario,
complacent with a fringe of prosperity along lake front, is an
instance; Quebec, with only a border on each bank of her great rivers
peopled, is another instance; and the prairie provinces are still more
striking illustrations of the sleeping potentialities of the Dominion.
In our dark days we used to call those three prairie provinces between
Lake Superior and the Rockies "the granary of the Empire." I am afraid
it was more in bravado, hoping against hope, than in any other spirit;
for we were raising little grain and exporting less and receiving
prices that hardly paid for the labor. That was back in the early
nineties. To-day, what? One single year's wheat crop from one only of
those provinces equals more gold in value than ever came out of
Klondike. If Britain were cut off from every other source of food
supply, those three provinces could feed the British Isles with their
surplus wheat. To be explicit, credit Great Britain with a population
of forty-five millions. Apportion to each six bushels of wheat--the
per capita requirement for food, according to scientists. Great
Britain requires two hundred and eighty to three hundred million
bushels of wheat for bread only--not to be manufactured into cereal
products, which is another and enormous demand in itself. Of the wheat
required for bread, Great Britain herself raises only fifty to sixty
million bushels, leaving a deficit, which must come from outside
sources, of two hundred million bushels.
In 1912 Canada raised one hundred and ninety-nine million bushels of
wheat. In 1913, of grain products, Canada exported one hundred and ten
million bushels; of flour products, almost twenty million dollars'
worth. Under stress of need or high prices these totals could easily
be trebled. The figures are, indeed, bewildering in their bigness. In
the three prairie provinces there were under cultivation in 1912 for
all crops only sixteen and one-half million acres.[10] At twenty
bushels to the acre this area put under wheat would feed Great Britain.
But note--only sixteen and one-half million acres were under
cultivation. There have been surveyed as suitable for cultivation one
hundred and fifty-eight million acres. The land area of the three
prairie provinces is four hundred and sixty-six million acres. If only
half the land surveyed as suitable for cultivation were put in
wheat--namely seventy-nine million acres; and if it yielded only ten
bushels to the acre (it usually yields nearer twenty than ten), the
three prairie provinces of Canada would be producing crops equal to the
entire spring wheat production of the United States. Grant, then, two
bushels for reseeding, or one hundred and fifty-eight million bushels,
and six bushels for food, or fifty million bushels, the three prairie
provinces would still have for export more than five hundred million
bushels. All this presupposes population. Granting each man one
hundred and sixty acres, it presupposes 493,750 more farmers than are
in the West; but coming to Canada yearly are four hundred thousand
settlers; so that counting four out of every five settlers children, in
half a decade at the least, Western Canada will have five hundred
thousand more farmers--enough to feed Great Britain and still have a
surplus of wheat for Europe.
In connection with wheat exports from the West one factor should never
be ignored--the influence of the Great Lakes and the Soo Canal in
reducing freight to the West. Great Lakes freight tolls are to-day the
cheapest in the world, and their influence in minimizing the toll on
the all-land haul must never be ignored. Freight can be carried on the
Great Lakes one thousand miles for the same rate charged on rail rate
for one hundred miles.[11]
And wheat is not the only product of the three prairie provinces. On
the borderland between Manitoba and Saskatchewan are enormous deposits
of coal which have not yet been explored. Canoeing once through
Eastern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba, I saw a piece of almost
pure copper brought down from the hinterland of Churchill River by an
Indian, from an unknown mine, which no white man has yet found. On the
borderland between Alberta and British Columbia is a ridge of coal
deposits which such conservative experts as the late George Dawson
estimated would mine four million tons a year for five thousand years.
These coal deposits seem almost nature's special provision for the
treeless plains.
It is well known that the decrease in white fish in the Great Lakes for
the past ten years has been appalling. Northward of Churchill River is
a region of chains of lakes--the Lesser Great Lakes, they have been
called--and these are the only untouched inland fisheries in America.
To the exporter they are ideal fishing ground. The climate is cool.
The fish can be sent out frozen to American markets. Of Canada's
thirty-four million dollars' worth of fish in 1912, one and one-half
million dollars' worth came from the three prairie provinces.
Under the old boundaries, the three prairie provinces compared in area
respectively Manitoba with Great Britain; Saskatchewan with France;
Alberta, one and a half times larger than Germany. Under the new
boundaries extending the province to Hudson Bay, Manitoba is fifty-two
thousand square miles larger than Germany; Saskatchewan extended north
is fifty thousand square miles larger than France; and Alberta extended
north is fifty thousand square miles larger than Germany. And north of
the three grain provinces is an area the size of European Russia.
We talk of Canada's boom as "done," but has it even begun? Strathcona
used to say that the three prairie provinces would support a population
of one hundred million. Was he right? On the basis of Europe's
population the three provinces would sustain three times Germany's
sixty-five millions.
VI
In British Columbia one reaches the province of the greatest natural
wealth, the greatest diversity in climate and the most feverish
activity in Canada. East of the mountains is a climate high, cold and
bracing as Russia or Switzerland. Between the ranges of the mountains
are valleys mild as France. On the coast toward the south is a climate
like Italy; toward the north, like Scotland. Of Canada's entire timber
area--twice as great as Europe's standing timber--three-quarters lie in
British Columbia. Fruit equal to Niagara's, fisheries richer than the
maritime provinces, mines yielding more than Klondike--exist in this
most favored of provinces. While the area is a half larger than
Germany, the population is smaller than that of a suburb of Berlin.[12]
Of Canada's thirty-four million dollars' worth of fish, thirteen
million dollars' worth come from British Columbia; and of her products
of forty-six millions of precious and fifty-six millions of
non-metallic minerals in 1911 easily half came from British
Columbia.[13]
Instead of that repose which marks the maritime provinces, one finds an
eager fronting to the future that is almost feverish. If Panama is
turning the entire Pacific into a front door instead of a back door,
then British Columbia knows the coign of vantage, which she holds as an
outlet for half Canada's commerce by way of the Pacific. It is in
British Columbia that East must meet West and work out destiny.
[1] In 1800, the United States population was 5,308,483; in 1901, the
Canadian population was 5,371,315.
[2] Ireland lost one-half her population from 1840 to 1900, Her
population dropped in round numbers from eight millions to four
millions.
[3] Total foreign trade of Canada, 1912, $1,085,264,000; of United
States, $4,538,702,000.
[4] This presupposes immigration to the United States at a million and
a quarter, as before the war.
[5] Speaking generally, there are few sections of the Northwest where
the average rainfall is scanty.
[6] The areas of all the Canadian provinces except the maritime ones
have been extended in recent years--Quebec to include Labrador--except
the East Shore, which is under Newfoundland; Ontario to James Bay;
Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Hudson Bay; Alberta to MacKenzie River.
Northern British Columbia is not yet surveyed, which explains why its
northern area is largely a matter of guess--closest estimates placing
the whole province including Yukon as twice Germany; without Yukon as
about one and two-thirds the area of Germany; but this is rough
guesswork.
[7] Canada's fisheries for 1912 yielded $34,667,872.
[8] Canada's subsidies to steamships vary from year to year, but I do
not think any year has much exceeded two millions.
[9] This is including Labrador.
[10] Under crop in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta 16,478,000 acres.
Area surveyed available for cultivation 158,516,427 acres; land area,
466,068,798 acres.
[11] The rate from the head of the Lakes to Montreal is usually four to
five cents. It has been as low as one cent, when grain was carried
almost for ballast.
[12] British Columbia's population in 1912 was 392,480.
[13] Canada, mineral production for 1911 stands thus: copper,
$6,911,831: gold, $9,672,096; iron, $700,216; lead, $818,672; nickel,
$10,229,623; silver, $17,452,128; other metal, $322,862; total,
$46,197,428. Non-metallic production 1911: coal $26,378,477; cement,
$7,571,299; clay, $8,317,709; stone, $3,680,361; in all, $56,094.258.