nation.

These were Canada's pioneer days, when she was spending more than she
was earning, when she bound herself down to grinding poverty and big
risks and hard tasks.  It was a long pull, and a hard pull; but it was
a pull altogether.  That was Canada's seed time; this is her harvest.
That was her night work, when she toiled, while other nations slept;
now is the awakening, when the world sees what she was doing.  Railroad
man, farmer, miner, manufacturer, all had the same struggle, the big
outlay of labor and money at first, the big risk and no profit, the
long period of waiting.

Canada was laying her foundations of yesterday for the superstructure
of prosperity to-day and to-morrow--the New Empire.

When one surveys the country as a whole, the facts are so big they are
bewildering.

{viii} In the first place, the area of the Dominion is within a few
thousand miles of as large as all Europe.  To be more specific, you
could spread the surface of Italy and Spain and Turkey and Greece and
Austria over eastern Canada, and you would still have an area uncovered
in the east alone bigger than the German Empire.  England spread flat
on the surface of Eastern Canada would just serve to cover the Maritime
Provinces nicely, leaving uncovered Quebec, which is a third bigger
than Germany; Ontario, which is bigger than France; and Labrador
(Ungava), which is about the size of Austria.

In the west you could spread the British Isles out flat, and you would
not cover Manitoba--with her new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay.
It would take a country the size of France to cover the province of
Saskatchewan, a country larger than Germany to cover Alberta, two
countries the size of Germany to cover British Columbia and the Yukon,
and there would still be left uncovered the northern half of the
West--an area the size of European Russia.

No Old World monarch from William the Conqueror to Napoleon could boast
of such a realm.  People are fond of tracing ancestry back to feudal
barons of the Middle Ages.  What feudal baron of the Middle Ages, or
Lord of the Outer Marches, was heir to such heritage as Canada may
claim?  Think of it!  Combine all the feudatory domains of the Rhine
and the Danube, you have not so vast an estate as a single western
province.  Or gather up all the estates of England's midland counties
and eastern shires and borderlands, you have not enough land to fill
one of Canada's inland seas,--Lake Superior.

If there were a population in eastern Canada equal to France,--and
Quebec alone would support a population equal to France,--and in
Manitoba equal to the British Isles, and in Saskatchewan equal to
France, and in Alberta equal to Germany, and in British Columbia equal
to Germany,--ignoring Yukon, Mackenzie River, Keewatin, and Labrador,
taking only those parts of Canada where climate has been tested and
lands surveyed,--Canada would support two hundred million people.

{ix} The figures are staggering, but they are not half so improbable as
the actual facts of what has taken place in the United States.
America's population was acquired against hard odds.  There were no
railroads when the movement to America began.  The only ocean goers
were sailboats of slow progress and great discomfort.  In Europe was
profound ignorance regarding America; to-day all is changed.  Canada
begins where the United States left off.  The whole world is gridironed
with railroads.  Fast Atlantic liners offer greater comfort to the
emigrant than he has known at home.  Ignorance of America has given
place to almost romantic glamour.  Just when the free lands of the
United States are exhausted and the government is putting up bars to
keep out the immigrant, Canada is in a position to open her doors wide.
Less than a fortieth of the entire West is inhabited.  Of the Great
Clay Belt of North Ontario only a patch on the southern edge is
populated.  The same may be said of the Great Forest Belt of Quebec.
These facts are the magnet that will attract the immigrant to Canada.
The United States wants no more immigrants.

And the movement to Canada has begun.  To her shores are thronging the
hosts of the Old World's dispossessed, in multitudes greater than any
army that ever marched to conquest under Napoleon.  When the history of
America comes to be written in a hundred years, it will not be the
record of a slaughter field with contending nations battling for the
mastery, or generals wading to glory knee-deep in blood.  It will be an
account of the most wonderful race movement, the most wonderful
experiment in democracy the world has known.

The people thronging to Canada for homes, who are to be her nation
builders, are people crowded out of their home lands, who had n't room
for the shoulder swing manhood and womanhood need to carve out
honorable careers.  Look at them in the streets of London, or Glasgow,
or Dublin, or Berlin, these _emigres_, as the French called their
royalists, whom revolution drove from home, and I think the word
_emigre_ is a truer description of the newcomer to Canada than the word
"emigrant."  They are {x} poor, they are desperately poor, so poor that
a month's illness or a shut-down of the factory may push them from
poverty to the abyss.  They are thrifty, but can neither earn nor save
enough to feel absolutely sure that the hollow-eyed specter of Want may
not seize them by the throat.  They are willing to work, so eager to
work that at the docks and the factory gates they trample and jostle
one another for the chance to work.  They are the underpinnings, the
underprops of an old system, these _emigres_, by which the masses were
expected to toil for the benefit of the classes.

"It's all the average man or woman is good for," says the Old Order,
"just a day's wage representing bodily needs."