CANADA'S TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM. 457 



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 treas- 

 ury 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 transporta- 

 tion facilities between eastern Canada and the new province of British 

 Columbia. Up to the present time Canada has expended on her rail- 

 ways 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 esti- 

 mated that the wheat crop will pass the hundred million mark; and 

 hard-headed business men, not given to idle boasting, confidently pre- 

 dict 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 terri- 

 tories for profitable wheat raising. With an available acreage esti- 

 mated at over one hundred millions, and a rapidly increasing popula- 

 tion, he would be a bold pessimist who would deny the coming great- 

 ness of the Canadian west as a dominant factor in the world's wheat 

 markets. Under such conditions, it is well that the government of 



