Having demonstrated the great value of such farms as forcible 

 educative agents, we transferred the farms to the Federal Dept. of 

 Agriculture. Through the results obtained, we thus demonstrated to 

 the farmers of the neighbourhood that one of themselves was obtaining 

 these results without any assistance other than the advice of our experts 

 and at no greater cost than their own farming operations. It was a 

 demonstration that, by following our advice, our illustration farmer 

 could obtain an increased yield, and that practically the whole of the 

 increase was profit. 



At another period, we expended a maximum upon water-power 

 investigations, and we may fairly claim that, throughout Canada, we 

 excited interest in this great resource. We published a general work 

 on the Water- Powers of Canada in 1911, followed by the Water- 

 Powers of the Prairie Provinces in 1918, and the Water-Powers of 

 British Columbia will be issued this year. 



For a time we devoted special attention to Town Planning and 

 Housing, and we now see the partial fruition of our efforts in the 

 appropriation of $25,000,000 for housing. 



War Conditions Conditions created by the war have directed atten- 

 Emphasize tion to the necessity of adopting measures of con- 



servation. It is not too much to say that the subject 

 of conservation is uppermost in the minds of the thinking men of 

 the world. The United States has been called the ' most wasteful 

 nation in the world,' but a survey of conditions in Canada, and the 

 high cost of living indicate that Canada is pre-eminent in that respect 

 — a pre-eminence of which we have no reason to be proud. It is 

 axiomatic that the nation which can produce at lowest cost is the 

 nation that will obtain the trade of the world. Hitherto, Great 

 Britain has been the greatest exporting nation, and Germany's 

 failure to oust Britain by a thoroughly unsound system of bounties, 

 special freight rates, subsidies, and special privileges which eventu- 

 ally became an almost unbearable domestic burden, was one of the 

 principal causes of the war. 



We are now endeavouring to re-adjust ourselves to 

 H^band"^"^* post-war conditions, but it must be borne in mind 

 Resources that, if we burden ourselves with extravagant and 



wasteful methods of developing or of utilizing our 

 natural resources, if we destroy our created resources by fire, if we 

 lock up our floating capital in unremunerative works, we are fatally 

 handicapping ourselves in the great race for world trade or for any 

 considerable portion of it. 



Since our last meeting, the great world war has practically 

 ended. Our Commissioner, Hon. Dr. B61and, has at last been released 



