Student of Canadian Economics 43 



that until after the North was victorious when it at once in- 

 creased to 332,577 in 1867. While, however, the local trade of 

 Canada seemed for the moment prosperous in these years, polit- 

 ical ferment between the opposing provinces, accentuated by 

 racial and religious mistrust between the two dominant races in 

 the United Canadas, made any progressive movement towards 

 national development impossible. The year 1864 saw the 

 Reciprocity Treaty abrogated; while the one bright gleam of 

 national hope, which shone with the crowning Act of Confed- 

 eration in 1867, came too late in any way to counter-balance 

 the glorious sense of power and national resourcefulness felt by 

 the victorious Northern States. Canada was forgotten, when a 

 triumphant people, now nearly 40,000,000, turned the energies 

 of millions of disbanded soldiers back into the walks of peace. 

 The railways, already wide-spread, were pushed westward from 

 the standpoint both of national security and unity and of 

 commercial development, and 1869 saw a railway uniting with 

 iron bands the people and destinies of a whole continent be- 

 tween two oceans and gave a nation, who had fought to be free, 

 an intrinsic sense of ability to dare to do and accomplish, aided 

 by the telegraph and steam engine, the necromancers of the 

 modern world deeds in peace never imagined, much less 

 equalled elsewhere. A nation had found its soul and its spiritual 

 essence blossomed forth in works of material accomplishment, 

 which, however crude, illustrated the spirit of their Viking 

 ancestors of a thousand years before." 



All this the professor now read into the cold facts of history 

 and turning his eyes upon puny Canada beheld a series of dis- 

 connected provinces with no sense of unity, no common interests, 

 no trustful spirit, no conscious hope. The most promised for 

 the darksome future was that the Confederation Act contained 

 a clause providing for the building of the Intercolonial Railroad 

 from Canada to the sea at Halifax and to this end a loan of 

 3,000,000 was guaranteed by the British Government. The 

 professor had already seen that immigration had almost ceased; 

 he learned from the Committee of Agriculture of the Legisla- 

 ture in 1859 that the Grand Trunk Railway, built with the 

 money of English bondholders, had had its agents in Germany 

 and Sweden, booking passengers for the longest haul to Chicago 



