48 The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



as the Wellington, Grey and Bruce and Credit Valley roads; 

 while a Government went out of power due to suspicions of an 

 improper intimacy between its members and a company pro- 

 moting the great national enterprise, the Pacific railway, which 

 was to connect coast with coast, and ultimately to prove even 

 a greater bond, because it was so much more necessary, to bridge 

 over the great gap of wilderness between Ontario and the West. 

 "But this was not yet to be. The method later proposed of 

 building it in sections, part waterways and part railways, how- 

 ever in keeping with the financial resources of the country at 

 that time, was wholly inadequate to fulfil the requirements of 

 the situation, and from 1872 to 1882 commercial stagnation 

 marked Canada to a degree before unparalleled, and the migra- 

 tion of Canadians across the border rose to such figures as had 

 never before been equalled, as seen in the following list of yearly 

 emigrants from Canada into the United States : 



Emigrants from Canada to United States 



1870 40,411 1877 22,116. 



1871 47,082 1878 25,568 



1872 40,176 1879 31,268 



1873. 37,871 1880 99,706 



1874,- 32,960 1881 125,391 



1875 24,651 1882 92,295 



1876 22,471 



"So remarkable, however, did the trade revival in the United 

 States become after the five years' depression from 1873 to 1878, 

 that, while the total immigration to that country in 1878 was 

 only 138,000, it rose in 1880 to 347,000 while that from Canada 

 to the United States multiplied three times within three years. 

 This stream, whose flow had lessened during the five years fol- 

 lowing the 1873 panic, had risen to its height in 1881, to decline 

 again only for a time after this, when the outlet to Manitoba 

 through Minnesota had been found. 



"I fancy," said Mr. Keeler, "that the real extent and mean- 

 ing of this depopulation, as it actually existed then, was not 

 known even to the public and business men of that time, and it 

 has needed a decade of expansion such as that of the past ten 

 years for them in any degree accurately to estimate or compre- 

 hend the strength of the centripetal forces, which the churn- 



