The Attraction of the North. 25 



under a realized certainty of Northern Pacific success, and when 

 the promoters of the Canadian Pacific launched that enterprise, they 

 were in turn ridiculed and laughed at by the Northern Pacific 

 people and the Northern Pacific people's friends ; and now, as that 

 ridicule and that laughter are dying away under a realizing cer- 

 tainty of the Canadian Pacific success, and as the people of Mani- 

 toba and British Columbia are trying to launch the still more 

 northern Canadian Pacific as the best route of them all, it has come 

 to be the turn of the Canadian Pacific people and the Canadian 

 Pacific people's friends to ridicule and laugh ; and so the world 

 moves on, and moves northward. 



The people of Manitoba had figured out the distances, and saw 

 plainly that, should the waters of Hudson's Bay and Strait prove 

 to be navigable for a sufficient length of time, the farmers would be 

 able to reach Liverpool with their products by that route with a 

 saving of about one thousand miles of railway traffic, or some thirty 

 cents a bushel on their wheat. The establishment of such a route 

 would therefore be an incalculable boon to the North- West, would 

 mark the beginning of an era in Canada, and would guarantee the 

 development of a vast British Empire north-west of the great 

 lakes that might one day become the Greater Britain. 



