484 Our North Land. 



But when the interior of the great North-West becomes settled 

 up these proposed twenty steamships will be increased to fifty, 

 with a carrying capacity of seventy-five thousand car-loads, or 

 equal to seven hundred and fifty thousand -tons annually. In that 

 event there could be taken into the North- West nearly half a 

 million immigrants annually by the Hudson's Bay route. 



But how is this route to be opened ? By a private company 

 with a land subsidy, and the opposition of the Canadian Pacific 

 Railway Company ? No, never ! It may be among the possibilities, 

 but no one of the present generation will ever live to see such a 

 feat carried out. If the route is ever to be opened that sort of 

 thing must cease, and the Government — the National Government 

 — must take the enterprise in hand the same way as they took the 

 Canadian Pacific Railway in hand in 1879. There is no other way. 

 Let the Government form another Syndicate — a Hudson's Bay 

 Syndicate — that will contract to commence the proposed roads at 

 two points — Winnipeg and Churchill — simultaneously, within one 

 year, and complete the line in four years, and the Prince Albert 

 branch within five years. This will be easy of accomplishment. 

 Thirty millions of acres of good lands can be set aside by resolution 

 of Parliament, in the same way, for this object, that one hundred 

 millions were set aside for the Canadian Pacific in 1879. Then let 

 the Government subsidize the Syndicate that will put up one mil- 

 lion dollars as a pledge of good faith, and ability to carry out the 

 contract and maintain the route in good order for twenty years, 

 by twelve thousand eight hundred acres of land per mile in land, 

 and $12,800 per mile in money, and we will have the Hudson's Bay 

 route opened in short order. It will be the best paying investment 

 Canada has ever made, and will return an hundredfold. It will 

 bring millions of settlers into the North-West, and convert the 

 dreary prairie wastes into waving wheat fields, swarm the alluvial 

 plains of the far west with herds of hundreds of thousands of fat 

 cattle, and hogs, and inaugurate a new era in the commercial history 

 of Canada. It will open the gates of the great Canadian North- 

 West to the starving millions of Europe, and present to them a 

 means of transportation to free, or almost free homes, in Canada, at 



