Immigration and the Hudson's Bay Route. 565 



As to Professor Ramsay's views, we on this side of the Atlantic, 

 having exceptional experience of affairs in the North-West, on 

 account of a considerable residence in that part of Canada, might 

 differ from them. It might be well to exercise a good deal of 

 caution as to the class of persons sent out to make a livelihood by 

 farming. At any rate they should be well provided with means to 

 start with, and, what is equally important, they should have some 

 practical instruction in the methods necessary to be pursued in order 

 to succeed. Intelligent farming is just as superior to unintelligent 

 farming in its results as is a wise and prudent management of a 

 commercial business superior to an unwise and imprudent one. 



Mr. Peacock Edwards in moving a vote of thanks to the speakers 

 at the meeting said it had fallen to his lot to conduct the coloniza- 

 tion scheme of Lady Gordon Cathcart, and. he was also one of those 

 who sent out the families from London. He went on to say that 

 the Canada North- West Land Company owned over two million 

 acres within the railway belt west of Brandon and in Southern 

 Manitoba, besides one-half of the town sites between Brandon and 

 the Rocky Mountains, a distance of eight hundred miles. These 

 lands had been selected as combining in the largest measure all the 

 elements essential to successful farming, including suitable soil, 

 convenient timber and water supply, and proximity to railways. 

 Interjected among these selected lands were the free homesteads of 

 one hundred and sixty acres which the Dominion Government offer 

 to settlers, which being in alternate sections, necessarily shared the 

 advantages of the selected lands, which were being taken up at a 

 rate unexampled, he believed, in any British colony. The increase 

 of population in Manitoba for the ten years from 1871 to 1881 was 

 at the rate of 439 per cent. New Zealand for same period the next 

 highest was 91 per cent., and the average increase of the whole 

 of Australasia was only 42 per cent, for same period. The company 

 to which he had referred had an efficient staff of officers in Edin- 

 burgh and at Winnipeg, and at various towns adjacent to the lands 

 now opened for settlement, who had been instructed to give gratuit- 

 ously their services to emigrants settling in the neighbourhood, to 

 direct them from stage to stage on their journey, to advise them in 



