The Growth of Canada and Imperial Federation. 571 



three-quarters of a million for pocket money. In all British North 

 America, not including Newfoundland, the deposits of the people in 

 the savings and other banks amounted to six and a-half millions. 

 They are now 151 millions. In 1844 the total .bank circulation was 

 under six millions; in 1884 the circulation, Government and bank, 

 is 45 millions. The value of farm property in Ontario in 1844 was 

 $41,000,000. In 1883 it was $654,000,000." 



Pages of statistics from reliable sources may be given equally 

 strong, in proof of the steady, rapid advancement of the Dominion of 

 Canada, but the most pleasing feature of the question is its national 

 aspect. But a few short years ago, within the memory of the older 

 Public School pupils -of our land, British North America consisted of 

 half-a-dozen scattered and disunited colonies. They were for the 

 most part obscure and unattractive. Geographically they were 

 widely separated from each other, some of them, and their respective 

 interests were greatly divergent. Who in looking upon these British 

 possessions in 1860, could see in them the constituent materials with 

 which to build a nation ? Lord Durham may have had some faith 

 in the idea that a proper scheme of Union would be mutually advan- 

 tageous to the Provinces, and conducive to the happiness and pros- 

 perity of the Canadian people. Sir John Macdonald, the late Hon. 

 George Brown, and their contemporaries in public life in the other 

 Provinces may have seen the elements of Canadian peace and 

 prosperity in their plans of Confederation, but none of them ever 

 dreamed of the great possibilities in store for this country. They 

 had, no doubt, high hopes that from the strength that union gives a 

 greater degree of development would be attainable ; but the exigen- 

 cies of the day, the difficulties of Government with which they had 

 to contend, the unmanageable heterogeneousness of the populations — 

 these were the obstacles that they sought to remove by a Confedera- 

 tion of the colonies, and we may venture to think that they saw but 

 a short distance into the future beyond the political turmoil with 

 which they were surrounded. 



However, the work of Canadian Confederation was only begun 

 by the Union of 1867, and it has been going forward ever since, and 

 this is the national progress to which the reader's attention is now 



