82 HALIBURTON OX COAL TRADE OF THE NEW DOMINION. 



greatness. A people possessing abundance of coal and iron 

 must in time become a capitalist among nations ; but combine 

 geographical advantages such as I have described with the 

 possession of these essential elements of national wealth, and 

 you constitute a country whose gi'eatness is simply a question of 

 time, and is inevitable. 



All of these peculiar advantages we find combined in Great 

 Britain and in Nova Scotia and Vancouver's Island.* Along 

 the shores of the Atlantic, from the Orkneys to the Cape of 

 Good Hope, there is only one country. Great Britain, which 

 possesses extensive coal fields that are adjacent to the seaboard. 

 Spain has a large carboniferous tract, but it is undeveloped, 

 and its capabilities are still unknown. On the western shores 

 of the Atlantic, from Cape North to Cape Plorn, the only 

 accessible coal fields of any importance are those of Nova 

 Scotia ; w^hile on the Pacific coast, from Behring Straits to the 

 Straits of Magellan, there is nothing to compete with Vancou- 

 ver's Island, which, with its coal seams cropping out on the shores 

 of excellent harbours, is destined to be the future coal depot 

 for the steam fleets of the Atlantic, and the home of manufac- 

 tures and commerce. That the eastern and w^estern portals of 

 British America should be so favoured by nature, augurs well for 

 the New Dominion, which possessing a vast tract of magnificent 

 agricultural country between these extreme limits, only requires 

 an energetic, self-reliant people, worthy of such a home, to raise 

 it to a high position among nations. Nova Scotia and Vancou- 

 ver's Island, however, find to their cost that these advantasfes, 

 great as they are, require the aid of capital and labour, while 

 Great Britain has discovered to her dismay that her coal fields, 

 like all things earthly, must have an end, and are liable to 

 exhaustion. The theory advanced with great ability by Mr. 

 Jevons in his well knov/n work on the coal question, that within 

 a century this truth will be sensibly felt by Great Britain, has 

 excited much interest and no little alarm. Mr. Hull, a previous 

 writer, remarks : — ' ' I can conceive the coal fields of this coun- 

 try so far exhausted that the daughter in her maturity shall be 



*I am not aware whether iron mines exist in Vancouver's Island, but we may infer 

 that this is the case, judging by the other coal fiekls of North America, 



