Canadian Agriculture. 
463 
dising the local agricultural societies, made it possible to 
stimulate enterprise and excite emulation among the farmers 
by the offer of prizes at the agricultural exhibitions. The 
value of these competitive shows is well illustrated in the 
marked and rapid improvement of the live-stock of the Dominion, 
and in the production of the Red Fyfe variety of wheat. 
As the United States become more densely peopled, Canada 
will probably find there an outlet for some of her agricultural 
produce. She will spare no effort to maintain the position she 
has won for herself in the trans-oceanic cattle trade, while she 
will endeavour to supply in the wheat-trade the short-comings 
of the United States, whose export to this country is so visibly 
declining, — her great competitor in this field will be British India. 
With a superior article of butter, such as she is well capable of 
producing, she is advantageously placed for challenging the 
Danish trade with the West Indies, whither Denmark sends 
large exports of butter in hermetically sealed tins. 
Xothing, I think, would have so salutary an effect on the 
agricultural practice of the Dominion as an influx of settlers of 
good farming experience. And what Canada most needs for 
the development of her great resources is increased capital, 
which would serve not only to extend her agricultural opera- 
tions, but would assist in the development of her mineral wealth, 
and in the establishment of manufactories. 
Canada is the nearest British colony. There is probably 
not a large town, certainly not a county, in the old country 
which has not supplied its quota, small or large, to the present 
population of the Dominion. The feeling of kinship on the 
one hand, and the growth in commercial relations on the other, 
are continually helping to bind the two countries closer together. 
To the agriculturist and the capitalist, to the political economist 
and the philanthropist, Canada, with her past so brief, and her 
future so pregnant with promise, presents a problem which 
for interest has never been surpassed. The greatest prejudice 
the Dominion has to live down is that connected with its 
climate, and ail the unpleasant forebodings which were once 
uttered with respect to the older Provinces are now lightly 
transferred to the prairie. But, just as the Eastern Provinces 
are filling up with a healthy population, so I cannot help 
believing will be the case with the new lands farther west. I 
will even go a step farther, and submit that the offspring of the 
British people who are born and bred under the clear northern 
sky of the Canadian Dominion, with its undoubtedly severe 
climate, will in the course of generations develop into a finer, 
hardier, healthier race than descendants of the same people can 
hope to become in the lower latitudes of the same continent. 
