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said Sir Wilfrid Laurier, "the nineteenth century was the century of the United States, the twentieth century will be the century of Canada." This magnificent hyperbole explains, and perhaps justifies, the overwhelming popular verdict which has once more made the ablest colonial statesman Prime Minister of the greatest and best of all the British colonies. But, magnificent though the hyperbole may be, it is not improbable that it may be literally fulfilled. This does not mean than any Canadian in his most sanguine dreams expects the Dominion to outstrip the Republic. What Sir Wilfrid Laurier meant was that, as the most astonishing and commanding spectacle offered to the world in the nineteenth century was the marvellous rush to the front of a new race, the unprecedented development of vast areas of an unpeopled continent, the coming to maturity of manhood of a nation that was only in its cradle when the century dawned, so it is Canada which in the twentieth century will offer to mankind the most amazing and phenomenal spectacle of immense and rapid national development.

And there is solid substantial justification for that expectation. For Canada is the coming land of the immediate future. All that the Americans, who peopled the Atlantic coast a hundred years ago, have done in developing their hinterland, the Cana

Abridged from The Review of Reviews, England. -ED.

dians are doing to-day, and will do to a still greater extent every decade of the new century. Canada has now within her borders about six millions of the hardiest, keenest, and most industrious of the human race. But she has room in which to accommodate comfortably a hundred millions of human beings. Some say twice that number, but Sir Wilfrid Laurier, being essentially a moderate man, puts it at the lower figure. When he addressed the Canadian Club in London, he said: "The one thing wanted in Canada was population. They had room, they had land to give homes and shelter to one hundred millions, at least, and he hoped that at no distant date they would have a population of a hundred millions."

For all our industrious youth Canada is Opportunity. Competence and comfort, and the attractions which she offers in the broad belt of fertile land which stretches from Atlantic to Pacific will secure for her, under the shelter of her own flag, as varied and composite a family of independent sister nations as those which shelter today under the Stars and Stripes.

I.-The True Canada.

The Republic is to the Dominion what England is to Scotland in the United Kingdom. Canada is the Scotland of the American continent. And the Canadians, like the Scotch, have the advantage of the discipline of the north-easter. The stern grey weather of which Kingsley sang with such enthusiasm is the breeder of men who dare and who do. The Canadians may always be less numerous than their southern neighbors. But,

like their own wheat, the quality of the grain will always bring them to the top. The area of Canada is larger than that of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, and it is also a fact that the area susceptible of cultivation and settlement is not smaller, as popularly supposed, than the great Republic of the south. This is abundantly This is abundantly clear by a study of the map, especially if the huge area represented by the ever-broadening belt of the Rocky Mountains towards the south, the great American desert, and the "bad lands" in the northern prairie regions of the States are taken into account.

The splendors of the destinies of the Dominion do not depend in the least upon the vast expanse of territory lying north of the 60th parallel of latitude. Klondike, it is true, lies five degrees nearer the North Pole, and there is an indefinite potentiality of other Klondikes in those inclement regions. Canada is great enough to dispense with all her circumpolar possessions, and then she would confront the world without feeling that her greatness and her wealth were materially affected by the surrender.

The Dominion, for all practical purposes, consists of the fertile belt 400 miles wide which spans the continent. Ontario and Quebec, which at present contain more than half the population of the Dominion, drive a huge irregular wedge into the territory lying south of the 49th parallel, the extreme tip of which is 400 miles south of the normal frontier. It is in the land lying between the 49th and the 60th parallels that Canada has discovered her destiny. There is land, and good land, in New Brunswick, and in Quebec, and in Ontario, but the El Dorado to which hundreds of thousands are flocking to take up homesteads lies north of latitude 49 in the belt between the 49th and the 60th, where lies, as lay in the Cestus of

Venus, the fascination which no one can resist.

Thus limited, the acreage and mileage of Canada will stand good comparison with that of the United States. It is true that Canada has not got a cotton belt, neither has she to face the terrible problem of a black population. The Dominion is emphatically a white man's country. The United States is piebald. But if Canada cannot grow cotton, she can, and does, grow men, who, when tested in the workaday laboratory of actual life, are to the average south-western American very much what the New Englander was to the Southerner. The Canadian is sharper and keener, and everywhere he makes his way.

It is a curious fact that the Canadian, who was once almost entirely French, and who is to-day predominantly English, Scotch, and Irish, should nevertheless be a more distinct British type than the people of the United States, who at first were almost entirely English. Canada, which was discovered by a Venetian, and colonized by Frenchmen, which began life as New France, is creating a New England, where the best characteristics of the best English type-that of the North of England-are being preserved for the good of the world.

The French habitant remains French, and if he loyally accepts the British Empire to-day, it is because he believes it affords him better guarantees for the retention of his French nationality than he could hope to enjoy in the Republic of the United States. But there will be no new France in the western continent. There is the old France there-a social and religious type with which modern France has little in common, but the old France, although its children are prolific, has lost even the ambition to dominate the continent. But the

dreams of Cartier, of Champlain, and of Montcalm have almost perished from the memory of their descendants. The French pioneers led the way not only in Quebec, but throughout the whole of the vast North-West. They were the bushrangers, the trappers, frontiersmen par excellence of the enormous region known as Hudson's Bay Territory. They did good work in their day. But while they labored other men entered into their labors. Their descendants dwell in the land, but the suppression of the abortive rebellion of Riel in the Red River territory put the final seal upon the Ukase whereby destiny deeded these lands to be predominantly English.

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It is strange how, whatever human ingredients are poured into the Canadian cauldron, the Canadian Englishspeaking man always comes out top. The first emigrants were French. The second great swarm were the 50,000 United Empire Loyalists, who, after the success of the American Revolution, shook off the dust of their feet against the Republic and came northward to remain under the British flag. Ten thousand of them settled in Ontario. They were of varied origin. Most of them had served in the British army, and as George the Third had cast his net pretty wide, the United Empire Loyalists were somewhat mixed. They were of English, Scotch, Irish, German, Dutch, and Huguenot blood. The third great tidal wave of immigration was due to the potato famine in Ireland and clearances of the Highlands. At this time arose the Highland settlement of Glengarry, the settlement of English gentlemen and retired military officers near Cobourg, the Irish settlement near Peterboro', the military settlement near Perth, the Talbot settlement in Elgin, the Canada Company's settlement in the Huron Tract, the block of Paisley weavers in Welling

ton, the Germans in Waterloo, Huron and Renfrew, and the French-Canadians in Essex, Prescott and Russell.

We are now witnessing a fourth flood of immigration. It comes from the south and from the east. The Americans are realizing that there are better openings in the Canadian North-West than in any of their unoccupied lands. And the Mother Country is fast beginning to wake up to the potentialities of this vast reserve. Ten years ago there were hardly 1,000 immigrants a month into Canada. Last year there were nearly 3,000 a week.

II.-The Nonpareil of Nations.

There are men from all lands, but the Briton predominates. Canada, which now absorbs 135,000 emigrants annually, will take thrice that number. And she will get them. This is not surprising when the attractions which

she offers are considered. The Hon. R. Harcourt, the Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario, a "province" that is very little short of the size of the German Empire, did not hesitate recently to challenge the attention of the world by the following declaration:

"Can a country be named the size of ours, with a like population and like conditions, where the people generally are either more contented or prosperous? where the general where the average of comfort is higher? encouraging? where there is less illiteracy, prospects of a very bright future are more less crime, less abject want? Times were never better than now. No man need be out of employment. The mechanic, the laborer-every one-has work to do, and a good wage for doing it."

Granting that Mr. Harcourt was speaking of Ontario, the claims which he made would probably be endorsed by the public men of the other provinces-especially those in the far west. It is, perhaps, only natural that Mr. Harcourt should be optimistic, for Mr.

Harcourt is Minister of Education. And Canada is building its hopes for the future quite as much upon its schools as its wheat lands. It claims that in the opinion of competent educationists, its school system is one of the best in the whole world. In western Canada the rural schools are about every three miles or so apart in the settled districts, and the system is free. There is no taxation of pupils for attendance, and ten children in a school district are sufficient to permit of the formation of a school district, while an average attendance of six will entitle the school to an annual grant by the government of a considerable sum to each school, and all the expenses, teacher's salary included, are paid by this grant, and a general taxation of the land within the district, whether occupied or unoccupied, or owned by parents or those having no children. This assures the poor all the advantages of primary education that are enjoyed by the rich. In the cities and towns collegiate institutes are maintained where students are fitted for the several colleges at Winnipeg and other cities in Canada. The fees for secondary education are almost nominal, amounting to less than £3 per annum. One-eighteenth part of the whole of the "Fertile Belt," from Pembina to the Saskatchewan, and beyond it, is set apart for the maintenance of schools.

A striking illustration of the greater readiness of the Canadians to show their faith in education by their liberality in its support is that one Canadian for the last five years has given £100,000 a year to the support of the Canadian University in which he was interested, whereas in England no one has given that amount to Oxford and Cambridge in the last twenty years. Mr. Rhodes' magnificent bequest was

not given to the University, but provided scholarships tenable at Oxford by men from all parts of the Englishspeaking world. And Mr. Rhodes was a South African.

III.-The Climate of Canada.

Canada as a field for emigration is deservedly recognized to be the plum of the whole British Empire. South Africa is at present out of the running; Australia has against it several disadvantages. In the first place, it is so far off-at least four times as far, measured by time-as the Dominion of Canada; in the second. place, the Australians do not seem very keen upon welcoming emigrants; and in the third place, the climate of Australia seems to tell upon the women more than the cold of Canada. And here we strike upon the one deeply-seated popular prejudice against Canada, the notion that it is not the plum, but the ice-box of the Empire. Would-be emigrants shiver at the thought of the Canadian winter, and often, in order to go to what they believe to be a more temperate climesettle in the United States, hundreds of miles nearer the Arctic Circle than the southern provinces of Ontario.

The question is of so much importance that it ought to be dealt with carefully, giving it precedence of every other consideration. Is the climate of Canada abominably cold? Canada has all kinds of climates, and at the extreme north is as cold as Greenland. But no one emigrates to the extreme north. Canada for emigration purposes does not extend further north than the 60th parallel. The question, therefore, is not whether Canada is unbearably unbearably cold, but whether the emigration field in Canada is so.

The answer to that question is clear and decisive. During four months of

the year it is cold, but never unbearably cold. When the thermometer registers a cold far below zero the Canadians are as merry as grasshoppers, because of the dryness of the atmosphere, the absence of wind and the almost continuous sunshine. Winter time is their holiday season. When the mercury disappears in the bulb, then they fling dull care away and have a good time. And the season which is set apart for social amusement and jollification may be cold, but it certainly cannot be regarded as "abominably cold." "Drat the thermometer," said the Irishman, "it has no effect upon the temperature." And that was only the Irish way of expressing a great truth. Thermometrical observations afford no clue to the effect of cold or heat upon the individual. Every human being is his own thermometer. What hurts one man cheers up another. But taking an average, the Canadian human is the most trustworthy thermometer we can get. What does he or she register as to the cold of Canada?

With one consent every Canadian who visits England finds the English winter cold much more abominable than his own exhilarating frost. The cold, damp mugginess of a London in November takes more out of a man than all the cold of Manitoba, which is dry, to begin with, and is tempered by the brilliant sunshine. The emiThe emigrants who have recently gone out almost invariably express themselves as being pleasantly surprised by the bright, clear, invigorating sunshiny winter which they found in the Far West. In Alberta the winter is characterized by frequent spells of milder weather under the influence of the Chinook wind, and the conditions are favorable for stock-keeping.

In the emigration field the winter starts about the middle of November, and breaks almost into summer dur

ing the month of March. Sowing commences at the beginning of April. The first frosts come in October, and this year ploughing was actually proceeding in the last week of November. There are occasional abnormal spells. of cold weather, seldom continuing, however, for more than three days.

Lord Grey, who has often been in Canada, speaking on this subject just before his departure to take up the duties of Governor-General, said: Moreover, he was going to a country where the sky was blue and where the air was like champagne. His personal experience led him to believe that the Canadian winter was most pleasant and more exhilarating than the average English summer. He was going to a country which in the wealth and fertility of its resources and in its invigorating climate and its happy breed of men was not to be surpassed by any other part of the globe.

So much for the cold in winter. There is more reason to complain, if complaint there must be, of heat in summer. For there are two hours more sunshine every day in western Canada than in the United states, and the heat is more difficult for an Englishman to bear than the cold. But the heat, although trying at times, is a healthy heat. When the NorthWest was an unknown land-less than forty years ago it fell to the lot of the late Commander-in-Chief of the British army to begin his brilliant career as a general in command by leading an expedition of 1,400 men across 600 miles of what was then an almost untracked wilderness to distant Winnipeg. He took them in a small flotilla of fifty boats and canoes through a wilderness of rivers, lakes, forests and rocks, where, as no food

to be obtained, everything required had to be taken with them and transported on the soldiers' backs over difficult portages for many miles.