The Canadian Commonwealth

and 1911 by actual count there entered Canada 650,719 American settlers. Averaging up one year with another by actual estimate of settlers' possessions at point of entry, the

he copper mines, the smelters, the silver mines, the coal lands, the timber limits, the fisheries, the vast holdings of a

merican capital. To be more explicit, when the MacKenzie-Mann interests bought one large coal area in British Columbia, the Hill interests of St. Paul bought the other large coal area. This does

of beautifully gilded and engraved stock certificates taking the place of real profits-of almost worth-nothing shares in worthless holes in the ground selling on a face value of a next-door profit-yielding neighbor. The American is without a peer as pioneer on land, in mine, in forest; but the boomster, who invariably follows on the heels of that pioneer, is also the most expert "houn' dawg" to rous

ars yet later in Cobalt, and it must not be forgotten that when Canadian capital refu

orty bushels of wheat to the acre, when you burned it in the stack or fed it to cattle worth only ten dollars a head, because you could get neither wheat nor cattle to market? You really believed you had the best land on earth, but what good did the belief do you? Sons and daughters forsook the Canadian farmstead for the United States. Between the early eighties and the early nineties, of Canada's population of five millions, over a million-some estimates place it at a million and a half-Canadians left the Dominion for the United States. You find the place names of Ontario al

d humanity would people the Northwest? Why, we were mad with alarm over the gold stampede! Men pitched their homesteads to the winds and trekked penniless for the mines. Women bought mining shares for a dollar that were not worth ten cents. Clerks, railroad hands, seamstresses, waitresses-all were infecte

sness. Land in the western states was selling at this time at from seventeen dollars in the remote sections to seventy-five dollars an acre

did it because I was dead broke, and it seemed to me the easiest way to make three thousand dollars. I could earn three dollars

s to an audience in Winnipeg.) But this penniless settler had seen it happen in his own home state of Iowa. He had seen land increase in value from nothing an acre to ten dollars and twenty dollars and seventy-five dollars and one hundred dollars, and he sat him down on the bare prairie in a tar-papered shanty to help the same process along in Canada. He never had the faintes

exceeded its rights? The dispute was non-religious at first, but finally developed into a bitter Catholic versus Protestant controversy. Not all Protestants wanted non-religious schools; but when Catholic Quebec said that Protestant Manitoba should not have non-religious schools, a furious little tempest waxed in a furious little teapot. The entrenched government of Sir John Macdonald, who had died so

ecoming high priced. The personal testimony of successful farmers was bill-posted from station platform to remotest barb-wire fence. The country was literally combed by Sifton agents. Big land companies which had already exploited colonization schemes in the western states pricked up their ears and sent agents to spy out the land. Those agents may have deluded themselves that they went to Ca

land jumped in value from five dollars to fifteen dollars, from fifteen dollars to thirty dollars an acre. When Canada's yearly immigration reached the proportions of four hundred thousand-half Americans-it is not exaggerating to say the prairie took fire. Villages grew into cities overnight. Edmonton and Calgary and Moose Jaw and Regina-formerly jumping-off places into a no-man's-land-became metropolitan cities of twenty-

had to be built. All-red routes of round-the-globe steam ships were established; all-red round-the-world cables were laid. The quickened pulse was

ce of the border-till somebody began to howl about "the Americanizing of Canada." Then, in the words of the illustrious Governor-General, "what was good enough for Americans was good enough" for him. Clifford Sif

anizing of Canada," it

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