 196 CANADA and downs which were caused by the enormous outlay on construction were almost sensational, like the engineering feats that carried the road over the Rockies. By 1881-2 the four- hundred-mile section was finished between Port Arthur, the head of Lake Superior, and Winnipeg; and as Port Arthur could be reached in two days by fine steamers from the heart of Ontario, this opened the North-West to the world. So, while the road was still being made through wild Ontario to the east, and over the prairies to the west, the world rushed in. A few thousand people had already spread over the nearer prairie, but nobody had as yet heard very much of it. In 1881-2 there was a great boom. Thous- ands rushed to Winnipeg, which reached a population of thirty thousand in two years, and small towns sprang up along the railroad towards the Rocky Mountains. The boom was overdone, prices had risen to absurd figures, speculation was mainly in paper, and there was a disastrous reaction. But the boom opened the country to the world's knowledge, left thousands of new settlers behind, and put an end to the still lingering notion that Old Canada, ending at Lake Huron, was the limit of the country for all appreciable time. The farmers' sons of Ontario and the Maritime provinces, and often the farmers themselves, left for the promised land. The |  THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 197 most contradictory stories were told about its crops and prospects. It was a common pleasantry in Old Canada that nobody who returned from Manitoba could ever speak the truth again. Agricultural matters were very bad just then in England, and nearly as bad for the same reason in Canada. A dozen years previously English land had been considered the soundest thing in the whole world, and now a regular cataclysm had overtaken it. Hundreds of English farms were tenantless and derelict, and lands were vainly offered at prices which even a century before would have been thought impossible. Well-established Canadian and Eastern American farms suffered from the same cause, in an only less degree. This cause was the opening of the American West by railroads, and the pouring in of cheap produce grown on virgin soil. It was the fall in grain, never appreciably to rise again, which first upset all these old countries. The Continent sought safety in high protective duties. Great Britain faced it, but half the country went into grass, while the half that could not grow grass had terrible years, and has never fully recovered its old prices and prosperity. Old Canada suffered too. Its lands went down, but its yeoman freeholders changed all their methods by degrees, and went into grass, |
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