 204 CANADA production made steady progress, and hun- dreds of contented farmers who had come up with little or nothing were to be found in the land. But that the North-West, till within the last year or two of the last century, had disappointed expectations, there is no doubt. All Canada, indeed, had gone very slowly for the previous twenty years. Both in east and west there was a vast amount of solid well-being and quiet progress. But for a new country that had just annexed a fertile slice of a continent, things were not right. Comparisons between Old Canada and the Eastern States in material advance were inevitable and unpleasant. Population barely maintained the rate of an old country; Canadians went to the United States by thousands. The West of Canada, again, compared equally badly with the American West when it came to figures. Nobody quite knew why, but everybody knew it was so.At the close of the last century the Canadian North-West suddenly woke up. Nothing particular happened up there. It had been going steadily and slowly along, when the outside world suddenly discovered it had misjudged the country. Two things, however, contributed to show the world its mistake. A very active immigration policy on the part of the Dominion Government in Great Britain, and even in parts of Europe, coincided with |  THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 205 the exhaustion of all the free grant and cheap lands worth having in the United States. Then suddenly a rush began to the Canadian North-West. There were millions of acres of good land unoccupied and owned by the Government, by the Canadian Pacific railroad, which had received great areas as part payment, and by the Hudson's Bay Company, which had received them in consideration of their old rights. There were free grants on conditions of settlement and cultivation, and other lands at a nominal price. The American habit for generations among a considerable class had been to take up land on a frontier, make a good improved farm of it, sell it at a high price during a buoyant time, and then move on westward to repeat themselves, or in the person of their children, the same process. They had now got to their farthest West, and settled that up in good farms, worth an acre. There was no further move possible till suddenly they discovered that North-West Canada offered yet another shift as promising as any they or their fathers had ever made. Nay, better, for they soon saw that no wheat land in America had ever been so certain and produced quite such good stuff as this new country. So, all through the Western States, times being good, American farmers sold their well-equipped fenced farms |
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