The opening of the West brought new prosperity to every corner of the
East. Factories found growing markets; banks multiplied branches and
business; exports mounted fast and imports faster; closer relations
were formed with London and New York financial interests; mushroom
millionaires, country clubs, city slums, suburban subdivisions,
land booms, grafting aldermen, and all the apparatus of an advanced
civilization grew apace. A new self-confidence became the dominant note
alike of private business and of public policy.

With industrial prosperity, political unity became assured. Canada
became more and more a name of which all her sons were proud. Expansion
brought men of the different provinces together. The Maritime Provinces
first felt fully at one with the rest of Canada when Vancouver and
Winnipeg rather than Boston and New York called their sons. Even
Ontario and Quebec made some advance toward mutual understanding, though
clerical leaders who sought safety for their Church in the isolation
of its people, imperialists who drove a wedge between Canadians by
emphasizing Anglo-Saxon racial ties, and politicians of the baser sort
exploiting race prejudice for their own gain, opened rifts in a society
already seamed by differences of language and creed. In the West unity
was still harder to secure, for men of all countries and of none
poured into a land still in the shaping. The divergent interests of the
farming, free trade West and of the manufacturing, protectionist East
made for friction. Fortunately strong ties held East and West together.
Eastern Canadians or their sons filled most of the strategic posts in
Government and business, in school and church and press in the West.
Transcontinental railways, chartered banks with branches and interests
in every province, political parties organizing their forces from
coast to coast, played their part. Much had been accomplished; but
much remained to be done. With this background of rapid industrial
development and growing national unity, Canada's relations with the
Empire, with her sister democracy across the border, and with foreign
states, took on new importance and divided interest with the changes in
her internal affairs.

From being a state wherein the mother country exercised control and the
colonies yielded obedience the Empire was rapidly being transformed
into a free and equal partnership of independent commonwealths under one
king. Out of the clash of rival