a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without
Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade
filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a
day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed
a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western
Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures--the lure of the
land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is
estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one
thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth
of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring
the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in
figures--the "power of the man."

[Illustration: Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt]

Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City
of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation
of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg
sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages--Armenian, Arabic,
Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu,
Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that
some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast
the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would
Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the _London
Times_, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out
from among the flotsam in the kelp.

Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we
cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred
steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate
that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the
six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This
will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold
by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for
breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the
list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics
of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that
these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do.
"But they are all good pay," the implement-man says. Looking at the red
plou