ect contributions.

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CHAPTER XI

THE COMING OF PROSPERITY

The opening of the west--Railway expansion--State aids to
production--New provinces and old cries--Party fortunes

We have seen that in the early years of the Laurier regime Canada
attained a new international status and came to play no small part in
the affairs of the Empire. No less notable in the succeeding years was
the remarkable industrial expansion at home, the sunrise of prosperity
which followed the long night of depression. This expansion touched
every corner of the far-flung Dominion, and was based on the
exploitation of resources and possibilities of the most varied kind.
Yet the central fact, the development which caused and conditioned all
the rest, was the settlement of the great western plains.

For years 'Canada's unequalled western heritage' had given many an
after-dinner speaker a peroration, but it had given very few new
settlers a living. The Conservative Government had achieved one great
task of constructive patriotism, in providing for the {219} building of
a railway across the vast wilderness to the Pacific. Over thirty
million acres of the choicest lands of the West had been given to this
and other railways to encourage settlement. A liberal homestead policy
had been adopted. And still the settlers came not, or if they came
they did not stay. Barely three thousand homestead entries a year were
made in the early nineties. By 1896 the number had fallen to eighteen
hundred. Canadians themselves seemed to have lost faith in the West,
for in this year the applicants for homesteads included only five
hundred and seventy settlers from the older Canada. The stock of the
railway which had been built with such national effort had fallen to
fifty. West of Lake Superior, after thirty years of Confederation,
there were little more than three hundred thousand people, of whom
nearly one-third were Indians. And, in the phrase of a western
Conservative newspaper, 'the trails from Manitoba to the States were
worn bare and brown by the waggon wheels of departing settlers.'

In the remarkable development of the West which now began, and which
profoundly changed the whole outlook and temper of Canadian life, there
were some general factors {220} with which statesmen or business men
had nothing to do. The prices of farm products began to rise the world
over, due in part to the swing of population in every land from country