onditions in our mission districts. We are perfectly convinced that
when all our Catholics will have fully realized the truth of these
conditions, they will immediately understand their responsibilities and
fulfill generously their duty. But what is that "call of the West"
which the Catholic Church Extension is sounding like a cry of alarm
through the country? You all know, what I would call, "the Romance of
the West."

A few decades ago Western Canada was but a bleak, lifeless plain,
extending from the Great Lakes to the foothills of the Rockies, dotted
here and there with the Indian wigwam, the roving herds of buffaloes,
the solitary chapel of the Catholic missionary, and the lonely posts of
the Hudson Bay fur-traders. Suddenly under the magic steel of the
plough, that immense waste of land woke up from its age-long slumber.
The desolate prairie became within a few years the greatest granary of
the world. The Indian trail gave place to transcontinental highways,
to those "long, long, and winding," steel trails that have led the
youth of our Country and the exiles of Europe "into the lands of their
dreams." These trans-Canada roads have conquered distances and linked
the Atlantic to the Pacific. They may well be considered as the
arteries of our Dominion; through them indeed flows rapid and warm the
blood of our national life and in them one can hear, as it were, the
pulsations of its great and noble heart. The transcontinental lines
are responsible for the birth and phenomenal growth of our Prairie
Provinces.

What are the conditions of the Church in these new and promising
Provinces? It is not the time, nor is it the place to discuss errors
or absence of policy that have crippled the Church's work and growth in
that period of rapid transformation. We take facts as they are now.
The Church in Western Canada to hold its ground, to extend its work and
develop its institutions, has an absolute need of the help of the East.
The barrier of immense distances to which are added, for long months,
unfavorable climatic conditions; diversity of nationality, variety of
racial ideals, differences of language, customs and traditions; absence
of Catholic traditions and a prevailing atmosphere of unbelief and
irreligion; such are, in a few words, the tremendous obstacles against
which the Western Church in its infancy has to contend.

This vision of distress, the Extension wishes to place before every
Catholic in Canada;