rom the eyes of the world
cannot be hid. Miles away, secure in her sea-girt isle, is old London,
port of all seas; miles away, breasting the beat of the Atlantic,
sits New York, capital of the New World, and mart of the world,
Old and New; far away to the west lie the mighty cities of the Orient,
Peking and Hong Kong, Tokio and Yokohama; and fair across the highway
of the world's commerce sits Winnipeg, Empress of the Prairies.
Her Trans-Continental railways thrust themselves in every direction,
--south into the American Republic, east to the ports of the Atlantic,
west to the Pacific, and north to the Great Inland Sea.

To her gates and to her deep-soiled tributary prairies she draws from
all lands peoples of all tribes and tongues, smitten with two great
race passions, the lust for liberty, and the lust for land.

By hundreds and tens of hundreds they stream in and through this
hospitable city, Saxon and Celt and Slav, each eager on his own quest,
each paying his toll to the new land as he comes and goes, for good
or for ill, but whether more for good than for ill only God knows.

A hundred years ago, where now stands the thronging city, stood
the lonely trading-post of The Honourable, The Hudson's Bay Company.
To this post in their birch bark canoes came the half-breed trapper
and the Indian hunter, with their priceless bales of furs to be
bartered for blankets and beads, for pemmican and bacon, for powder
and ball, and for the thousand and one articles of commerce that
piled the store shelves from cellar to roof.

Fifty years ago, about the lonely post a little settlement had
gathered--a band of sturdy Scots. Those dour and doughty pioneers
of peoples had planted on the Red River their homes upon their
little "strip" farms--a rampart of civilization against the wide,
wild prairie, the home of the buffalo, and camp ground of the
hunters of the plain.

Twenty-five years ago, in the early eighties, a little city had
fairly dug its roots into the black soil, refusing to be swept away
by that cyclone of financial frenzy known over the Continent as the
"boom of '81," and holding on with abundant courage and invincible
hope, had gathered to itself what of strength it could, until by 1884
it had come to assume an appearance of enduring solidity. Hitherto
accessible from the world by the river and the railroad from the south,
in this year the city began to cast eager eyes eastward, and to listen
for the rumble of the f