as to
whether the transplanting be permanent, it should be settled by
homestead entries. In one era of something less than three years out
of 351,530 men, women and children who came, sixty thousand entered for
homesteads. In other words, if each householder were married and had a
family of four, almost the entire immigration of 351,530 was absorbed
in permanent tenure by the land. The drifters, the floaters, the
disinherited of their share of earth became landowners, proprietors of
Canada to the extent of one hundred and sixty acres. From 1897 to 1911
the Canadian government spent $2,419,957 advertising Canada in England
and paying a bonus of one pound per capita to steamship agents for each
immigrant; so that each colonist cost the Dominion something over three
dollars. I have heard immigration officials figure how each colonist
was worth to the country as a producer fifteen hundred dollars a year.
This is an excessive estimate, but the bargain was a good one for
Canada. In 1901, when Canada's population was five millions, there
were seven hundred thousand people of British birth in the Dominion; so
that of Canada's present population of 7,800,000, there are in the
Dominion a million and a half people of British birth.[1] Averaging
winter with summer for ten years, colonists of British birth have been
landing on Canada's shores at the rate of three hundred a day.
Canada's natural increase is under one hundred thousand a year.
British colonists are to-day yearly outnumbering Canada's natural
increase.

Only two other such migrations of Saxon blood have taken place in
history: when the Angles and Jutes and Saxons came in plunder raids to
English shores at the dawn of the Christian Era; when in the
seventeenth century Englishmen came to America; and both these tides of
migration were as a drop in an ocean wave compared to the numbers of
English born now flooding to the shores of Canada.

Knowing the Viking spirit that rode out to conquer the very elements in
the teeth of death, it is easy to look back and realize that these
Angles and Jutes and Saxons were bound to found a great sea empire.
So, too, of the New England Puritans! Men who sacrificed their all for
a political and religious belief were bound to build of such belief
foundation for a sturdy nation of the future. It is easy to look back
and realize. It is hard to look forward with eyes that see; but one
must be a very opaque thinker, indeed, not to w