ation was scattered
over an area the size of Europe.[1] To render the situation doubly
dark and doubtful the United States had just entered on her career of
high tariff. That high tariff barred Canadian produce out. There was
only one intermittent and unsatisfactory steamer service across the
Atlantic. There was none at all across the Pacific. British
Columbians trusted to windjammers round the Horn. Of railroads binding
East to West there was none. A canal system had been begun from the
lakes and the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence, but this was a measure more
of national defense than commerce. Crops were abundant, but where
could they be sold? I have heard relatives tell how wheat in those
days sold down to forty cents, and oats to twenty cents, and potatoes
to fifteen cents, and fine cattle to forty dollars, and finest horses
to fifty dollars and seventy-five dollars. Fathers of farmers who
to-day clear their three thousand dollars and four thousand dollars a
year could not clear one hundred dollars a year. Commerce was
absolutely stagnant. Canada was a federation, but a federation of
what? Poverty-stricken, isolated provinces. Not in bravado, not in
flamboyant self-confidence, rebuffed of all chance to trade with the
United States, the new Dominion humbly set herself to build the
foundations of a nation. She did not know whether she could do what
she had set herself to do; but she began with that same dogged idealism
and faith in the future which had buoyed up her first settlers; and
there were dark days during her long hard task, when the whiff of an
adverse wind would have thrown her into national bankruptcy--that
winter, for instance, when the Canadian Pacific had no money to go on
building and the Canadian government refused to extend aid. Had the
Kiel Rebellion of '85 not compelled the Dominion government to extend
aid so that the line would be ready for the troops every bank in Canada
would have collapsed, and national credit would have been impaired for
fifty years.

Meanwhile, a country of less than four million people set itself to
link British Columbia with Montreal, and Montreal with Halifax, and
Ottawa with Detroit, and the Great Lakes with the sea. The story is
too long to be related in detail, but on canals alone Canada has spent
a hundred millions. Including stocks, bonds, funded debt and debenture
stock, the Dominion railways have a capital of $1,369,992,574; and the
country that had no