d
million bushels of wheat her transcontinentals are glutted with traffic
and her harbors gorged, what will happen when her wheat fields raise
eight hundred million bushels of wheat? So Canada has cast about for a
shorter route to Europe by Hudson Bay, and both parties in Dominion
politics have backed the project.

At a time when the food supply of Great Britain must be drawn almost
solely from her colonial possessions and the United States and
Argentina, when her very national existence depends on the sea lanes to
that food supply being kept open--a route which shortens the distance
to that food supply by from one thousand five hundred to three thousand
miles becomes doubly interesting.

Take a mental look at the contour of North America! All the big export
harbors of the Atlantic Coast are situated at the broadest bulge of the
continent--Halifax, St. John, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore
are all where the distance across the continent from the grain fields
is widest. That means a long land haul.

Take another look at the map--this time at a revolving globe! Any
schoolboy knows that a circle round a top is shorter at the ends than
around its middle. The same of the earth. East and west distances are
shorter the nearer you are to the Pole, the farther you are from the
Equator.

To England from Eastern Asia by Suez is fourteen to eighteen thousand
miles. To England from Asia by San Francisco is eleven thousand miles,
by Seattle ten thousand miles, by Prince Rupert and Hudson Bay seven to
eight thousand miles--representing a saving by the northern route of
almost half round the world.

Another point--take a compass! Stick the needle on Hudson Bay and
swing the leg down round New York and up through the wheat plains of
the Northwest. Draw lines to the center of your circle--to your
amazement, you find the lines from the wheat plains to New York are
twice and thrice as long as the lines from the wheat plains to Hudson
Bay. In other words, Mr. Hill's wheat empire is one thousand miles
nearer tidewater to Hudson Bay than to New York. The three prairie
provinces of Northwestern Canada are from four hundred (for Manitoba)
to eight hundred miles (for Alberta) distant from ocean front on Hudson
Bay. They are from one thousand two hundred to two thousand four
hundred miles distant from tidewater at Montreal and New York and
Philadelphia.

That is--if land rates were the same as water rates--the Hudson