e only limit to growth
in the North Country is the nature of the soil. I am not, of course,
speaking of the Arctic slope, but I am of the great belt of wild land
north of Saskatchewan River. And where the arable land stops, the
great fur farm of the world begins---a fur farm which may change but
can never be exhausted. Of course, Canada has a great northern belt of
land that is not arable, but in that belt are such precious minerals as
were discovered in the Yukon. Land that can't be plowed isn't
necessarily waste land, and Canada's great northern belt is partly
balanced by the desert belt of the Southwest in the United States--the
perpetual Indian land of Uncle Sam.

III

With this argument--you come back just where you began. The two
countries were first settled almost contemporaneously. Their area is
not far different. They are both fertile. Each has great
belts--having spent months in each belt, I hesitate to call them
barren--of land that can not be plowed. Why has one country progressed
with such marvelous rapidity; and the other progressed in fits and
starts and stops? Why did a million and a half Canadians--or
one-fourth the native population--leave Canada for the United States?
The Canadian retort always is--for the same reason that two million
Americans have left the United States for Canada--to better their
position. But the point is--why was it these million and a half
Canadians found better opportunities in the United States than in
Canada? Opportunities knock at every man's door if he has ears to
hear, but they are usually supposed to knock loudest and oftenest in
the new land. It is a truism that there are ten chances on the
frontier for a man to rise compared to one in the city. One can
understand American settlers thronging to Canada. They have used and
made good the opportunities in their own land. Now they are sending
their sons to a land of more opportunities. The Iowa farmer who has
succeeded on his three hundred and twenty acres sends forth his sons
each to succeed on his one hundred and sixty acres in Canada; or he
sells his own land for one hundred dollars an acre and forthwith buys a
thousand acres in Canada. When the farmers of Ontario flocked to
Wisconsin and Michigan and Minnesota and the two Dakotas, their land
was worth thirty per cent. less than when they bought it. To-day that
same land is worth one hundred per cent. more than for what they sold
it.

It is easy t