only on the outer edge of
realizing her own wealth.

V

We sometimes speak as though Canada had had her boom and it was all
over. She has had her boom, and the boom has exploded, and it is a
good thing. When inflation collapses, a country gets down to reality;
and the reality is that Canada has barely begun to develop the
exhaustless mine of wealth which Heaven has given her. Ontario,
complacent with a fringe of prosperity along lake front, is an
instance; Quebec, with only a border on each bank of her great rivers
peopled, is another instance; and the prairie provinces are still more
striking illustrations of the sleeping potentialities of the Dominion.
In our dark days we used to call those three prairie provinces between
Lake Superior and the Rockies "the granary of the Empire." I am afraid
it was more in bravado, hoping against hope, than in any other spirit;
for we were raising little grain and exporting less and receiving
prices that hardly paid for the labor. That was back in the early
nineties. To-day, what? One single year's wheat crop from one only of
those provinces equals more gold in value than ever came out of
Klondike. If Britain were cut off from every other source of food
supply, those three provinces could feed the British Isles with their
surplus wheat. To be explicit, credit Great Britain with a population
of forty-five millions. Apportion to each six bushels of wheat--the
per capita requirement for food, according to scientists. Great
Britain requires two hundred and eighty to three hundred million
bushels of wheat for bread only--not to be manufactured into cereal
products, which is another and enormous demand in itself. Of the wheat
required for bread, Great Britain herself raises only fifty to sixty
million bushels, leaving a deficit, which must come from outside
sources, of two hundred million bushels.

In 1912 Canada raised one hundred and ninety-nine million bushels of
wheat. In 1913, of grain products, Canada exported one hundred and ten
million bushels; of flour products, almost twenty million dollars'
worth. Under stress of need or high prices these totals could easily
be trebled. The figures are, indeed, bewildering in their bigness. In
the three prairie provinces there were under cultivation in 1912 for
all crops only sixteen and one-half million acres.[10] At twenty
bushels to the acre this area put under wheat would feed Great Britain.
But note--only sixteen and o