Stand with me on the top of the Union Bank Building, and take a look at the city of Winnipeg. You had best pull your hat down over your ears and button your fur coat up to your neck for the wind is blowing a gale. The sky is bright, and the air is sharp and so full of ozone that we seem to be breathing champagne. I venture you have never felt so much alive. The city stretches out on all sides for miles. Office buildings and stores are going up, new shingle roofs shine brightly under the winter sun, and we can almost smell the paint of the suburban additions. Within fifty years Winnipeg has jumped from a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post of two hundred people to a city of more than two hundred thousand, and it is still growing. The value of the buildings erected last year amounted to more than half that of the new construction in Montreal. Now turn about and look up Portage Avenue. Twenty years ago that street hardly existed. To-day it has millions of dollars’ worth of business blocks, any of which would be a credit to a city the same size in the States. That nine-story department store over there is the largest in western Canada. Farther down Main Street are the Canadian Pacific hotel and railway offices, and beyond them the great terminals of the Canadian National Railways. “Yes, sir,” says the Winnipegger at my side, “you can see how we have grown. It was about the beginning of this century that we began to build for all time and eternity. Before that most of our buildings were put up without cellars and had flimsy foundations. We had not realized that Winnipeg was bound to be the greatest city of Central Canada. “Look at those wholesale houses,” he continues. “Did you ever see anything like them? Most of them started as two- or three-story structures, but their business has grown so that they have had to be pushed up to six stories or more. Winnipeg is one of the chief markets of western North America. If you had a pair of long-distance glasses that would enable you to look from here to the Pacific you could find no city in western Canada that can approach it, and your eyes would travel as far as Toronto before any city of its size could be seen. “If it were now summer,” the Winnipegger continues, “your telescope would show you that you are at the eastern end of the greatest grain-growing region on earth. To the west of us are six million acres of land that will grow wheat and other foodstuffs with little more labour than scratching the ground. Western Canada raised in one year almost a half billion bushels of wheat and almost as much oats, to say nothing of millions of bushels of barley, rye, and flax seed.” “Don’t you think it is a bit cold here on the roof?” I rather timidly manage to ask. “Well, perhaps so,” is the reply, “but when I talk about Winnipeg I grow so warm that I could stand stark naked on the North Pole and not feel uncomfortable.”