The Hudson Bay route would bring the wheat of the Northwest a thousand miles nearer the ocean. Port Nelson is as near Liverpool as is Montreal, and a carload of wheat from Regina in Saskatchewan could be at the Hudson Bay port in the same time it would take to reach Fort William. The distance from Winnipeg to Liverpool via Hudson Bay is three thousand miles, whereas by Montreal it is 4228 miles. Passengers to England from St. Paul and Minneapolis by using this route would shorten their railroad journey by at least five or six hundred miles. The chief objection to the completion of the Hudson Bay railway is the difficulty of navigating, not the Bay itself, but Hudson Strait, which leads into it. The strait opens out into the Atlantic a little below Greenland. It is between four and five hundred miles long, and from fifty to two hundred miles wide. From the middle of October until June it is sure to be full of ice from the Arctic Ocean, and some parts of it are usually blocked for a month longer. Moreover, it is not safe to rely upon it being open later than the first week in October. CHAPTER XXI THE GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAYS Can you imagine all the railroads of the United States divided into two systems, paralleling each other from our Atlantic coast to the Pacific? Think of them as north of a line drawn from Baltimore westward through St. Louis to San Francisco. Let the distance between terminals be nearly four thousand miles, and the total length of track ten times as great. Finally, suppose that the larger of the two systems is owned and operated by Uncle Sam, and the other by such a corporation as the New York Central. If you can do that you will have the background of the railroad situation in Canada to-day. With a mile of track for every twenty-three people, Canada has more railroads in proportion to her population than any other country on earth. Only the United States and Russia have a greater total mileage. Geographically, British America extends from our northern border to the Arctic Ocean, but the active life of the Dominion is mostly confined to a strip of territory averaging less than five hundred miles wide from north to south and more than three thousand miles long. Our railroad development began in the East and extended westward, but we have no system that reaches from coast to coast. Canada, on the other hand, has two such systems. Neither have we any such transportation service as the Canadian Pacific, which can take a passenger on board ship at Liverpool, Hamburg, Cherbourg, land him in Canada, carry him across the continent and across the Pacific, and set him down in Japan or China, putting him up at its own hotels whenever he wants to stop over.