In the Thetford district of southern Quebec, power from Shawinigan operates the machinery of the asbestos mines. Fifty years ago, when these deposits were discovered, there was almost no market for asbestos at ten dollars a ton. Nowadays, with its use in theatre curtains, automobile brake linings, and coatings for furnaces and steam pipes, the best grades bring two thousand dollars a ton, and two hundred thousand tons are produced in a year. Quebec now furnishes eighty-eight per cent. of the world’s annual supply of this mineral. The Quebec government controls all power sites, and leases them to private interests for ninety-nine year terms. The province has spent large sums in conserving its water-power resources. At the headquarters of the St. Maurice River, it built the Gouin reservoir, which floods an area of more than three hundred square miles, and stores more water than the great Aswan Dam on the Nile. Quebec is the third province in value of agricultural production. What I have seen of its farms convinces me that the French Canadian on the land is a conspicuous success. For a half day I rode along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River through a country like one great farm. Nearly every foot of it is occupied by French farmers. Most of the time we were on high ground, overlooking the river, which, where we first saw it, was forty miles wide. It grew constantly narrower, until, where we crossed it on a ferry to Quebec, its width was less than a mile. All the way we had splendid views of the Laurentian Mountains, looming up on the north shore of the river. Geologists say the Laurentians are the oldest rock formation on our continent. They are not high, the peaks averaging about sixteen hundred feet elevation, but they are one of the great fish and game preserves of the world and are sprinkled with hunting and fishing clubs. In accordance with French law the Quebec farms have been divided and sub-divided among so many succeeding generations that the land is cut into narrow ribbons. Contrary to the custom in France, however, every field is fenced in with rails. I am sure that the fences I saw, if joined together, would easily reach from Quebec to Washington and back. They did not zig-zag across the fields like ours, thereby wasting both rails and land, but extended in a straight line, up hill and down, sometimes for as much as a mile or more.