Following the course of the French explorers, I have come up the St. Lawrence to the head of navigation, and am now in Montreal, the largest city of Canada and the second port of North America. It is an outlet for much of the grain of both the United States and Canada, and it handles one third of all the foreign trade of the Dominion. Montreal is the financial centre of the country and the headquarters for many of its largest business enterprises. In a commercial sense, it is indeed the New York of Canada, although totally unlike our metropolis. In order to account for the importance of Montreal, it is necessary only to glance at the map. Look first at the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the broad mouth of the river! See how they form a great funnel inviting the world to pour in its people and goods. Follow the St. Lawrence down to Quebec and on by Montreal to the Great Lakes, which extend westward to the very heart of the continent. There is no such waterway on the face of the globe and none that carries such a vast commerce into the midst of a great industrial empire. Montreal is the greatest inland port in the world. It ships more grain than any other city. It is only four hundred and twenty miles north of New York, yet it is three hundred miles nearer Liverpool. One third of the distance to that British port lies between here and the Straits of Belle Isle, where the Canadian liners first meet the waves of the open sea. The city is the terminus of the canal from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence and of Canada’s three transcontinental railways. Vessels from all over the world come here to get cargoes assembled from one of the most productive regions on the globe. Although frozen in for five months every winter, Montreal annually handles nearly four million tons of shipping, most of which is under the British flag. It has a foreign trade of more than five hundred million dollars. The annual grain movement sometimes exceeds one hundred and sixty bushels for each of the city’s population of almost a million. In the modern sense, the port is not yet one hundred years old, though Cartier was here nearly four centuries ago, and Champlain came only seventy years later. Both were prevented from going farther upstream by the Lachine Rapids, just above the present city. Cartier was seeking the northwest passage to the East Indies, and he gave the rapids the name La Chine because he thought that beyond them lay China. At the foot of the rapids the Frenchmen found an island, thirty miles long and from seven to ten miles wide, separated from the mainland by the two mouths of the Ottawa River. It was then occupied by a fortified Indian settlement. The presence of the Indians seemed to make the island an appropriate site on which to lay the foundations of the new Catholic “Kingdom of God,” and the great hill in the background, seven hundred and forty feet high, suggested the name, Mont Real, or Mount Royal.