Although the Indians seemed to prefer fighting the newcomers to gaining salvation, the religious motive was long kept alive, and it was not until early in the last century that the city began to assume great commercial importance. During the first days of our Revolution, General Montgomery occupied Montreal for a time, and Benjamin Franklin begged its citizens to join our rebellion. It had then about four thousand inhabitants. Even as late as 1830 Montreal was a walled town, with only a beach in the way of shipping accommodations. The other day it was described by an expert from New York as the most efficiently organized port in the world. I have gone down to the harbour and been lifted up to the tops of grain elevators half as high as the Washington Monument. I have also been a guest of the Harbour Commission in a tour of the water-front. The Commission is an all-powerful body in the development and control of the port. Its members, who are appointed by the Dominion government, have spent nearly forty million dollars in improvements. This sum amounts to almost five dollars a head for everyone in Canada, but the port has always earned the interest on its bonds, and has never been a burden to the taxpayers. An American, Peter Fleming, who built the locks on the Erie Canal, drew the first plans for the harbour development of Montreal. That was about a century ago. Now the city has its own expert port engineers, and last summer one of the firms here built in ninety days a grain elevator addition with a capacity of twelve hundred and fifty thousand bushels. A giant new elevator, larger than any in existence, is now being erected. It will have a total capacity of fourteen million bushels of grain. [Illustration: Montreal’s future, like her present greatness, lies along her water front. Here the giant elevators load the grain crop of half a continent into vessels that sail the seven seas.] [Illustration: On a clear day one may stand on Mt. Royal, overlooking Montreal and the St. Lawrence, and see in the distance the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondacks of New York.] The port handles at times as much as twenty-three hundred thousand bushels of wheat in a day. It is not uncommon for a lake vessel to arrive early in the morning, discharge its cargo, and start back to the head of the lakes before noon. Rivers of wheat are sucked out of the barges, steamers, and freight cars, and flow at high speed into the storage bins. There are sixty miles of water-front railways, most of which have been electrified. Every operation possible is performed by machinery, and there are never more than a few workmen anywhere in sight. Yet the grain business is a source of great revenue to the city, and furnishes a living to thousands of people. One of the industries it has built up is that of making grain sacks, of which one firm here turns out two and one half millions a year.