One of the engineers I talked with has given me a new appreciation of what development of water-power means to Canada. He tells me that each thousand horse-power developed brings an ultimate investment of eighteen hundred and sixty thousand dollars, which provides work for twenty-two hundred persons and pays them wages amounting to five hundred seventy-one thousand dollars a year. The cost of building and operating the power station itself represents only thirteen per cent. of all this; it is the application of the new energy in shops, mines, and mills that is responsible for the bulk of the investment. A new power development attracts industries; these in turn attract workers and their families; the latter bring in their train the tradesmen and the professional people needed to serve them. In this way new towns come into being, and old ones start to grow. Water-power is sometimes called “white coal.” It should be called “white magic.” [Illustration: Canada is one of the richest countries in the world in its water-power. Engineers calculate that every thousand electric horse-power developed from her waterfalls eventually provides employment for more than two thousand people.] [Illustration: Since their discovery in 1903, the Cobalt mines have yielded silver bullion worth more than $200,000,000. These huge piles of tailings were formerly thrown away as waste. They are now being worked over again at a profit.] CHAPTER XVI THE SILVER MINES OF NORTHERN ONTARIO Take up your map of North America and draw a line from Buffalo to the lowest part of Hudson Bay. Divide it in half, and the middle point will just about strike Cobalt, the centre of the world’s richest silver deposits. I have come here via North Bay from Toronto, more than three hundred miles to the south, and am now clicking my typewriter over ground that has produced upward of one million dollars an acre in silver-bearing ore. For a long time it has turned out a ton of silver bullion every twenty-four hours. There are said to be only two real silver-mining districts in the world. One is at Guanajuato, Mexico, where the veins are of enormous extent but yield a low grade of ore. The other is here at Cobalt, where the deposits, though comparatively small, are almost pure silver. In practically all the other great silver districts the metal is a by-product. The Anaconda mine in Montana and the Coeur d’Alene in Idaho are both famous silver producers, but in the former it is a by-product of copper, and in the latter, of lead.