HISTORICALLY, the Dominion of Canada was evolved from the separate provinces; but it will be more convenient here to consider it as a whole before giving some account of each of the nine provinces separately. In this chapter, and generally throughout the book, when I speak of Canada, I mean the Dominion of Canada, though the name was first applied to the French province on the St. Lawrence, which was sometimes also called New France. Afterwards, for three-quarters of a century, from 1791 to 1867, the province now known as Quebec was called Lower Canada, or Canada East; and that now known as Ontario, Upper Canada, or Canada West. The immense area of Canada is one of its most striking features. Its size is one of the reasons that it is a land of great opportunity; it is also the root of many of the most difficult problems of its government and development. In area it is over 3½ million square miles; that is to say, it is a little larger than the United States, or than Europe would be without France. It stretches from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Pacific on the west, and from the United States boundary on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north. The distance from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Vancouver in British Columbia is about 3,660 miles, whilst that from Halifax to Liverpool is only about 2,820; and the traveller, wishing to go from Victoria in Vancouver Island to Dawson in the Yukon District, has to make a journey by land and water of over 1,500 miles. It is just as well for the intending immigrant to try to realize that Canada is a land of “magnificent distances”; otherwise, on his outward journey, perhaps to some point in the far west, it may seem that the distance he is putting between himself and his old home is interminable. With modern conveniences of travel, however, the immigrant of to-day can come from England and cross Canada to Vancouver in a shorter time than it took the Loyalists to go from New York to Toronto. The most southern point of Canada, a little islet in Lake Erie, is only about the same distance from the equator as is Valladolid in Spain, whilst Toronto is in nearly the same latitude as Florence, and the new town of Prince Rupert, far up on the Pacific seaboard of the Dominion, is not much farther north than Liverpool. The vast extent of country and the variety in its physical features cause considerable differences of climate; but generally the interior is rather colder than the same latitudes in the west of Europe, and the summer, though hot and dry, is shorter than in Europe. The climate in the region near the Atlantic is colder than the countries on the opposite side of that ocean, owing to a cold current which flows southward along its shores from the Arctic regions; but the Pacific Coast, which has the benefit of the warm Japanese current, has a climate very much resembling that of the British Isles.