Other places at Ottawa of national interest, either for what they are or for what they may become, are its museums, its National Art Gallery, its Royal Mint and the Archives Building, which houses a collection of extremely valuable historical documents. IV LANDS AND THE PEOPLE IN my last chapter I mentioned the ungranted public lands as amongst the assets of the Dominion. Apart from the vast area of land north of the limits of the provinces, the Crown, according to a recently published official estimate, still holds the title to many millions of acres of “ungranted, surveyed public lands in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta in addition to a vast quantity of good land yet unsurveyed.” The public lands in the Eastern Provinces are owned by the provinces, but in every section of Canada lands may be obtained by the _bonâ fide_ settler, either as free grants, or at a very small rate of payment. This matter will, however, be referred to again later. Lands offered for settlement in the provinces of the middle west are laid out in blocks six miles square, called townships. Each of these townships is divided into thirty-six sections of one mile square. The sections are again divided into quarters; and the homesteads offered as free grants by the Dominion government on certain conditions as to residence upon and improvement of the land; each contain one-quarter section, or one hundred and sixty acres. (For the land regulations as to free grants and pre-emptions, see Appendix, Note B, p. 297.) Within a certain area two sections in each township have been allotted to the Hudson’s Bay Company, two are reserved for the support of schools, sixteen are held for sale or have been given as land grants in aid of colonization railways, and the remaining sixteen are, or have been, open to homesteaders. During the fiscal year of 1911-12, over thirty-nine thousand heads of families, or single men, made homestead entries, taking up over six and a quarter millions of acres. In the same year the railway companies and the Hudson’s Bay Company sold between eighteen and nineteen million acres of land; and it is predicted that before another decade has gone by “Canada’s balance of population will be west of Lake Superior.” This may or may not be true, for there is no province in Canada that is not well able to support a much larger population than it has at present; and in every province new opportunities are offering themselves.