To the company, which finally built the line, the government gave $25,000,000 (£5,130,000) in cash, an even greater value in portions of the road already constructed, and twenty-five million acres of land, scattered through the prairie provinces, and the Canadian Pacific Railway is now a very wealthy corporation, which carries on numerous enterprises outside the actual business of railway transportation. For instance, there is a fleet of seventy-three Canadian Pacific Railway steamships, most of which are large vessels sailing the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Great Lakes. These ships carry annually over half a million passengers and give employment to over twelve thousand men. The company also owns a number of luxurious hotels, including the happily-named “Château Frontenac,” which the new arrival from Europe, coming up the St. Lawrence, can scarcely fail to notice, crowning the rock of Quebec, near to the spot where old Count Frontenac, from his little “Château St. Louis,” lorded it over the rough bushrangers and determined churchmen of New France. The company still owns some ten or eleven million acres of land in the four western provinces; and during recent years has inaugurated a policy of irrigating some naturally rather arid lands in Alberta and preparing there what are known as “ready-made farms,” for suitable immigrants. This experiment has inspired the governments of some of the provinces to make similar preparation for immigrant farmers. The preparation of the farms for their future owners is, of course, a business enterprize; none the less it has smoothed the way for many newcomers. Looking at the map of the country served by the Canadian Pacific, we see no longer a line but a network of lines (even in the West) where fifty years ago it was generally supposed that nothing would grow. It is Canada’s vast wheat fields, which have made possible her huge railway systems, and while new lands are year by year being brought under cultivation, the railways will continue to add to their mileage. On the other hand, every year the new lines of railway open fresh lands to settlers. Another Canadian railway that has a remarkable record is the Canadian Northern, which claims to have grown at the rate of a mile a day for the last sixteen years. This railway also has obtained most liberal government assistance and is a transcontinental system in the making. In fact, contracts are let for the completion of the whole distance between the city of Quebec and Port Mann in British Columbia; but it has gone on the plan of building short lines in different districts, to be afterwards combined and connected to form the whole system. Already it has run many branch lines from Winnipeg—westward and northward and southward—into the great grain-growing districts, and in 1912 it hauled no less than sixty million bushels of wheat.