Of course, the railways employ a great army of men upon their construction on the one hand, and their operation on the other. In 1912 the C.P.R. alone had 85,000 employees on its pay rolls. The numbers finding employment in connection with the transportation systems in this “country of magnificent distances” as it has been called, would be vastly increased if those engaged in the subsidiary trades were taken into account, such as the making of iron rails, the construction of cars and engines, the cutting of railway ties and so forth. A great change has taken place in Canada recently in the occupations of the people. Sixty years ago there were only twenty-eight or thirty different kinds of manufactures carried on in the country, and of the manufacturing establishments the chief were—shipyards, saw, grist, carding, and woollen mills; distilleries, tanneries, breweries and foundries, several of which are very closely connected with agriculture. The great woollen mills and the tanneries, for instance, are all closely dependent on farm products, as the saw mills are on the natural crop of wood, and all these with distilleries, in addition, were very early established on a small scale in the several districts to supply local demands. By 1891 there were three hundred different kinds of manufactures, instead of thirty, and the number of workers employed had multiplied five-fold. Since then the capital invested, the value of their output, and the importance of Canada’s manufacturing, has continued to increase, the development during the last decade being the greatest on record. Manufactures of wood and manufactures connected with food are still specially important. Manufactures have been artificially encouraged by the so-called “National Policy,” or tariff, arranged to protect home industries. One result of this has been the stimulation of the growth of the towns and cities. In Ontario the last census showed a considerable increase in the population as a whole, a greater increase in the urban population and a falling off of over 50,000 in the rural population. No doubt this is due in part to the exodus to the West, but the towns of Ontario can well support more than their old quota of population, and there are excellent markets near at hand for all the fruit, vegetables, and other farm products that can be raised. The same story comes from New Brunswick and that peaceful little agricultural community, Prince Edward Island. The fact that Canada is becoming a manufacturing as well as an agricultural country is, however, in a large degree a natural development. There is no question that its opportunities are not confined to agriculture. It is, indeed, singularly favoured by nature with water powers, from which electricity for light and power can be developed readily and cheaply, and can be conveniently transmitted for hundreds of miles for use by great cities or by single farms.