As England’s great coal fields determined that she should become a great manufacturing nation, Canada’s immense number of cataracts and rapids promise that she, too, shall be great in the same line. Everyone has heard of the “harnessing of Niagara”; but not everyone realizes how much electricity is used in Canada. Many a little town, only a few months old, has stepped at once from the stage of lighting with lamps to that of brilliant electrical illumination. But if facilities for obtaining power are the first necessity for manufacturing, Canada has opportunities also in the variety of her natural products, from field, forest and mine. A third reason, strongest of all, perhaps, is that her people are ambitious, and rightly or wrongly feel that it is necessary to the realization of their nationhood that a proportion of their population should be engaged in manufacturing. There is at least this strong excuse for such a position, that always there will be people to whom agricultural pursuits will not be congenial, and, if there were no opportunities apart from cultivation of the soil in Canada, many of her young people would continue to go elsewhere. At the present day, there are over a million Canadians in the United States, who have been attracted thither by the opportunities offered by its cities and industries. Some of these are now returning—drawn home to a great extent by the opening of new industries in their native land. Unquestionably the prosperity of Canada rests mainly upon agriculture; and legislation that has any tendency to foster the growth of the towns at the expense of the country must in the long run prove injurious. Canada is, however, only following the example of older lands, when she rejoices in her big towns, and in the consequent massing of wealth in restricted areas, for the absence of these (at least as society is now constituted) limits the sphere of human activity; and, if Canada desires anything strongly, it is, perhaps, to be an all-round nation, possessing not only these material advantages of which we all hear so much, not only the chances for the honest worker, but also opportunities at least for the cultivation of science and art, literature and music. Now the cultivation of these is not easy in little frontier towns and hamlets and solitary farms deep in the country. But the manufacturing industries build up the towns, and the towns make possible a kind of co-operation in the things of the mind, that has been almost unheard of in the country.