“The island of Newfoundland has a seacoast 1000 miles in extent. It has an area of 23,040,000 acres, of which only a small portion is cultivated. Its spring is late, its summer short, but the frost of winter is less severe than in many parts of our own Northern States and Territories. It is only 1665 miles distant from Ireland. It possesses a large trade with various countries, including Spain, Portugal, Italy, the West Indies, and the Brazils. “The chief wealth of Newfoundland and of the Labrador coast is to be found in their extensive and inexhaustible fisheries, in which the other Provinces also partake. The future products of these, when properly developed by human ingenuity and industry, defy human calculation. The Gulf Stream is met near the shores of Newfoundland by a current from the Polar basin, vast deposits are formed by the meeting of the opposing waters, the great submarine islands, known as ‘The Banks,’ are formed; and the rich pastures created in Ireland by the warm and humid influences of the Gulf Stream are compensated by the ‘rich sea-pastures of Newfoundland.’ The fishes of warm or tropical waters, inferior in quality and scarcely capable of preservation, cannot form an article of commerce like those produced in inexhaustible quantities in these cold and shallow seas. The abundance of these marine resources is unequalled in any portion of the globe. “Canada, rather a nation than a province in any common acceptation of the term, includes not less than 346,863 square miles of territory, independently of its North-western Possessions not yet open for settlement. It is three times as large as Great Britain and Ireland, and more than three times as large as Prussia. It intervenes between the Great North-west and the Maritime Provinces, and consists chiefly of a vast territorial projection into the territory of the United States, although it possesses a coast of nearly 1000 miles on the river and gulf of the St. Lawrence, where fisheries of cod, herring, mackerel, and salmon are carried on successfully. Valuable fisheries exist also in its lakes. It is rich in metallic ore and in the resources of its forests. Large portions of its territory are peculiarly favourable to the growth of wheat, barley, and the other cereals of the north. During the life of the present generation, or the last quarter of a century, its population has increased more than fourfold, or from 582,000 to 2,500,000. “The population of all the provinces may be fairly estimated as numbering 3,500,000. Many of the inhabitants are of French extraction, and a few German settlements exist; but two-thirds of the people of the provinces owe their origin either to the United States or to the British Islands, whose language we speak, and who ‘people the world with men industrious and free.’