[Illustration: SHAWATLANS LAKE AND FALLS, PRINCE RUPERT] [Illustration: WATER FRONT, PRINCE RUPERT TERMINUS, G.T.P. RLY.] Situated 550 miles north of Vancouver, and forty miles south of the Alaska boundary, Prince Rupert occupies a beautiful site, and, it is said, nature has provided that future city with the finest harbour on the Pacific coast—large, land-locked, with deep water, no shoals, and an absence of strong tidal currents. Steamship services from Prince Rupert will shorten by two days the traffic between Europe and Asia. To this new port will come the ships of the Seven Seas. CHAPTER XVIII THE STORY OF THE SALMON FISHERIES To compare the production of a small but old country like Great Britain with the production of a large but new country like Canada is to find oneself confronted by comic statistics. For a beginner, the daughter is doing very well with her large farm of nearly four million square miles; but the mother is doing so much better with her mere potato patch of 121,000 square miles, that the two sets of results, when placed side by side, almost smack of Gilbert and Sullivan. True, the daughter has got ahead in wheat-growing, and also in timber (the old lady, in the latter case, having allowed her stock to run low). But in other matters the result is controlled by the greater number of hands at work on the potato patch. In comparing the results achieved by forty-five million people in a little country, with the results achieved by eight million people in a large country, we perceive what the political economist means when he says wealth is labour. In the making of wealth, natural resources are necessary. They are the bases on which human effort builds. But natural resources without population are of no immediate value. To the starving, isolated man half a dozen penny saveloys would be greater riches than a mountain of gold. [Illustration: GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, VICTORIA, B.C.] [Illustration: TOURISTS IN VANCOUVER CITY, B.C.] According to the most recent reliable figures accessible to me at the moment of writing, the fisheries of England and Wales (leaving Scotland and Ireland out of the reckoning) represent a greater annual money value than the fisheries of Canada—a fact that assumes considerable significance in the light of two other facts, namely, (1) that the fisheries of Great Britain have been severely depleted, and (2) that the fisheries of Canada are the largest and most prolific in the world. Great Britain, it will be noted, is the richer in caught fish; Canada is the richer in uncaught fish. In other words, Canada has more fish than Great Britain, but Great Britain has more fishermen than Canada.