And soon the procession of immigrants was moving across the country, to quicken Manitoba and British Columbia into vigorous growth and found the intermediate provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Then the C.P.R. saw that its faith would be justified. A beginning had been made in tapping the agricultural and mineral riches of Western Canada. The railway was the steel key that had unlocked a treasury of incalculable wealth—wealth that poured forth, and continues to pour forth, in a stream ever expanding with the growth of population. Solicitude for the well-being of new settlers became the bed-rock of C.P.R. policy. On that basis, the company won its way to a prosperity that was assisted by developments which, in their magnitude and the foresight that inspired them, were fitting sequels to the original enterprise. Early the C.P.R. provided three steel steamships to traverse the Great Lakes—craft since supplemented by magnificent Clyde-built vessels. Later it made a new water connection, with car ferries plying between Windsor, in Ontario, and Detroit, in Michigan. Afterwards the C.P.R. turned its attention to the lakes and rivers of British Columbia; and to-day on those waters it controls some twenty vessels, several of them of considerable size and appointed with superb quarters for travellers. Another fleet of twenty steamships carry passengers and merchandise between ports on the coast of British Columbia. But the C.P.R. has not been content merely to navigate Canadian waters. Early it established a trans-Pacific service connecting the Dominion with China and Japan, the pioneer vessels being replaced in 1891 by the famous _Empress of India_ and her sister ships, which established a new standard of comfort in ocean travel. A later development was the trans-Atlantic service, also furnished with superb liners, and providing new means of communication between Canada and Liverpool, London, Bristol and Antwerp. Thus the C.P.R. has already extended its sphere of operations two-thirds round the world; all that is needed to complete the circle being a service of C.P.R. aeroplanes across Europe and Asia. The company’s combined fleets include sixty-seven steamships—a number about equal to all the battleships of the United States, Japan, France and Russia. The C.P.R. vessels, placed end to end, would form a line three and a half miles long. Between them they consume every day 2,903 tons of coal. Their crews and shore staffs form an army of 11,294 men. They annually cover a mileage equal to fifty-seven journeys round the earth. Nor, on the land, has the C.P.R. been content with its three thousand miles of track stretching across the continent. To-day it controls over eleven thousand miles of railway, on which there are running 1,534 locomotives, 1,870 passenger cars and 48,850 freight and cattle cars.