"In English Canada, our newspapers supply us with British news filtered through American channels; we read American books, are interested in American politics, frequent their watering-places and race tracks, imitate their tariffs, play baseball and poker, live under local institutions fashioned after theirs, think like them, speak like them, eat like them, dress like them; when we visit England, we find ourselves taken for them and treated well in consequence, better than if we confessed ourselves Colonials." _E. Farrer, Canada and the new Imperialism (Contemporary Review, December, 1903)._ "Some ten years since there began to trickle into the vast wastes of the West the tiny rivulet of immigration which has now become a great stream. Many influences have gone toward widening this current of immigration, but the initial impulse which set it in motion came from the courage of one man. In 1896 Clifford Sifton, a young man, thirty-five years of age, who had already played a considerable _rôle_ in the politics of Manitoba, became Minister of the Interior in the Dominion Government. He was equipped with a genius for organization, an almost unequaled capacity for persistent hard work, and, above all, a faith in the West which knew neither wavering nor questioning. {64} He threw himself with immense energy into the task of advertising the Canadian West to the world and inducing immigration. His conception of the problem and its solution was Napoleonic; for he saw what others could not see and even scouted as absurd, that the people who could be induced most easily to lead the procession into the vacant prairies lived in the adjoining States of the American Union. A new generation had grown up in these States on the farms secured as free grants by their fathers in the ’70's, and he saw that when they looked for lands for themselves there would be none available at all comparable with those of Western Canada. Therefore, he argued, to acquaint them with the opportunities and possibilities of the new land to the north would be to insure such a migration as he desired, and if the stream once began flowing it would widen by its own velocity. This was the great idea which, given effect to by an organization called into being by first-class executive talent, operating with limitless resources, broke forever the great silence of the prairies and made them the Mecca of the world’s landless folk.