One reason for the late development of Canada was the flow of immigration during the greater part of the nineteenth century to the United States. The States had nearly three centuries start of Canada. Since 1772 they were an independent nation. They governed illimitable areas of cultivable land. Centres of manufacturing industry were early established and grew at an amazing rate. There was enormous railway development, facilitating intercommunication between the various States and encouraging settlement along the lines of railway construction. Along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts there was an interminable seaboard offering farmers and manufacturers harbours and rivers for the carrying on of sea trade. The great emigrant nations of the world—Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany—found the United States a congenial country in which to settle their surplus population, and those already settled sent home glowing stories of the prospects and much money for their relatives and friends to follow them. The United States grew populous, rich and great by these feeders from the Old World. Canada, on the contrary, held out few inducements for settlement. Its people were satisfied with a moderate degree of comfort and showed little disposition to welcome new-comers. So Canada would have remained till to-day had it not been for the opening up of the country by railway construction, to the story of which a future chapter will be devoted. Somehow the idea had got into the mind of the world that Canada was a country of intolerable cold, covered in the Eastern Provinces with monotonous and depressing woods and practically a desert as to Central Canada, while only the Indians and a few Scotsmen of iron constitution in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company endured the terrors of the arctic North. Certain novelists, who had drawn their material partly from the facts of the life of the Canadian Far West, but mainly from their fertile imaginations, conveyed the impression that Canada was infested with tomahawking Indians and that no man’s life and no woman’s life was worth much if they settled outside the bounds of Old Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company, during its hold of the Far West, rather encouraged such ideas. It did its utmost to keep immigrants at arms’ length and to prevent any rivalry with its profitable fur trade, even from enterprising Scotsmen and French Canadians at Quebec and Montreal who were not disposed to recognise the rights which Charles II. lightly gave away when he granted the charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1672, conferring on them the lordship of all lands watered by streams running into Hudson’s Bay. Fort Garry, where now is Winnipeg, the capital of the Prairie cornlands, was the western boundary of known Canada, and to get even to Fort Garry before the Canadian Pacific struck across the continent was a most tremendous adventure. When the Canadian Pacific pioneers, however, opened up the country, and the Red River