The increasing immigration of British young people into Canada, the increasing inflow of British capital, are of course making Canada a country of surpassing interest to people in the homeland. My hope in these chapters—based on my personal observation and on talks with a large number of men “in the know” in all the Provinces of the Dominion—is that this book will prove useful to British readers. There is an earnest desire alike on the part of those who are considering Canada as a country offering careers to bright and energetic young men, and on the part of those with capital to invest, and who want a larger profit than capital usually yields in our own country, to learn what are the real facts about Canada—the country, the people, the resources, the development, the prospects. My desire is to make this book thoroughly practical, with a view to meeting the wants of such readers. * * * * * CHAPTER IV THE ROMANCE OF RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION Modern Canada, as has been intimated, is the creation of railway enterprise. But for the railway, not only the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia, but the larger portion of the Eastern Provinces must have remained unpopulated and undeveloped. In pre-railway days population followed the banks of the St. Lawrence and the shores of the Great Lakes. There were a few small scattered inland villages kept in communication with the world by different “portages.” What was the use of cultivating the land, felling the timber, and working the minerals when there were no means for their conveyance and marketing? With the coming of the railway, however, a great and glorious future dawned upon Canada. Millions of square miles of “acreage” of what had been considered worthless wilderness were seen to be rich in untold potentialities of corn-raising. The interminable forests presented themselves as sources of inexhaustible wealth. The lakes, other than the Great Lakes, scattered through the Provinces, and the rivers navigable for hundreds of miles, were seen through the eyes of practical imagination as equally sources of wealth to vast populations of the future who should reap the harvest of the fish and use the waters, in conjunction with the railways, as means of transport.