Forty years ago Canada was practically the Canada of the British conquest of Quebec and the French cession to England. Even to-day the entire population of the Dominion, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is not more than that of Greater London. West of Ontario stretched for nearly 1,500 miles the level prairie land, many hundreds of miles from the United States border northwards to the regions of Hudson’s Bay. The prairie was roamed by buffalo, moose and caribou, who found rich feeding in the abundant grass of the most productive soil of the world. Few besides the Indians and the Hudson’s Bay traders, following certain traditional trails, traversed the prairie. It was regarded as for ever a waste as the sea is a waste. What was the use of cultivating an inland wilderness 1,500 miles from the populated part of Ontario, and cut off by the Rocky Mountains from British Columbia and the Pacific? But the projectors of the C.P.R., in their dream, saw the prairie waving with harvests; they saw cities rising amid the “waste,” and their financial souls rejoiced in visions of phantom trains conveying wheat enough to feed hundreds of millions along the phantom “steel” of the as yet unsubstantial dream of the C.P.R. They convinced the Government that there was “something in it,” and the Government gave every encouragement to them to “go ahead.” To-day it might seem to some that the Government was too generous in the concession of miles of land on either side of the line to be constructed, but then the land had no value at all at the time, and it never would have value till the “steel” was laid, and lots of people who were considered shrewd judges prophesied that even then the line would stretch for thousands of miles through country doomed for ever to be uninhabited and profitless. To-day, for 3,800 miles, the C.P.R. “steel” spans Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Atlantic, to Vancouver, on the Pacific. Its sleepers are laid a foot apart. Its sectional construction parties have their wooden houses and workshops at convenient intervals along the route. Thousands of towns and villages have sprung up on either side and several of them are leaping ahead to the size of cities running into hundreds of thousands of population. The C.P.R. literally created four new Provinces of the Dominion, each now with a Government of its own, Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament complete—Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Other railways are striking across Canada—the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk are racing each other to the Pacific, which they expect to reach this year—but the C.P.R. was the prophet pioneer, and on running down by its line from the Rockies into Vancouver I found, thirty to forty miles out of Vancouver, the construction men at work on the double track, which is to duplicate the single line from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The C.P.R. feels that it has got to be “on its mettle,” as well as on its metal.