“Candidly, the homesteads now available, and until the railway system has been further developed, are too far away from the railway track. But it is only a question of a few years of legitimate development until these points have been opened up, where some of the finest land on the continent will be brought within easy reach of the world’s markets. In the meantime, and while the new-comer is gaining experience and paying by his labour for a piece of land that can never depreciate in value, he is not precluded from selecting and acquiring his homestead. But the writer cannot advise penniless individuals to come out in the hope of taking up homestead duties at a remote point from the railway with the expectation of making good on it right away. The man with a bit of capital cannot fail to employ it to far better purpose in Canada than he is ever likely to use it at home. He need not ‘risk’ it until he has had every opportunity to test his investments on the spot. It is broadly on the land, the value of which by the legitimate process continues to increase with every season in which it has come under the hand of the cultivator. In the more thickly populated centres land values have increased enormously within the short period of five years; many of these, no doubt, have been rushed up to a fictitious figure by real estate jobbers, but where large manufacturing and wholesale houses have been compelled to establish themselves in response to a demand that is almost unprecedented in its all but instantaneous growth, these values are at once legitimate and permanent.” From a very informative booklet issued in connection with the “International Dry Farming Congress” at Lethbridge, Alberta, in October, 1912, I extract these interesting particulars about the conditions of prairie settlement and farming:— “Settlement progresses so rapidly that pioneering is shorn of its desolation. It is no uncommon event to find a whole township or an entire district taken up in a single summer. The pioneer will always have neighbours in his new Alberta home. Roads and schools follow in due course. Recent legislation has established a system of local government which affords all the machinery necessary to a local community to carry out public improvements. Commercial life develops very rapidly. The settlement of a district is invariably followed by the extension of the telephone and the railway.