Something ought perhaps to be said in reference to the part which Canada seems likely to take in supplying food to the United Kingdom. The area of wheat production has shifted rapidly on the American continent, first westward from New York State to Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, then northward to Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Dakota. Till within a few years past these northern states of the Union were supposed to mark the limit of successful wheat cultivation. Actual experience has now proved that it is several hundreds of miles further north, and that in Canadian territory is included the largest and richest undeveloped wheat area in the world. Allowance must be made for occasional early frosts, which are, {150} however, not so disastrous as Indian or Australian droughts, and may apparently be successfully combated by fall ploughing and early sowing. When this allowance is made, it seems clearly proved that in both quantity and quality the north-western provinces and territories of Canada will soon take a leading place in grain supply. The railway, which opened up the country to settlement, was completed in 1885. Yet in 1887 the districts which it reached, with but a scattered population, yielded 12,000,000 bushels of surplus wheat; in 1890, 16,000,000 bushels; and the estimate for 1891 is 21,000,000 bushels. Eight times this quantity would supply the whole British demand. At the present average of production 100,000 farmers thrown into the north-west, which {151} is capable of absorbing many hundreds of thousands, would raise all the wheat that now comes into the United Kingdom. Statisticians are already forecasting the date when the growth of population, going on side by side with the exhaustion of the more fertile prairie lands in the United States, will equalize production and consumption in that country, and leave it unable to furnish the supplies on which Britain has hitherto so largely depended. Speaking to a Yorkshire audience not long since, Sir Lyon Playfair suggested twenty years hence as the probable period to the time when England could expect to draw wheat supplies from the United States, after which she would have to depend on Canada, India, and other countries chiefly within the Empire. On the same question Mr. Bryce, in speaking of the United States, says: 'High economic authorities pronounce that the beginnings of this time of pressure lie not more than thirty years ahead. Nearly all the best arable land of the West is already occupied, so that the second and third best will soon begin to be cultivated; while the exhaustion already complained of in farms which have been under the plough for three or four decades will be increasingly felt.' Like opinions have been expressed by American writers. Whatever may be thought about the precise point of time, the tendency is manifest. Within a measurable time the Empire will, by the natural progress of events, mainly supply its own markets with wheat, and, it may be added, with