3. After providing for her defence Canada's next care was to bring the different provinces into touch with each other. By means of a wonderful network of waterways, a person can go through the length and breadth of the land almost entirely by water. But this mode of travelling is slow and difficult. Steps were, therefore, taken by the Dominion Parliament to bind the different provinces together by means of a line of rails. What a gigantic task lay before them! The distance to be crossed between the two oceans was no less than 3000 miles, a distance so great that it would take an ordinary train, going day and night, almost a week to accomplish the journey. 4. The task, however, was completed in five years. The Canadian Pacific Railway, as it is called, was begun in 1880 and finished in 1885. Thus the Dominion of Canada, which now stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is linked together by the iron road, and its most distant parts brought into easy communication with each other by rail and wire. To British Columbia and Manitoba, in particular, such a line meant everything. It afforded settlers easy access to the interior and gave an outlet to the markets for the produce of their farms. And to the mother-country also this railway is of great value as an important link in the chain that binds together the various parts of the British Empire. Mails from England to the Far East are now carried by way of Canada more quickly than by any other route. Troops may be transported from Liverpool to Hong Kong in less than thirty days. 5. Canada has everything required to make a nation great and prosperous. Her various provinces have each their own special character and productions. _Nova Scotia_, for instance, is the great coal-cellar of the eastern provinces, and it stands first in the whole Dominion for its fisheries; whilst the supply of wood-pulp for making paper is almost unlimited. 6. The province of _Quebec_ was formerly a vast forest, and the lumber trade is still its most important industry. Its inhabitants are chiefly of French origin, and they still cling to the language and customs of their ancestors. The French Canadian does not seem to move with the stream of time. He is content to smoke his home-grown tobacco and to get his sugar from the sap of the maple. He wears a strong "home-spun" cloth, spun and woven at his own fire-side; in fact, he is content to go on as his fathers before him. The people of _Ontario_ are strikingly different. They are mostly of British origin and are always pushing on, trying to make what is good still better. Their fruit orchards, vineyards, and dairy-farms are a growing source of wealth, and a great surprise to those who have thought of Canada as the land of ice and snow. Canadian butter and cheese are now largely exported; in 1900, for example, about twenty million pounds of butter and 200 million pounds of cheese were sent abroad.