Eastward again we fly, and look down on Manitoba—no longer a “postage stamp province,” for it has been growing in size, as well as in every other way. One extension followed another till in 1912 Manitoba pushed up to Hudson Bay, and the Province covers 232,000 square miles. Saskatchewan has 243,000 square miles, Alberta 253,000, and British Columbia 353,000. Big figures these. The West is a big place, as I have observed. That is nothing to brag about. Its bigness should inspire us with a humble determination to do big things with it, and for it, each in our own little corner of it, looking beyond our own little corner, too; for if we have a broad country we are bound to take broad views. A big country indeed, endowed with land and railways and roads and schools and all the machinery of Government for countless millions of citizens. We hold the West in trust, a sacred trust, not for ourselves and our children alone, but for the millions who might be here to use it with us. We shall gain, as well as they, by their coming; though even if we had nothing to gain, we cannot escape the responsibility of holding a realm so much vaster than we can use. Our most urgent need is to unearth our hidden wealth, to develop our enormous undeveloped resources, of which our uncultivated or half-cultivated land is the greatest part. Our first business, then, is plainly to get population, people able and willing to work. We have to devise new plans of settlement, of land-holding or land arrangement, of agricultural production and agricultural commerce—yes, and agricultural manufacture, so that we shall no longer depend almost wholly on the sale of raw material. Every possible avenue must be explored, every resource of human ingenuity taxed to the utmost, brushing aside all obstructive traditions and conventions, and thoroughly testing every plan with one glimmer of hope in it, to get and keep a large and permanent, because successful and contented, body of people doing this vital work. It is not the big wheat farm or cattle ranch that means big population, but just the opposite. Most of the new settlers we can hope to get will be poor. Small farming, and often very small farming, is the only kind possible to them. What of that? It was the small man, the poor man, with little or no capital beyond his own body and brains, who built up this country from the beginning. It is the small man, reinforcing us in his hundreds of thousands from the mother country and from many other lands, that we must get to build it up with fresh vigor from now on. Yes, and we must give him a better chance than he ever had under the broadcasting, go-as-you-like, sink-or-swim homestead system, which so often allowed him to sink, with grievous loss both to him and to the country.