With this thorny question out of the way, the Government turned to what it recognized as its greatest task, the promotion of the country's material prosperity. For years industry had been at a standstill. Exports and imports had ceased to expand; railway building had halted; emigrants outnumbered immigrants. The West, the center of so many hopes, the object of so many sacrifices, had not proved the El Dorado so eagerly sought by fortune hunters and home builders. There were little over two hundred thousand white men west of the Great Lakes. Homesteads had been offered freely; but in 1896 only eighteen hundred were taken up, and less than a third of these by Canadians from the East. The stock of the Canadian Pacific was selling at fifty. All but a few had begun to lose faith in the promise of the West. Then suddenly a change came. The failure of the West to lure pioneers was not due to poverty of soil or lack of natural riches: its resources were greater than the most reckless orator had dreamed. It was merely that its time had not come and that the men in charge of the country's affairs had not thrown enough energy into the task of speeding the coming of that time. Now fortune worked with Canada, not against it. The long and steady fall of prices, and particularly of the prices of farm products, ended; and a rapid rise began to make farming pay once more. The good free lands of the United States had nearly all been taken up. Canada's West was now the last great reserve of free and fertile land. Improvements in farming methods made it possible to cope with the peculiar problems of prairie husbandry. British capital, moreover, no longer found so ready an outlet in the United States, which was now financing its own development; and it had suffered severe losses in Argentine smashes and Australian droughts. Capital, therefore, was free to turn to Canada. But it was not enough merely to have the resources; it was essential to display them and to disclose their value. Canada needed millions of men of the right stock, and fortunately there were millions who needed Canada. The work of the Government was to put the facts before these potential settlers. The new Minister of the Interior, Clifford Sifton, himself a western man, at once began an immigration campaign which has never been equaled in any country for vigor and practical efficiency. Canada had hitherto received few settlers direct from the Continent. Western Europe was now prosperous, and emigrants were few. But eastern Europe was in a ferment, and thousands were ready to swarm to new homes overseas.